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Rh adapted to the study of logic. For the same reason, except in this one department of learning, he avows his allegiance to Plato, whose general view of things he accepts by reason of the free range it concedes to enquiry and speculation. I am not ashamed, he once says, to number myself among the academics, since in those things about which a wise man may doubt, I depart not from their footsteps. It is not that he is in favour of a general scepticism, far less of a general indecision and vacillation. Certain facts John conceives to be irrefragably established by authority; others stand on a secure foundation of reason: but there is a large class of problems in reference to which he holds his judgement in suspense, because they are not definitely solved by either of the prime arbiters of truth, nor yet verified by observation. Accordingly he gives a long and most curious list of things about which a wise man may doubt ... so however, he prudently adds, that the doubt extend not to the multitude. The items are strangely mixed; they bring into vivid light on the one hand the immense interval between the certainties of modern knowledge and the vague gropings that had to serve for physical science in John's age, and on the other the eternal limitations of the human mind which forbid the elevation of metaphysics or theology to the rank of an exact science.

In reading this catalogue one cannot repress the thought, how many sects and divisions would have been spared the church in other ages and in our own time, had men been willing to confess with John of Salisbury that there are many questions which every man has a right to answer or to leave unanswered for himself. Among these John reckons providence and fate, chance and free will; even those things which are reverently enquired about God himself, who surpasses the examination of all rational nature and is exalted above all that the mind can conceive. Other questions which are included in the same large enumeration—the nature and origin of the soul; matter and motion; the causes and beginnings of things; the use and end of virtues and vices, and their source; whether a man who