M. Conrat, _Geschichte der Quellen und Literatur des Römischen Rechts im früheren Mittelalter_ (Leipzig, 1891) treats of the sources of Isidore’s _Leges_, pp. 151 _et seq._; as also Voigt, _Jus Naturale_, 1, 576 _et seq._, and Dirksen, _Hinterlassene Schriften_, 1, 185 _et seq._ Arno Schenk, _De Isidori Hispalensis de natura rerum libelli fontibus_, Jena, 1909, finds that Isidore wrote the _De Natura Rerum_ and the _Etymologiae_ from his collection of excerpts which is drawn from Ambrose, Clement, Augustine, Jerome, the scholiast on Germanicus, Hyginus, Servius, the scholia on Lucan, Solinus, Suetonius, and a number of the Roman poets. This dissertation is largely meant to show that Reifferscheid in his work, _Suetoni Reliquiae_, had gone too far in attributing passages found in Isidore to Suetonius. M. Klussman, _Excerpta Tertullianea in Isidori Hispalensis Etymologiis_, Hamburg, 1892, gives a list of nearly seventy passages borrowed by Isidore from Tertullian, at the same time pointing out that credit for the passages is nowhere assigned to the latter. CHAPTER III ISIDORE’S WORLD VIEW Is it possible to ascertain from the writings of Isidore what was the general view of the universe and the attitude toward life held in the sixth and seventh centuries? On first thought it seems doubtful. As has been indicated, his works, and especially the _Etymologies_, form a mosaic of borrowings, whose ultimate origin is to be traced to unnumbered writings in both Greek and Latin, and in both Christian and pagan literatures. We find side by side in Isidore the ideas of Aristotle, Nicomachus, Porphyry, Varro, Cicero, Suetonius, Moses, St. Paul, Origen, and Augustine, to mention only a few; and these ideas, although as a rule they have undergone degeneration, are sometimes in the original words or a close rendering of them. If viewed closely they are a mass of confusion and incoherence. This is natural; such eclectism as had existed for centuries in the Roman, pagan and Christian, systems of thought is not compatible with consistency. Incoherence in the intellectual possession was inevitable; equally inevitable was an increasing indifference to incoherence and even inability to perceive it. The words of a writer of such a period must therefore not be pressed too hard. Too close an investigation would land the inquirer in hopeless confusion.