middle
ages is at once Protestantism, Scepticism, and Ghibellinism.(253)

The intellectual action in this crisis is marked by four forms;--(1) the
criticism created by the scholastic philosophy, which has been thought to
mark in Abelard the commencement of doubt; (2) the introduction of the
idea of progress in religion, in the sense that Christianity is to be
replaced by a better religion; (3) the idea of the comparison of
Christianity with other religions, so as to obliterate its exceptional
character; (4) the traces of disbelief in the doctrine of immortality. The
two former are free thought as doubt, the two latter as disbelief.

It will be necessary, for illustrating the first of those forms, to
explain the nature of the scholastic philosophy, so far as to show how it
might become the means of producing heresy or scepticism, when applied to
theology.

Scholasticism is the vague name which describes the system of inquiry
common in the middle ages.(254) In truth it marks a period rather than a
system; a method rather than a philosophy. In spite of difference of form,
it links itself with the speculations of other ages in community of aim,
in that it strove to gain a general philosophy of the universe, to reach
some few principles which might offer an interpretation of all
difficulties.

In the present age the science which attempts this grand problem is
denominated Logic, or Metaphysics, according to the different sphere which
it covers.(255) But in the middle ages these two fields were not clearly
distinguished; in the same manner as in the {~GREEK CAPITAL LETTER DELTA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER LAMDA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER KAPPA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER TAU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER KAPPA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ETA WITH VARIA~} of Plato, method
and the realities attained by method were not separated.(256) Yet it was
mainly in reference to the former that scholasticism wears the aspect of a
method, and to the latter the aspect of a philosophy. Adopting deduction
as the type of a perfect science, it assumed its data partly on the ground
of innate ideas, partly from the truths of revelation, partly from the
metaphysical dicta of Aristotle; and from these principles attempted to
work out deductively a solution of universal nature. It was the {~GREEK CAPITAL LETTER SIGMA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER PHI