Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/215

Rh John of Salisbury is the youngest exponent of a great and vigorous intellectual movement. The generation of its founders began in the last quarter of the eleventh century; John carries on its current past the middle of the twelfth. But the tide has been already long ebbing, and the thirteenth century hardly begins before the Physics of Aristotle, now first made known to the Latin world, are solemnly interdicted by a council at Paris; a few years later the proscription is extended to the Metaphysics. That was in fact the meeting-time of two eras, and the opening of the new period of philosophical progress, created by the importation of the works of Aristotle, was threatened, as the efforts of Roscelin and Abailard had been, by the anathema of the church. Now, however, a reconciliation was soon arranged; and the church herself had the glory of claiming as her own the men who reared the stupendous fabric of the mature scholastic philosophy. Into this, the second and greater, period in the history of scholasticism we do not propose to enter; its magnitude and importance make it a subject by itself. In the following chapters our attention will be confined to a small department of it, one to which we are naturally led, since of the theories formed in the middle ages respecting the nature and functions of the state John of Salisbury's is the first that aspires to a philosophical character.