has yet to be found; that
their phenomena run, not in one series, but along two parallel lines.

To the schoolmen the duality of the universe appeared under a
different aspect. How this came about will not be intelligible unless
we clearly apprehend the fact that they did really believe in
dogmatic Christianity as it was formulated by the Roman Church. They
did not give a mere dull assent to anything the Church told them on
Sundays, and ignore her teachings for the rest of the week; but they
lived and moved and had their being in that supersensible theological
world which was created, or rather grew up, during the first four
centuries of our reckoning, and which occupied their thoughts far more
than the sensible world in which their earthly lot was cast.

For the most part, we learn history from the colourless compendiums or
partisan briefs of mere scholars, who have too little acquaintance
with practical life, and too little insight into speculative problems,
to understand that about which they write. In historical science, as
in all sciences which have to do with concrete phenomena, laboratory
practice is indispensable; and the laboratory practice of historical
science is afforded, on the one hand, by active social and political
life, and, on the other, by the study of those tendencies and
operations of the mind which embody themselves in philosophical and
theological systems. Thucydides and Tacitus, and, to come nearer our
own time, Hume and Grote, were men of affairs, and had acquired, by
direct contact with social and political history in the making, the
secret of understanding how such history is made. Our notions of the
intellectual history of the middle ages are, unfortunately, too often
derived from writers who have never seriously grappled with
philosophical and theological problems: and hence that strange myth of
a millennium of moonshine to which I have adverted.

However, no very profound study of the works of contemporary writers
who, without devoting themselves specially to theology or philosophy,
were learned and enlightened--such men, for example, as Eginhard or
Dante--is necessary to convince one's self, that, for them, the world
of the theologian was an ever-present and awful reality. From the
centre of that world, the Divine Trinity, surrounded by a hierarchy of
angels and saints, contemplated and governed the insignificant
sensible world in which the inferior spirits of men, burdened with the
de