Middle Ages and Renaissance 221
Within a little more than a century their prayers and pains
were rewarded by one of man’s most glorious achievements,
Scholastic Philosophy, a system of thought and of nature
at once rational and authoritative, which not only explained
but integrated the universe.
Then time played one of her many jokes: Scholasticism
crumbled before the fresh intellectual efforts. But the uni-
versities outlived the purpose that gave them birth. Like all
human institutions they must one day disappear ; and die they
will and must when they cease to persuade mankind to value
things of the spirit.
Peter Abaelard was the greatest, although not the first,
of the teachers who applied the Aristotelian organon to the
speculative problems of his age. Although the active part
of his life preceded the birth of universities, it was as much
the prestige of his teaching in the schools of Notre-Dame
and Sainte-GenevIeve as the physical advantages of Paris,
that fixed there the first university in northern Europe. The
stream of pupils who came to learn under Abaelard, the
masters who remained after he had gone, and the increasing
importance of Paris under Capetian kings, fixed that city
as seat of the first and greatest medieval university.
The process by which this congeries of teachers and pupils
became the University of Paris began shortly after the death
of Abaelard in 1142, and was not completed within a century.
There was no organization in Abaelard’s time, except that
a teacher required a license from the Archbishop’s rep-
resentative before he was allowed to set up a school, or to
lecture. Here is the first, or ecclesiastical, element in uni-
versity government. Self-government, the second element,
came when the teachers organized a guild to protect them-
selves and further their common interests, just as every
trade and profession was then doing. Commencement