explore the Cloisters of the
past, built at one time from the current ideals of the Good, at another
of the True, at another of the Beautiful; indeed, in widely varying
measures and proportions from all of these. How far each of these now
expresses the present, how far it may yet serve the future, is
obviously a question of questions, yet for that very reason one
exceeding our present limits. Enough if in city life the historic place
of what is here generalised under this antique name of Cloister be here
recognised; and in some measure the actual need, the potential place be
recognised also. Here is the need and use, beyond the fundamental claims
of the material life of the Town, and the everyday sanity of the
Schools, with all their observations and information, their commonsense
and experience, their customs and conventions, even their morals and
their law, for a deeper ethical insight than any rule or precedent can
afford, for a fuller and freer intellectual outlook than that which has
been derived from any technical experience or empiric skill, for an
imagery which is no mere review of the phantasmagoria of the senses. In
our age of the multiplication and expansion of towns, of their
enrichment and their impoverishment, of the multiplication and
enrichment of schools also, it is well for the sociologist to read from
history, as he then may more fully see also around him that it is ever
some fresh combination of these threefold products of the
Cloister--ideal theory, and imagery--emotional, intellectual,
sensuous--which transforms the thought-world of its time.

The philosopher of old in his academic grove, his porch, the mediaeval
monk within his studious cloister's pale, are thus more akin to the
modern scientific thinker than he commonly realises--perhaps because he
is still, for the most part, of the solitary individualism of the hermit
of the Thebaid, of Diogenes in his tub. Assuredly, they are less removed
in essential psychology than their derived fraternities, their [Page:
85] respective novices and scholars, have often thought. It is thus no
mere play of language which hands on from the one to the other the
"travail de Benedictin," though even here the phrase is inadequate
savouring too much of the school, into which each cloister of every sort
declines sooner or later, unless even worse befall.

The decay of the cloister, though thus on the one hand into and with the
school, may also take place within itse