It cannot and need not be denied that the education imparted by the medieval scholastics was in many regards defective. It was at once too dogmatic and disputatious.[1] Literary studies were comparatively neglected; frequently too much importance was attached to purely dialectical subtleties. This education was one-sided, and a few great men of the age, as Roger Bacon, the great medieval scientist, and John of Salisbury, complained that scholasticism was too narrow.[2] The defects of scholasticism became especially manifest in the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when much time and energy was wasted in discussing useless refinements of thought.
Another serious defect of medieval education was the lack of philological and historical criticism. This uncritical spirit has been well pointed out in the International Catholic Scientific Congress at Munich, 1900, by the distinguished Jesuit historian, Father Grisar. Speaking of the unwarranted traditions and pious legends that grew up during the Middle Ages, he says: "The age was really in infancy, so far as regular historical scientific instinct was concerned. As in other branches of knowledge, people lived on the good or bad tradition of former days, just as they had received it. ... The scientific work of the whole epoch was devoted to those branches of knowledge that are most sublime in their matter and stand in closest relation to religion and Church. The age produced great and exceedingly acute theologians, philosophers and canonists, but in these very men the general absence of the historical sense, and of the criticism of facts, is
