n his terms and exact in his
use of them. That it was possible to be childishly as well as
barbarously scholastic nobody would deny, and the famous sarcasms of
the _Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum_, two centuries after our time, had
been anticipated long before by satirists. But even the logical
fribble, even the logical jargonist, was bound to be exact. Now
exactness was the very thing which languages, mostly young in actual
age, and in all cases what we may call uneducated, unpractised in
literary exercises, wanted most of all. And it was impossible that
they should have better teachers in it than the few famous, and even
than most of the numerous unknown or almost unknown, philosophers of
the Scholastic period.

[Sidenote: _The great Scholastics._]

It has been said that of those most famous almost all belong specially
to this our period. Before it there is, till its very latest eve,
hardly one except John Scotus Erigena; after it none, except Occam, of
the very greatest. But during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries
there is scarcely a decade without its illustration. The first
champions of the great Realist and Nominalist controversy, Roscellinus
and William of Champeaux, belong to the eleventh century in part, as
does their still more famous follower, Abelard, by the first twenty
years of his life, while almost the whole of that of Anselm may be
claimed by it.[12] But it was not till the extreme end of that century
that the great controversy in which these men were the front-fighters
became active (the date of the Council of Soissons, which condemned
the Nominalism of Roscellinus as tritheistic is 1092), and the
controversy itself was at its hottest in the earlier part of the
succeeding age. The Master of the Sentences, Peter Lombard, belongs
wholly to the twelfth, and the book which gives him his scholastic
title dates from its very middle. John of Salisbury, one of the
clearest-headed as well as most scholarly of the whole body, died in
1180. The fuller knowledge of Aristotle, through the Arabian writers,
coincided with the latter part of the twelfth century: and the curious
outburst of Pantheism which connects itself on the one hand with the
little-known teaching of Amaury de Bene and David of Dinant, on the
other with the almost legendary "Eternal Gospel" of Joachim of Flora,
occurred almost exactly at the junction of the twelfth and thirteenth.
As for the writers of the thirteenth century itself, that great