otherwise unobtainable, and poured its vitality into every form of
human thought and action.

It was Catholicism and the spirit of feudalism that preserved men
from the dangers inherent in the immense individualism of the time.
With this powerful and penetrating cooerdinating force men were safe
to go about as far as they liked in the line of individuality,
whereas today, for example, the unifying force of a common and
vital religion being absent and nothing having been offered to take
its place, the result of a similar tendency is egotism and anarchy.
These things happened in the end in the case of Mediaevalism when
the power and the influence of religion once began to weaken, and
the Renaissance and Reformation dissolved the fabric of a unified
society. Thereafter it became necessary to bring some order out of
the spiritual, intellectual and physical chaos through the
application of arbitrary force, and so came absolutism in
government, the tyranny of the new intellectualism, the Catholic
Inquisition and the Puritan Theocracy.

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, however, the balance is
justly preserved, though it was but an unstable equilibrium, and
therefore during the time of Abelard we find the widest diversity
of speculation and freedom of thought which continue unhampered for
more than a hundred years. The mystical school of the Abbey of St.
Victor in Paris follows one line (perhaps the most nearly right of
all though it was submerged by the intellectual force and vivacity
of the Scholastics) with Hugh of St. Victor as its greatest
exponent. The Franciscans and Dominicans each possessed great
schools of philosophy and dogmatic theology, and in addition there
were a dozen individual line of speculation, each vitalized by some
one personality, daring, original, enthusiastic. This prodigious
mental and spiritual activity was largely fostered by the schools,
colleges and universities that had suddenly appeared all over
Europe. Never was such activity along educational lines. Almost
every cathedral had its school, and many of the abbeys as well, as
for example, in France alone, Cluny, Citeaux and Bec, St. Martin of
Tours, Laon, Chartres, Rheims and Paris. To these schools students
poured in from all over the world in numbers mounting to many
thousands for such as Paris for example, and the mutual rivalries
were intense and sometimes disorderly. Groups of students would
choose their own masters and follow th