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THE MEDIEVAL REVIVAL OF LEARNING 385 evidence. Medical students now had the voluminous works of the Greek Galen and the Arab Avicenna; astronomers profited by the ancient writings of Ptolemy, and by the more recent works of numerous Arabs. Men's minds were now formed by the ideas of the Greeks and Arabs instead of merely by reading the church fathers and Latin litera- ture. They now had a new mass of material, to which they could put the questions that were troubling them, and which suggested new questions to them. It may seem strange that ancient Greek writers, most of whom were pagans, and more recent writers in Arabic, many of whom were Mohamme- dans, should have been so readily accepted as authorities by the Western Christian world. But intellectual curiosity and respect for learning proved stronger than religious scru- ples. There was, it is true, an abiding hostility to certain free-thinking Arabs like Averroes, but this was because he was a skeptic and not even a good Mohammedan. But Aristotle, whom Averroes and the Arabian learned , world generally had fervently admired as the greatest of all philosophers, was equally esteemed by the Chris- The new tians of the thirteenth century. In Abelard's Aristotle ! time only his logical treatises had been known to the Latins, I but now most of the other works by him which have come down to us were translated. Plato, whose philosophy of nature William of Conches had followed in the twelfth cen- , tury, was now rather neglected in favor of Aristotle. For a while, it is true, Aristotle's treatises in natural science were not permitted to be taught at Paris, but soon they, together with his other works, became the common property of all Latin scholars thanks to the labors of the two great school- men, Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas. The former set forth the doctrines of Aristotle with additions of his own in a series of works which paralleled in titles and contents the writings of the Greek philosopher. Aquinas issued a revised translation of Aristotle's writings with an accom- panying commentary of his own. Aristotle's Metaphysics, a work dealing as its title suggests with things beyond the purely physical, was of great interest to the medieval theo-