the morning and evening state of their
understandings?[847] Into such follies the schoolmen appear to have
launched, partly because there was less danger of running against a
heresy in a matter where the church had defined so little--partly from
their presumption, which disdained all inquiries into the human mind, as
merely a part of physics--and in no small degree through a spirit of
mystical fanaticism, derived from the oriental philosophy and the later
Platonists, which blended itself with the cold-blooded technicalities of
the Aristotelian school.[848] But this unproductive waste of the
faculties could not last for ever. Men discovered that they had given
their time for the promise of wisdom, and been cheated in the bargain.
What John of Salisbury observes of the Parisian dialecticians in his own
time, that, after several years' absence, he found them not a step
advanced and still employed in urging and parrying the same arguments,
was equally applicable to the period of centuries. After three or four
hundred years, the scholastics had not untied a single knot, nor added
one unequivocal truth to the domain of philosophy. As this became more
evident, the enthusiasm for that kind of learning declined; after the
middle of the fourteenth century few distinguished teachers arose among
the schoolmen, and at the revival of letters their pretended science had
no advocates left, but among the prejudiced or ignorant adherents of
established systems. How different is the state of genuine philosophy,
the zeal for which will never wear out by length of time or change of
fashion, because the inquirer, unrestrained by authority, is perpetually
cheered by the discovery of truth in researches, which the boundless
riches of nature seem to render indefinitely progressive![849]

Yet, upon a general consideration, the attention paid in the
universities to scholastic philosophy, may be deemed a source of
improvement in the intellectual character, when we compare it with the
perfect ignorance of some preceding ages. Whether the same industry
would not have been more profitably directed if the love of metaphysics
had not intervened, is another question. Philology, or the principles of
good taste, degenerated through the prevalence of school-logic. The
Latin compositions of the twelfth century are better than those of the
three that followed--at least on the northern side of the Alps. I do
not, however, conceive that any real correctness of