At the present day the philosophies of the Middle Ages are being studied with a vigour altogether without parallel. One of the chief causes of this is doubtless our ever-widening curiosity as to all that concerns the past: but another cause is almost certainly the need more or less confusedly felt by our age for a return to the wisdom of a period which, though it certainly had a far smaller volume of knowledge than we, yet held irmly to the one thing necessary to know the absolute superiority of the spiritual over the temporal. Fundamentally. perhaps, it is its grip on this truth that makes the Middle Ages our best school of Metaphysics. Yet, in spite of all the historical monographs, the doctrinal syntheses, the daily growing multitude of texts re-published, it seems that the general perspective under which we see the whole of that age is falsified by one deeply rooted presupposition. What this island how serious it is may be brought out most clearly by an analogy.

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