Aristotle was, of course, a pagan. He was uncertain whether the soul continued to exist after death; he had never heard of the Bible and knew nothing of the salvation of man through Christ. One would have supposed that he would have been promptly rejected with horror by those who never questioned the doctrines of Christianity. But the teachers of the thirteenth century were fascinated by his logic and astonished at his learning. The great theologians of the time, Albertus Magnus (d. 1280) and Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274), did not hesitate to prepare elaborate commentaries upon all his works. He was called "The Philosopher"; and so fully were scholars convinced that it had pleased God to permit Aristotle to say the last word upon each and every branch of knowledge that they humbly accepted him, along with the Bible, the church fathers, and the canon and Roman law, as one of the unquestioned authorities which together formed a complete guide for humanity in conduct and in every branch of science. [Sidenote: Scholasticism.] The term _scholasticism_ is commonly given to the philosophy, theology, and method of discussion of the mediæval professors. To those who later outgrew the fondness for logic and the supreme respect for Aristotle, scholasticism, with its neglect of Greek and Roman literature, came to seem an arid and profitless plan of education. Yet if we turn over the pages of the wonderful works of Thomas Aquinas, we see that the scholastic philosopher might be a person of extraordinary insight and erudition, ready to recognize all the objections to his position, and able to express himself with great clearness and cogency.[175] The training in logic, if it did not increase the sum of human knowledge, accustomed the student to make careful distinctions and present his material in an orderly way. [Sidenote: Roger Bacon's attack on scholasticism.] Even in the thirteenth century there were a few scholars who criticised the habit of relying upon Aristotle for all knowledge. The most distinguished fault-finder was Roger Bacon, an English Franciscan monk (d. about 1290), who declared that even if Aristotle were very wise he had only planted the tree of knowledge and that this had "not as yet put forth all its branches nor produced all its fruits." "If we could continue to live for endless centuries we mortals could never hope to reach full and complete knowledge of all the things which are to be known. No one knows enough of nature completely to describe the peculiarities of a single fly and give the reason for its color and why it has just so many feet, no more and no less." Bacon held that truth could be reached a hundred thousand times better by experiments with real things than by poring over the bad Latin translations of Aristotle. "If I had my way," he declared, "I should burn all the books of Aristotle, for the study of them can only lead to a loss of time, produce error and increase ignorance."