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588 REVIEWS OF BOOKS October Some part of this intelligibility was due to Dr. Poole's understanding of and insistence on the human personality of the authors of whom he treated, and on the outer accidents which shaped their lives and had a share in forming their opinions. With men who are known chiefly from their speculative writings and from the denunciation of their opinions by their opponents, there is a natural tendency to treat a man as a book, and in the formal anatomy of his thoughts to forget the life and circumstances which gave them applicability and purpose. But in the Illustrations, for instance, Gottschalk's embittered view of predestination, with the doom he plentifully dealt out to his kind, becomes the natural outburst of a man immured in a monastery by an arbitrary act of Lewis the Pious, after a synod had released him from the monkish profession which his father had forced on him as a child. He had been predestined in his own life, and only under his poetical name of Theodulus could something of the unspoilt nature of the man transpire. ' Few disputes ', says Dr. Poole (p. 45) of this controversy on predestination, ' ever had a more accidental origin.' This is true, but it was also fitting that the crumbling Carolingian empire should be the background to his gloomy doctrine. The book, as its readers know, falls into two divisions, the origin of which Dr. Poole explains in the short biographical preface he has prefixed to the new edition. The first, reaching to chapter vii, deals with the survival and revival of learning and thought in the early middle ages from Charlemagne to Frederick Barbarossa. It is remarkable how much the preservation of the knowledge of the classics was due to the British Isles. The sound learning of Alcuin, the genius of John the Scot, returned to the Continent some of the culture it had lost. It was in part a far-off result of the mission of St. Augustine, a paradoxical consequence to flow from the pontificate of Pope Gregory the Great, whose Philistine attitude to letters Dr. Poole emphasizes. In John the Scot elements of both the later schools of thought, nominalism and realism, are present, but it is not until after the dark age of disaster has been made good at the end of the eleventh century, that the time of the schoolmen begins and along with it the renewed clash of those two natural trends of human specula- tion. In the century and a half preceding we hear of the great diffusers and reawakeners of learning, of Bruno, Gerbert, and Fulbert ; in the mid eleventh Anselm is uplifted far beyond the capacity of his time, but does not enter on the tedious path by which that time was to progress. In the twelfth we have the succession of schoolmen. Dr. Poole here describes the ebb and flow of their opinions, in the elucidation of which he is at his best, and these masterly chapters have most experienced revision in the new issue. But profound and subtle though they were, it is not perhaps so much what the schoolmen thought as what they taught which was of most importance. They taught half-barbaric Europe, one may almost say, the use of the reasoning and critical faculties, how to think and how to learn, how to dare to inquire. This debt we still owe to the Breton Abailard and the rivals he scorned, and, perhaps we may add, to the dreary glossators who expounded the meaning and deduced the consequences of the texts of the civil law. How much the movement of the Italian Renaissance owed to this prolonged mental training of