eaching, and its real
import is entirely missed. Students and professors are supposed to
have been limited in their interests to dialectics and metaphysics in
the narrowest sense of these terms, and much time was, according to
even presumably good authorities, frittered away in idle speculations
with regard to things that are absolutely unknowable. [Footnote 36]

[Footnote 36: Much of the remainder of this chapter is taken from the
chapter on What and How They Studied at the Universities, in my book
The Thirteenth Greatest of Centuries. (Catholic Summer School Press,
N. Y.) Some of the sources from which the material is obtained will be
found more fully referred to there, and further information with
regard to scientific studies at these universities will be found in
the chapter on Post-graduate Work in the same book, from which a
certain amount of material is used again here.]

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Anyone who studies the works of the professors at these medieval
universities can scarcely fail to become entirely sympathetic toward
these scholars, who devoted themselves with so much ardor to every
form of learning that interested them, and who did not fail to
accomplish at least as much for future generations, as any other
generation of university men in history. Professor George Saintsbury
in his book On the Rise of Romance and the Flourishing of Allegory,
which is really the story of thirteenth century literature in Europe,
in the series of Periods of European Literature, [Footnote 37] in
summing up the contributions of these medieval professors to human
knowledge, said:

[Footnote 37: Scribners, 1896.]

"Yet, there has always, in generous souls who have some tincture of
philosophy, subsisted a curious kind of sympathy and yearning over
the work of these generations of mainly disinterested scholars, who,
whatever they were, were thorough, and whatever they could not do,
could think. And there have been in these latter days some graceless
ones who have asked whether the science of the nineteenth century,
after an equal interval, will be of any more positive value--whether
it will not have even less comparative interest than that which
appertains to the Scholasticism of the thirteenth."

Nothing could well be less true than the impression that philosophy
and theology were the exclusive subjects of the medieval university
curriculum. If because our modern universities devote a great amount
of time to physical