Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/195

Rh turn for magic, and used his pupils as assistants in his mysterious performances. John, however, proved a disturbing influence: he could see no ghosts, and his services were not again called for.

If this is all we know about his youth, we are very fully informed of his early manhood. The place in the Metalogicus in which he relates the progress of his learning when he went to France is one of those autobiographical passages rare in medieval literature which tell us even more of the life of the time than they do of their immediate subject. John was a witness of the disputes of the schools when they were in their first vigorous activity. The impulse in dialectical questions which Abailard had excited in the early years of the century had been continually gaining strength since his retirement from Paris. Now in the decline of his hard-beset life he was again teaching there, and it was from him that John received his first lessons in logic. But the student's thirst for all obtainable knowledge would not be satisfied with the expositions of a single master. John seems to have made it his object to learn from as many different sources as possible. He attended the masters of one and then the other side; but his critical faculty was always foremost. Except in politics, where a strong religious sympathy attached him to the hierarchical doctrine of his friend and patron, saint Thomas Becket, he never let himself become a partisan; and his notices of the intellectual struggle of his time are invaluable from their coolness and keen judgement. Hitherto we have used them as illustrating the careers and aims of several of his teachers: we have now to consider them as a part of the personal history of the scholar.

When as a lad, John says, I first went into Gaul for the cause of study (it was the next year after that the glorious king of the English, Henry the Lion of Righteousness, departed