Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/22

4 A still more suggestive line of enquiry is opened in the general history of thought and learning. The masculine spirit and the confidence with which the philosophers of the period carried on their speculations is hardly suspected by those who are not familiar with the original literature. Men who were least of all inclined to oppose anything that bore the stamp of traditional authority, displayed a freedom of judgement which could not but tend to consequences in one way or another divergent from the established system. The methods by which they accommodated the two are indeed evidence of the imperfect grasp they possessed of the inexorable demands of the reasoning faculties: their theological consciences were equally inexorable in requiring the adjustment; or perhaps more truly, the necessary conformity of reason and authority was so regularly assumed that they were unaware of the act of accommodation; the theological correctness of the conclusion, however arrived at, was the inevitable consequence of this implicit identification of contradictory terms in the premises. We are often at liberty to leave the ultimate reconciliation out of account, as a mode characteristic of the time rather than an argument due to the individual writer. It is the road on which their thoughts travel that retains its interest for the student of philosophical history.

The continuous activity of the human reason in Latin Christendom has its witness partly in the opposition, conscious or unconscious, to the tradition of the church, partly in the spirit of its philosophy. Through these currents we may learn the deeper springs which existed in men's minds and which, however often dormant, frozen by the rigid strength of theology, were yet capable of welling forth to nourish the world. The position held by intellectual studies and by learned men is uniformly the measure of the prevalence of these liberal forces in society; yet since the greatest writers have usually exercised a more powerful influence over posterity than