the professor's chair covered with
"horrible" filth. Far from feeling any awe, these evil-doers found, on
the contrary, a special amusement in the idea of perpetrating their
jokes in the _sanctum_ of philosophers, who, says the ordinance of the
wise king Charles V., "should be clean and honest, and inhabit clean,
decent, and honest places."[245]

Teaching, the principal object of which was logic, consisted in the
reading and interpreting of such books as were considered authorities.
"The method in expounding is always the same. The commentator discusses
in a prologue some general questions relating to the work he is about
to lecture upon, and he usually treats of its material, formal, final,
and efficient causes. He points out the principal divisions, takes the
first member of the division, subdivides it, divides the first member of
this subdivision, and thus by a series of divisions, each being
successively cleft into two, he reaches a division which only comprises
the first chapter. He applies to each part of the work the same process
as to its whole. He continues these divisions until he comes to having
before him only one phrase including one single complete idea."

Another not less important part of the instruction given consisted in
oratorical jousts; the masters disputed among themselves, and the pupils
did likewise. In a time when paper was scarce and parchment precious,
disputes replaced our written exercises. The weapons employed in these
jousts were blunt ones; but as in real tournaments where "armes
courtoises" were used, disputants were sometimes carried away by
passion, and the result was a true battle: "They scream themselves
hoarse, they lavish unmannerly expressions, abuse, threats, upon each
other. They even take to cuffing, kicking, and biting."[246]

Under this training, rudimentary though it was, superior minds became
sharpened, they got accustomed to think, to weigh the pros and cons, to
investigate freely; a taste for intellectual things was kept up in them.
The greatest geniuses who had come to study Aristotle on St. Genevieve's
Mount were always proud to call themselves pupils of Paris. But narrow
minds grew there more narrow; they remained, as Rabelais will say later,
foolish and silly, dreaming, stultified things, "tout niais, tout reveux
et rassotes." John of Salisbury, a brilliant scholar of Paris in the
twelfth century, had the curiosity to come, after a long absence, and
see his old comp