When we turn to the character of mediaeval thinking; we find, instead of the aesthetic views of antiquity and the purely scientific tendency of the modern era, a distinctively religious spirit.  Faith prescribes the objects and the limitations of knowledge; everything is referred to the hereafter, thought becomes prayer.  Men speculate concerning the attributes of God, on the number and rank of the angels, on the immortality of man—­all purely transcendental subjects.  Side by side with these, it is true, the world receives loving attention, but always as the lower story merely,[1] above which, with its own laws, rises the true fatherland, the kingdom of grace.  The most subtle acuteness is employed in the service of dogma, with the task of fathoming the how and why of things whose existence is certified elsewhere.  The result is a formalism in thought side by side with profound and fervent mysticism.  Doubt and trust are strangely intermingled, and a feeling of expectation stirs all hearts.  On the one side stands sinful, erring man, who, try as hard as he may, only half unravels the mysteries of revealed truth; on the other, the God of grace, who, after our death, will reveal himself to us as clearly as Adam knew him before the fall.  God alone, however, can comprehend himself—­for the finite spirit, even truth unveiled is mystery, and ecstasy, unresisting devotion to the incomprehensible, the culmination of knowledge.  In mediaeval philosophy the subject looks longingly upward to the infinite object of his thought, expecting that the latter will bend down toward him or lift him upward toward itself; in Greek philosophy the spirit confronts its object, the world, on a footing of equality; in modern philosophy the speculative subject feels himself higher than the object, superior to nature.  In the conception of the Middle Ages, truth and mystery are identical; to antiquity they appear reconcilable; modern thought holds them as mutually exclusively as light and darkness.  The unknown is the enemy of knowledge, which must be chased out of its last hiding-place.  It is, therefore, easy to understand that the modern period stands in far sharper antithesis to the mediaeval era than to the ancient, for the latter has furnished it many principles which can be used as weapons against the former.  Grandparents and grandchildren make good friends.

[Footnote 1:  On the separation and union of the three worlds, natura, gratia, gloria, in Thomas Aquinas, cf.  Rudolph Eucken, Die Philosophie des Thomas von Aquino und die Kultur der Neuzeit, Halle. 1886.]

When a new movement is in preparation, but there is a lack of creative force to give it form, a period of tumultuous disaffection with existing principles ensues.  What is wanted is not clearly perceived, but there is a lively sense of that which is not wanted.  Dissatisfaction prepares a place for that which is to come by undermining the existent and making it ripe for its fall.  The old, the outgrown, the