Page:The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924).djvu/210

184 have reference to Him, because all things derive their meaning from Him. The world unfolds itself like a vast whole of symbols, like a cathedral of ideas. It is the most richly rythmical conception of the world, a polyphonous expression of eternal harmony.

In the Middle Ages the symbolist attitude was much more in evidence than the causal or the genetic attitude. Not that this latter mode of conceiving the world, as a process of evolution, was wholly absent. Medieval thought, too, sought to understand things by means of their origin. But, destitute of experimental methods, and neglecting even observation and analysis, it was reduced, in order to state genetic relations, to abstract deduction. All notions of one thing proceeding from another took the naive form of procreation or ramification. The image of a tree or a pedigree sufficed to represent any relations of origin and cause. An arbor de origine juris et legum, for example, classified all law in the form of a tree with numerous branches. Owing to its primitive methods, the evolutionist thought of the Middle Ages was bound to remain schematic, arbitrary and sterile.

From the causal point of view, symbolism appears as a sort of short-circuit of thought. Instead of looking for the relation between two things by following the hidden detours of their causal connections, thought makes a leap and discovers their relation, not in a connection of cause or effects, but in a connection of signification or finality. Such a connection will at once appear convincing, provided only that the two things have an essential quality in common which can be referred to a general value. Expressed in terms of experimental psychology: all mental association based on a casual similitude whatever will immediately set up the idea of an essential and mystic connection. This may well seem a rather meagre mental function. Moreover, it reveals itself as a very primitive function, when envisaged from an ethnological point of view. Primitive thought is characterized by a general feebleness of perception of the exact demarcation between different concepts, so that it tends to incorporate into the notion of a definite something all the notions connected with it by any relation or similitude whatsoever. With this, tendency the symbolizing function is closely related.