inquiry for inquiry's sake, and honors it as supreme; even the ethelistic
philosophers, Fichte and Schopenhauer, pay their tribute to the prejudice
in favor of intellectualism. The fact that the modern period can show
no one philosophic writer of the literary rank of Plato, even though it
includes such masters of style as Fichte, Schelling, Schopenhauer, and
Lotze, not to speak of lesser names, is an external proof of how noticeably
the aesthetic impulse has given way to one purely intellectual.

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