liantly with the light of rational faith and insight, than Tennyson? Not to mention many others, whose poetic. flights have been ballasted with solid weights of thought.

Can it be, now, that a real philosophic talent, thus attested, may not be expected sooner or later to manifest itself in the forms of thoroughly reasoned speculation? I cannot so believe. Under the influence of German precedents, I think I see developing to-day signs, and very promising ones, of a movement which may in its final developments realize our hopeful expectations for a more brilliant future of English philosophy. Yet it were perhaps wiser to leave to history the passing of judgments for which she alone is competent. For a like reason it were doubtless better to omit speculations concerning possible modifications of English thought which may result from the wide enlargement of the empire of the English tongue, although from this point of view it were not difficult to formulate grounds of hope.

CHAPTER II.

MEDIEVAL ANTICIPATIONS OF THE MODERN ENGLISH

MIND.

"Es ist ein gross Ergötzen

Sich in den Geist der Zeiten zu versetzen,

Zu schauen, wie vor uns ein weiser Mann gedacht,
Und wie wir's dann zuletzt so herrlich weit gebracht."
Goethe's Faust: Scene I.

"A great delight is granted

When, in the spirit of the ages planted,

We mark how, ere our time, a sage has thought,

And then, how far his work, and grandly, we have brought."
Taylor's translation.

IN these words of the pedant, Faust's companion, taken apart from the irony and stern criticism with. which Faust, in the next following lines, rebukes the spirit in which they are uttered, we may find an apt text for some of the contemplations which now lie immediately before us. The thoughts which, in this view, I would especially connect with them, concern (1) the fascination there is for us moderns, when, with fresh, humane sympathies, we are enabled to reproduce in imagination the lives and thoughts of our ancestors, appreciating the things which gave them joy and sorrow, with intelligent charity for their errors, and generous recognition of their successes, and, above all, with such a quickened sense of the oneness of their humanity with our own, that we see in them ourselves in their circumstances; and (2) the continuity of intellectual types, the

fixity of national intellectual species, as established in the present case by the comparison of a few representative Englishmen of the time of the schoolmen with what we already know of the prevailing tendencies of the English mind.

We are apt to look down and back with an air of lordly contempt upon what is termed the scholastic period in the history of European thought, with about as much, or rather as little, intelligence, as if we were in the period of manhood to despise the memories of youth. A race, a civilization, must have its time of schooling as well as an individual. And during this time it will naturally exhibit the same ineptitudes, weaknesses, follies, but also the same bright prophecies of hope, which are discernible in "the growing boy." Nay, more, we shall perhaps find, on closer inspection, that, like the boy, it, too, "still is nature's priest,

And by the vision splendid

Is on its way attended";

the vision, namely, of realities, which we, for the very atomic dustiness of our perfected worldly wisdom, are unable to see, or, from the loss of our boyish simplicity, are ashamed to confess.

The scholastic period was the early school time of our Occidental christian civilization. Christendom, especially in central and northern Europe, had then but recently emerged from heathendom; and even on the ground of the ancient pagan civilizations it had, on the one hand, sprung up at an epoch when these civilizations had already decayed, or were decaying, and leaving no natural heir behind them, and when, on the other, the necessities

of its own existence forced it, in the greatest measure, to break off the line of tradition, which might otherwise have preserved for it not only the elements, but the riches, of ancient culture. The Occidental mind was then like an overgrown, undisciplined boy, such as all savages are said, as a rule, to be. The first condition of its future mastership was, then, that it should itself be mastered. It could learn to rule both itself and others only by first undergoing a suitable and prolonged training in regulated obedience. Such training the church, as a central authority, through the schools, as its instruments, furnished, and it were no less irrational than ungrateful to ignore, or pretend to ignore, the service to civilization thus rendered. Yet it was with scholasticism as with all schools. Those who had (through their ancestors) received its benefits, first celebrated their release from its restraints by hurling at it their manly anathemas, very much as the boy, when the period of his youthful schooling is over, is apt to turn his back on the scene of his scholastic discipline, and on his teachers, with the exclamation "Good bye, old school! you can't rule me any longer." So, in the time of the Renaissance, when, through the restoration of ancient letters and learning, the modern mind leaped forward out of the period of youthful guardianship into the confident glow of dawning manhood, scholasticism was dismissed with contemptuous and otherwise forcible maledictions, in utter forgetfulness of the circumstance that, but for its previous scholastic discipline, the Renaissance mind would have been utterly unfitted to expatiate with such intelligent rapture in the new fields of thought and learning finally opened up to it. For this injustice some reparation has of

late years, under the lead, especially, of Continental scholars, been made. Of intellectual maturity, of ripe wisdom, I suppose there is no more certain mark than a tolerant catholicity. An earlier and inferior stage of intellectual development has its inherent necessity, its relative or historic justification. It is not the part of wisdom to begin by attempting to kick it all over and to annihilate it, with a view of beginning absolutely de novo. No such break of continuity is possible. The past is to be corrected, if need be, and supplemented: it cannot be overthrown. On the other hand, it is not to be worshipped. Any attempt to perpetuate its dominion by holding the mind of man back to methods and points of view which have no longer any (or, at most, only a subordinate) raison d'être, is no less unreasonable and imbecile than is ignorant contempt.

Now if with unprejudiced minds and at least so much of sympathetic spirit as the Roman poet possessed, who could consider nothing pertaining to man as foreign to himself, if, I say, with such mind and spirit, we look at scholasticism in itself, in its historic setting, and in the vital interests which were felt to be concerned in it, we shall surely discover about it somewhat of that imperishable charm which is never wanting where human hearts throb and human brains are active. As to its historic setting, scholasticism is a part or appurtenance of mediavalism. And what a picture does not this word suggest to the instructed and appreciative mind! Castles with dungeons and towers and lordly halls, knightly lords and ladies, esquires, pages and faithful vassals, chivalrous votaries of love, more valiant than intelligent defenders of religion, grave and yet spirited bearers of secular responsi