the highest character as master of their instruction and witness of their life”.[147] These passages all refer to cathedral schools, but there is evidence equally good of the existence of similar schools in the monasteries.[148] Such, then, were the practical conditions, as far as known, which determined the educational activity of Isidore’s time. [144] The second council of Toledo (531) devoted especial attention to the subject of preparation for the priesthood. See Mansi, _Sacrorum Conciliorum Collectio_ (Florence, 1764), vol. 8 (_Concilium Toletanum II_). [145] Mansi, vol. 8, p. 785. [146] Cap. 2. [147] Mansi, vol. 10, p. 626 (_Concilium Toletanum_, IV, Cap. 24). [148] Isidore’s _Regula Monachorum_, 20, 5. The spirit in which Isidore approached the task of furnishing a comprehensive treatment of the secular subject-matter of education was the one proper to his age. He held that its place was a subordinate one. He seems to be expressing his own and not a borrowed view when he says that “grammarians are better than heretics, for heretics persuade men to drink a deadly draught, while the learning of grammarians can avail for life, if only it is turned to better uses”.[149] The same depreciation of the independent value of secular studies is reflected in his statement that the order of the seven liberal arts in the curriculum was one intended to secure a progressive liberation of the mind from earthly matters and “to set it at the task of contemplating things on high”.[150] He evidently believed that it was the function of the seven liberal arts to raise the mind from a lower or material to a higher or spiritual plane of thought.[151] [149] See p. 30. [150] _Etym._, 3, 71, 41. [151] To this conception of the time, that the secular side of education was a necessary evil, of which a minimum use must be made, the school disciplines had in reality been adapting themselves for centuries by their growing formalism and loss of content. Among the seven liberal arts rhetoric is the best example of the former characteristic. It was so purely conventional a discipline in Isidore’s time that, even though he wrote of it, he confesses that it made no impression on him, either good or bad. “When it is laid aside,” he says, “all recollection vanishes.” The loss of content, on the other hand, is best seen in Isidore’s account of the four mathematical sciences, especially in that of geometry, which consists of nothing more than a few definitions.