In spite of this it is very clear that if Isidore had treated these topics with any degree of reference to the actual realities of his own time, he would have left us a work of inestimable value. But he did not do so; he drew, not upon life, but upon books for his ideas; there was no first-hand observation. Moreover, the books which he consulted were, as a rule, centuries old.[38] He tells us practically nothing concerning his own period, in which so many important changes were taking place. For example, there are repeated and detailed references to the founding and early history of Rome, but no direct allusion to the political and social changes brought about by the disintegration of the Roman Empire; trifles attributed to a period thirteen centuries earlier seemed to interest him more than the mighty developments of his own epoch. Again, although he writes upon law, he does not appear to have heard of the Justinian code issued a century before;[39] and in his chronology he fails to mention the proposal for a new era in chronology made also a century before his time by Dionysius the Less.[40] [38] See p. 46. [39] See p. 165. [40] See p. 175. Throughout the _Etymologies_ there is a leading principle which guides Isidore in his handling of the different subjects, namely, his attitude toward words. His idea was that the road to knowledge was by way of words, and further, that they were to be elucidated by reference to their origin rather than to the things they stood for. This, in itself, gave an antiquarian cast to his work. His confidence in words really amounted to a belief, strong though perhaps somewhat inarticulate, that words were transcendental entities. All he had to do, he believed, was to clear away the misconceptions about their meaning, and set it forth in its true original sense; then, of their own accord, they would attach themselves to the general scheme of truth. The task of first importance, therefore, in treating any subject, was to seize upon the leading terms and trace them back to the meanings which they had in the beginning, before they had been contaminated by the false usage of the poets and other heathen writers; thus the truth would be found. It was inevitable that, with such a preconception, Isidore’s method in the _Etymologies_ should be to treat each subject by the method of defining the terms belonging to it.