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or allegorical—God and His angels, Satan and his devils, Justice, Mercy, and the like. We are accustomed to regard these abstract or general personages as the handiwork of the monks and medieval religion. We are accustomed to credit these spectacles as well as the scholastic lovers of abstractions with a profound desire to express the invisible and the infinite in their art and philosophy. But let us not confuse the idealism of a Plato or a Berkeley with the average thought of peoples saturated with superstitions grossly materialistic and narrowly limited in their intellectual and social views—men and women who forgot limitations of space and time in feudalised pictures of Hebrew, or Greek, or Roman antiquity, not because of their "universal" ideas, but because they were incapable of apprehending even very limited ideas correctly; who could only see the crucifixion through the associations of knights or burghers, and who reduced divinity with an almost savage confidence to the compass of their human senses and the little sphere of their sensual wit. Such men, such women, can have possessed no real conceptions of the infinite, can be credited with no true efforts to express it. The "realism" of the Middle Ages—which shines out as clearly in their dramas and allegorical "epic" poetry as in their formulated philosophy—is but a weak power of abstraction seeking to prop its steps on every kind of external object. Far from indicating a lofty feeling for the invisible and infinite, it shows how short a distance the human mind could then travel without perpetual returns to the visible. This "realism," as well as the allegorical and abstract characters of the medieval mysteries and moralities, reflects a weak sense of personality which is found in all early stages of social life, and to which the social organisations of medieval Europe