Page:The Mediaeval Mind Vol 2.djvu/292

280 terms generalized to vagueness, and with no attempt to follow the details or trace the historical development. The purpose has been to give the general flavour of mediaeval thought concerning Church and State, and the Individual as a member of them both. One observes how the patristic and mediaeval Christian thought mingles with the antique; and one may assume the intellectual acumen applied by legist, canonist, and scholastic theologian to the discussion and formulation of these high arguments. The mediaeval genius for abstractions is evident, and the mediaeval faculty of linking them to the affairs of life; clear also is the baneful effect of mediaeval allegory. Even as men now-a-days are disposed to rest in the apparent reality of the tangible phenomenon, so the mediaeval man just as commonly sought for his reality in what the phenomenon might be conceived to symbolize. Therefore in the higher political controversies, even as in other interests of the human spirit, argument through allegory was accepted as legitimate, if not convincing; and a proper sequence of thought was deemed to lie from one symbolical meaning to another, with even a deeper validity than from one palpable fact to that which followed from it.