The church through its systems of monasteries had maintained centers where religious and intellectual traditions had been preserved. These centers were undoubtedly important factors in conserving much that was valuable in an age when ruthless disregard for civilized values prevailed. Because of the abuses which sprang up in connection with the monasteries, certain positive reactions against the monasteries arose. St. Francis of Assisi (1181–1226) turned from the monastery to actual life. He inaugurated a method for the regeneration of society. He and his followers lived and spent themselves among the actual poor, subjecting themselves to the economic conditions of the poor. They helped the poor, not by giving alms as an expiation for sin and to secure self-salvation, but by the first-hand giving of their lives. St. Francis ignored the regular ecclesiastical conception of charity and gave it all the reality of a new and genuine social force. By renouncing the possession of property and living as the poor live, he obtained what he could secure in no other way--the poor man’s point of view. In this way, also, he secured an entrance into the poor man’s mind and heart that could not be had so well by any other method. By renouncing wealth and accepting literal poverty he reached the core of the problem of poverty. St. Francis was motivated by a desire to live a life of love. He spent not wealth but his life for the poor. Scholasticism developed as a reaction against churchly asceticism. According to scholasticism the individual should look to reason rather than to church dogma for religious and spiritual guidance. Scholasticism repudiated church traditions as a guide for individual action; it turned to Aristotelian logic for its technique. Thomas Aquinas (1226–1274), the best known of the scholastic philosophers, pushed forward the Aristotelian premises as follows: Man is a social being: he unites with other individuals in a social organization in order to gain his own purposes. The individual looks to able rulers for wise political guidance; he accords the requisite power to these rulers. Aquinas thus recognized a tacit social compact, or contract, foreshadowing Rousseau. In religion, scholasticism reduced religious mysticism to rational forms. It based religion on learning rather than on authority; it pursued the methods of reasoning rather than of contemplation. Scholasticism furthered the advancement of learning; it aided and developed the life of the universities. It encouraged the growth of independent thinking, although its decline set in about the fourteenth century, before it had had a fair opportunity to inaugurate a movement which would lead to an inductive or a positivistic philosophy, or sociology.