plane of development and into a richer
unfolding of life.[49]

The means by which these peoples are able to prepare the way for and
to achieve these transmutations through which they constantly emerge
to that fuller life, the rudiments of which are inborn in them, is the
principle of an unrestrained freedom of scientific research and
teaching.

Hence it comes that this instinct of free thought among these peoples
reaches expression very early, much earlier than the modern learned
world commonly suspects. "We are mistakenly in the habit of thinking
of free scientific inquiry as a fruitage of modern times. But among
these peoples that instinct is an ancient one which asserts that free
inquiry must be bound neither by the authority of a person nor by a
human ordinance; that, on the contrary, it is a power in itself,
resting immediately upon its own divine right, superior to and
antedating all human institutions whatever.

"_Quasi lignum vitae_," says Pope Alexander IV. in a constitution
addressed to the University of Paris in 1256, "_Quasi lignum vitae in
Paradiso Dei, et quasi lucerna fulgoris in Domo Domini, est in Sancta
Ecclesia Parisiensis Studii disciplina_." "As the tree of life in God's
Paradise and the lamp of glory in the house of God, such in the Holy
Church is the place of the Parisian corporation of learning." To
appreciate the import of these words of the holy father, it should be
borne in mind that in the Middle Ages all things whatever lived only by
virtue of a corporate existence, so that learning existed only as
incorporated in a university.

It would be a serious mistake to believe that the universities of the
Middle Ages rested that prerogative of scientific censure--_censura
doctrinatis_--to which they laid claim in such a comprehensive way,
upon these and other like papal or imperial and royal decrees of
establishment. Petrus Alliacensis, a man whom the University of Paris
elected as its _magnus magister_ in 1381, and who afterward wore the
archiepiscopal and also the cardinal's hat, tells us that not _ex jure
humano_, not from human legislation, but _ex jure divino_, from divine
law, does science derive its competence to exercise the _censura_; and
the privileges and charters granted by popes, emperors and kings are
nothing more than the acts of recognition of this prerogative of
science that comes to it _ex jure divino_, or, as an alternative
expression has it, _ex jure naturali_, by the law o