=Comparison of the Hellenic-Roman Period and the Middle Ages.= The Middle Ages can be conveniently remembered as approximately the 1000 years between the fall of old Rome, in 476, and the fall of new Rome (Constantinople) in 1453. Together these two periods make a long and a philosophically unproductive stretch of 1800 years. The intellectual materials which the two periods possessed, differ but little, although during the first half of the Middle Ages such materials were very few. There is, however, a decided difference in the way the two periods look at things. The ancient had started with Aristotle’s interest in knowledge for its own sake; the ancient had passed from that to the need of knowledge in ethical conduct; he had finally made use of knowledge only in formulating religion. On the other hand, the history of thought in the Middle Ages was exactly the reverse. The mediæval man starts satisfied with religion as thus formulated by the preceding period, and seeks to regain pure knowledge. The perspective in the two periods is therefore different. Hellenic thought began in freedom and ended in tradition; mediæval thought begins in tradition and, borne by the youthful German, who brings with him few original ideas, pushes forward toward freedom. No doubt one can discover in mediæval times many fresh transformations of ancient thought and a new Latin terminology, but, on the whole, all the problems of the Middle Ages, as well as their solutions, can be found in antiquity. One may find, too, the germs of modern thought in the Middle Ages, but they come from mediæval pupils and not from mediæval masters. In the Middle Ages humanity is again at school; its problems appear in succession, but they always are expressed in the conceptions of the ancients. =The Mediæval Man.= Antiquity had brought together three civilizations,――those of Greece, of Rome, and of Christianity. Greek civilization in the form of an intellectual culture, called Hellenism, had been superimposed upon Roman political society. The result was a society with a twofold stratum, and in such a society the Christian church had grown as an organization of controlling cultural and political influence. It was into this society that the German barbarians, by a series of invasions, entered during the first three centuries of the Middle Ages. The Middle Ages began and antiquity ended when these German tribes finally broke down the barriers of the Roman empire. It was a new period; for a new race had taken upon itself the responsibility of bearing the burden of the future of western Europe. The German was of course unconscious of the magnitude of his self-imposed burden, for the German was young, vigorous, and moved by primitive instincts. He had leaped into the world’s fields as a conqueror; he remained as a laborer.