Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/331

Rh i Sed si amore scientiae ad docendum accesserit, nec propter invidiam doctrinam subtrahet; nec ut aliquid extorqueat, veritatem cognitam fugiet; nec si deficiet multitudo sociorum, desinet; sed ad instructionem sui et aliorum vigil et diligens erit.

These quotations, I repeat, are taken from a work which, we are asked to believe, was shortened in concession to the rage for short and easy methods.

5. At a considerably later date William wrote the Dragmaticon, and in this the protests against the fashionable tendency are if possible stronger than in the Philosophia. One ironical reference to the author's constitutional dulness and incapacity to understand things after long thought, which his pretentious rivals professed to grasp in a moment, has been k already quoted. l In another he complains of the way in which the teachers of his time have lost credit among their scholars. Both he says are in fault; for to establish confidence one needs two things, knowledge and uprightness:

Quia igitur omnes fere contemporanei nostri sine his duobus officium docendi aggrediuntur, causa sunt quare sibi minus credatur. Discipuli enim culpa non carent, qui relicta Pythagoricae doctrinae forma (qua constitutum erat discipulum septem annis audire et credere, octavo demum anno interrogare), ex quo scholas intrant, antequam sedeant, et interrogant, imo (quod deterius est) iudicant; unius vero anni spacio negligenter studentes, totam sapientiam sibi cessisse putantes, arreptis ab ea panniculis, vento garrulitatis et superbiae pleni, pondere rei vacui abeunt: et cum a suis parentibus vel ab aliis audiuntur, in verbis eorum parum aut nihil utilitatis perpenditur; statimque quod hoc solum a magistris acceperint, creditur undo magistri authoritas minuitur.

6. The words of John of Salisbury, as I construe them, read precisely as an echo of what we now find to have been the consistent attitude towards learning and teaching maintained by William alike in his earliest and in his latest works. It is right to add that I was led to my