=The General Character of the Early Period.= It is no accident that these five hundred years of the Middle Ages were spiritualistic. Both the political disturbances and the intellectual inheritance from the Hellenic-Roman period made the period such. The troubles during the long death agony of the Roman empire had deprived the people of their interest in this world. The world of kingdoms and material things presented no ideals; and the age would have been pessimistic had not the Church through Augustine presented a heavenly ideal and the means to win that ideal. Both what the material world had taken away from man and what the spiritual seemed to offer him, made the age an age of faith. The principle of inner spirituality was moved to a central position. All things pointed to the supernatural and the transcendent. Men dwelt upon the nature of God, the number and rank of the angels, the salvation of the soul. In this, as in the Transitional Period following, little was known of Aristotle except some fragments of his logic; and little was known of Plato except in the form of neo-Platonism. But in this period (before the year 1000) the pupil was instructed in both Aristotle and Plato, and held them both together without controversy. Mysticism had little independence of church doctrine, as appears in the case of Erigena, the consequences of whose doctrine were not at first seen. The monastery became the fundamental social organization and the central social force. Organized ascetic life permitted an absorbing contemplation of heaven. Prayer superseded thought; faith prescribed knowledge. The intellectual world was dominated by neo-Platonic idealism, and the all-important topic in men’s minds was that of God’s grace. Augustine stood at the beginning of the period and organized its conception of grace for it. Erigena stood near the end and stated the neo-Platonism of the period in extreme form, presenting the issue for the scholasticism of the many years to come. The presentation of the doctrine of these two men will therefore be the philosophical exemplification of the attitude of the time. Illustration: MEDIÆVAL GEOGRAPHY. THE COSMAS MAP, A. D. 547 =From J. Keane’s _Evolution of Geography_= (Cosmas was an Egyptian monk who had once been a merchant and traveler. He did not use the records of his own travels to supplement the Greek and Roman plans, but he laid down as a fact that the earth is flat. Then he piously adduced evidence from the Scriptures to support his view. The maps drawn by Cosmas are the earliest Christian maps that have survived. Their crudeness, compared with the maps of the Romans and Arabs, reveals the low state of knowledge among the Christians.)