k and Roman
antiquity. A scientific, historical, and philosophical encyclopaedia of
the thirteenth century surely deserves to find a place in the preface to
the sixteenth.

After the encyclopaedist of the middle ages come, naturally, their
philosophers. They were numerous; and some of them have remained
illustrious. Several of them, at the date of their lives and labors,
have already been met with and remarked upon in this history, such as
Gerbert of Aurillac, who became Pope Sylvester II., St. Anselm, Abelard,
St. Bernard, Robert of Sorbon, founder of the Sorbonne, and St. Thomas
Aquinas.

[Illustration: St. Thomas Aquinas and Abelard----140]

To these names, known to every enlightened man, might be added many
others less familiar to the public, but belonging to men who held a high
place in the philosophical contests of their times, such as John Scot
Erigena, Berenger, Roscelin, William of Champeaux, Gilbert of La Poree,
&c. The questions which always have taken and always will take a
passionate hold of men's minds in respect of God, the universe, and man,
in respect of our origin, our nature, and our destiny, were raised and
discussed, from the eleventh to the fifteenth century, if not with so
much brilliancy, at any rate with as much boldness and earnest thought,
as at any other period. The middle ages had, in France, their
spiritualists, their materialists, their pantheists, their rationalists,
their mystics, and their sceptics, not very clear or refined in their
notions, but such as lacked neither profundity in their general view of
the questions, nor ingenious subtilty in their argumentative process. We
do not care to give in this place any exposition or estimate of their
doctrines; we shall simply point out what there was original and
characteristic in their fashion of philosophizing, and wherein their
mental condition differed essentially from that which was engendered and
propagated, in the sixteenth century, by the resuscitation of Greek and
Roman antiquity.

It is the constant idea of the philosophers and theologians of that
period to affirm and to demonstrate the agreement between Christian faith
and reason. They consider themselves placed between two fixed points,
faith in the Christian truths inculcated from the very first or formally
revealed by God to man, and reason, which is the faculty given to man to
enable him to recognize the truth. "Faith," wrote Hildebert, Archbishop
of Tours, in the