The unrest in Abelard’s teaching is representative of the last century of this period, which he brought to a close. There was growing a general revolt from the unfruitful methods of the scholastic dialectic, coupled with feverish desire for knowledge. There was, on the one hand, a great reaction toward mysticism with the Victorines, Bernard of Clairvaux and Bernard of Tours, and toward eclecticism with John of Salisbury and Peter the Lombard. On the other hand, there was an interesting growth in empirical science. But these theoretical interests were but eddies in the great current of events. For Jerusalem and the Holy Land, the memorials in earthly form of all the ideals sacred to the mediæval mind, had fallen into the hands of the infidel! The western world was preparing for the rescue, and the Crusades were the last and the frenzied expression of the Platonic idealism of the Middle Ages. They bring the first two periods to a spectacular climax. Is it a mere coincidence that Abelard brings to a close the dominance of idealism on the theoretic side at the time when earthly symbols of that idealism were being destroyed? CHAPTER XVIII THE PERIOD OF CLASSIC SCHOLASTICISM (1200–1453) =The General Character of this Last Period.= The first one hundred and fifty years of this period was the golden age of scholasticism; the remaining one hundred years was a period of decline. The period of Classic Scholasticism was a natural growth from the Transitional Period. At the end of the Transitional Period the church, in spite of Mohammedans, Jews, heretics, and the classics, outshone all else, and its life and dogma were the most worth while. In this period appeared a theology, adequate to its life and dogma,――a theology which was floated by the wave of piety of the Mendicant Orders. Acquaintance with the true Aristotle was the needed stimulus. The favorable conditions for that stimulus were (1) the triumph of the church and papacy, (2) the intense piety of the Mendicants, (3) the general culture derived from an inner development of the church and from contact with the East in Constantinople, Palestine, and Spain. Aristotle and the Mendicants were the new forces, and they achieved their position against the hostility of the old Orders, the universities, and the teachers. The triumph was possible because the new forces contributed nothing really new, but merely completed the old scheme of things. The new Aristotle, as it was understood, taught metaphysics, epistemology, and politics in a way to vindicate dogma as against the opposition of William of Champeaux and Roscellinus. The Mendicants on their part vindicated all dogma by blending it with faith on the one hand, and with reason on the other.