Page:The Mediaeval Mind Vol 2.djvu/382

370 Platonist, in spite of his fine affinities with Plato; for many of Hugo's thoughts, his classification of the sciences for example, pointed back to Aristotle.

Abaelard, Hugo, St. Bernard suggest the triangulation of the epoch's intellectual interests. Peter Lombard, somewhat their junior, presents its compend of accepted and partly digested theology. He took his method from Abaelard, and drew whole chapters of his work from Hugo; but his great source, which was also theirs, was Augustine. The Lombard was, and was to be, a representative man; for his Sentences brought together the ultimate problems which exercised the minds of the men of his time and after.

The early and central decades of the twelfth century offer other persons who may serve to round out our general notion of the character of the intellectual interests which occupied the period before the rediscovery of Aristotle, that is, of the substantial Aristotelian encyclopaedia of knowledge. Among such Adelard of Bath (England) was somewhat older than Abaelard. His keen pursuit of knowledge made him one of its early pilgrims to Spain and Greece. He compiled a book of Quaestiones naturales, and another called De eodem et diverseo, in which he struggled with the problem of universals, and with palpable problems of psychology. His cosmology shows a genial culling from the Timaeus fragment of Plato, and such other bits of Greek philosophy as he had access to.

Adelard was influenced by the views of men who taught or studied at Chartres. Bernard of Chartres, the first of the great Chartrian teachers of the early twelfth century, 2 wrote on Porphyry, and after his death was called by John of Salis- bury perfectissimus inter Platonicos saeculi nostri. He was one of those extreme realists whose teachings might bear pantheistic fruit in his disciples ; he had also a Platonistic imagination, leading him to see in Nature a living organism. Bernard's younger brother, Thierry, also called of Chartres, extended his range of studies, and compiled numerous works on natural knowledge, indicating his wide reading and recep- tive nature. His realism brought him very close to pantheism,

2 See ante, Chapter XXX., i.