[Illustration] JACQUES COEUR'S HOUSE (BOURGES)
[Illustration] CLOISTER OF ST. JOHN LATERAN (ROME)
WHAT AND HOW THEY STUDIED AT THE UNIVERSITIES.
It is usually the custom for text books of education to dismiss the teaching at the universities of the Middle Ages with some such expression as: "The teachers were mainly engaged in metaphysical speculations and the students were occupied with exercises in logic and in dialectics, learning in long drawn out disputations how to use the intellectual instruments they possessed but never actually applying them. All knowledge was supposed to be amenable to increase through dialectical discussion and all truth was supposed, to be obtainable as the conclusion of a regular syllogism." Great fun especially is made of the long-winded disputations, the time-taking public exercises in dialectics, the fine hair-drawn distinctions presumably with but the scantiest basis of truth behind them and in general the placing of words for realities in the investigation of truth and the conveyance of information. The sublime ignorance of educators who talk thus about the century that saw the rise of the universities in connection with the erection of the great Cathedrals, is only equaled by their assumption of knowledge.
It is very easy to make fun of a past generation and often rather difficult to enter into and appreciate its spirit. Ridicule comes natural to human nature, alas! but sympathy requires serious mental application for understanding's sake. Fortunately there has come in recent years a very different feeling in the minds of many mature and faithful students of this period, as regards the Middle Ages and its education. Dialectics may seem to be a waste of time to those who consider the training of the human mind as of little value in comparison with the stocking of it with information. Dialectical training will probably not often enable men to earn more money than might have otherwise been the case. This will be { 34} eminently true if the dialectician is to devote himself to commercial enterprises in his future life. If he is to take up one of the professions, however, there may be some doubt as to whether even his practical effectiveness will not be increased by a good course of logic. There is, however, another point of view from which this matter of the study of dialectics may be viewed, and which has been taken very well by Prof. Saintsbury of the University of Edinburgh in a recent volume on the Thirteenth Century.