fashion which until recently has uniformly prevailed over the
entire civilized world. We study literature rather than nature because
the Greeks did so, and because when the Romans and the Roman provincials
resolved to educate their sons, they employed Greek teachers and
followed in Greek paths." 1

The so-called practical bent of the Romans worked in the same direction.
In falling back upon the recorded ideas of the Greeks, they not only
took the short path to attaining a cultural development, but they
procured just the kind of material and method suited to their
administrative talents. For their practical genius was not directed to
the conquest and control of nature but to the conquest and control of
men.

Mr. Hatch, in the passage quoted, takes a good deal of history for
granted in saying that we have studied literature rather than nature
because the Greeks, and the Romans whom they taught, did so. What is the
link that spans the intervening centuries? The question suggests that
barbarian Europe but repeated on a larger scale and with increased
intensity the Roman situation. It had to go to school to Greco-Roman
civilization; it also borrowed rather than evolved its culture. Not
merely for its general ideas and their artistic presentation but for
its models of law it went to the records of alien peoples. And its
dependence upon tradition was increased by the dominant theological
interests of the period. For the authorities to which the Church
appealed were literatures composed in foreign tongues. Everything
converged to identify learning with linguistic training and to make
the language of the learned a literary language instead of the mother
speech.

The full scope of this fact escapes us, moreover, until we recognize
that this subject matter compelled recourse to a dialectical method.
Scholasticism frequently has been used since the time of the revival of
learning as a term of reproach. But all that it means is the method of
The Schools, or of the School Men. In its essence, it is nothing but a
highly effective systematization of the methods of teaching and learning
which are appropriate to transmit an authoritative body of truths.
Where literature rather than contemporary nature and society furnishes
material of study, methods must be adapted to defining, expounding, and
interpreting the received material, rather than to inquiry, discovery,
and invention. And at bottom what is called Scholasticism is the
whole