would have been atheists had they dared.  The first class was represented by the School of Saint-Victor; the second by John of Salisbury himself; the third, by a class of schoolmen whom he called Cornificii, as though they made a practice of inventing horns of dilemma on which to fix their opponents; as, for example, they asked whether a pig which was led to market was led by the man or the cord.  One asks instantly:  What cord?—­whether Grace, for instance, or Free Will?

Bishop John used the science he had learned in the school only to reach the conclusion that, if philosophy were a science at all, its best practical use was to teach charity—­love.  Even the early, superficial debates of the schools, in 1100-50, had so exhausted the subject that the most intelligent men saw how little was to be gained by pursuing further those lines of thought.  The twelfth century had already reached the point where the seventeenth century stood when Descartes renewed the attempt to give a solid, philosophical basis for deism by his celebrated “Cogito, ergo sum.”  Although that ultimate fact seemed new to Europe when Descartes revived it as the starting-point of his demonstration, it was as old and familiar as Saint Augustine to the twelfth century, and as little conclusive as any other assumption of the Ego or the Non-Ego.  The schools argued, according to their tastes, from unity to multiplicity, or from multiplicity to unity; but what they wanted was to connect the two.  They tried realism and found that it led to pantheism.  They tried nominalism and found that it ended in materialism.  They attempted a compromise in conceptualism which begged the whole question.  Then they lay down, exhausted.  In the seventeenth century the same violent struggle broke out again, and wrung from Pascal the famous outcry of despair in which the French language rose, perhaps for the last time, to the grand style of the twelfth century.  To the twelfth century it belongs; to the century of faith and simplicity; not to the mathematical certainties of Descartes and Leibnitz and Newton, or to the mathematical abstractions of Spinoza.  Descartes had proclaimed his famous conceptual proof of God:  “I am conscious of myself, and must exist; I am conscious of God and He must exist.”  Pascal wearily replied that it was not God he doubted, but logic.  He was tortured by the impossibility of rejecting man’s reason by reason; unconsciously sceptical, he forced himself to disbelieve in himself rather than admit a doubt of God.  Man had tried to prove God, and had failed:  “The metaphysical proofs of God are so remote (eloignees) from the reasoning of men, and so contradictory (impliquees, far-fetched) that they make little impression; and even if they served to convince some people, it would only be during the instant that they see the demonstration; an hour afterwards they fear to have deceived themselves.”  Moreover, this kind of proof could lead only to a speculative knowledge, and to know God only in that way was not to know Him at all.  The only way to reach God was to deny the value of reason, and to deny reason was scepticism:—­