This man was John Scotus Erigena,--or John the Erin-born,--who was also a monk, and whose early days had been spent in some secluded monastery in Ireland, or the Scottish islands. Somehow he attracted the attention of Charles the Bald, A.D. 843, and became his guest and chosen companion. And yet, while he lived in the court, he spent the most of his time in intellectual seclusion. As a guest of the king he may have become acquainted with Hincmar, or his acquaintance with Hincmar may have led to his friendship with Charles. He was witty, bright, and learned, like Abélard, a favorite with the great. In his treatise on Predestination, in which he combated the views of Gotschalk, he probably went further than Hincmar desired or expected: he boldly asserted the supremacy of reason, and threw off the shackles of authority. He combated Saint Augustine as well as Gottschalk. He even aspired to reconcile free-will with the divine sovereignty,--the great mistake of theologians in every age, the most hopeless and the most ambitious effort of human genius,--a problem which cannot be solved. He went even further than this: he attempted to harmonize philosophy with religion, as Abélard did afterwards. He brought all theological questions to the test of dialectical reasoning. Thus the ninth century saw a rationalist and a pantheist at the court of a Christian king. Like Democritus, he maintained the eternity of matter. Like a Buddhist, he believed that God is all things and all things are God. Such doctrines were not to be tolerated, even in an age when theological speculations did not usually provoke persecution. Religious persecution for opinions was the fruit of subsequent inquiries, and did not reach its height until the Dominicans arose in the thirteenth century. But Erigena was generally denounced; he fell under the censure of the Pope, and was obliged to fly, taking refuge about the year 882 in England,--it is said at Oxford, where there was probably a cathedral school, but not as yet a university, with its professors' chairs and scholastic honors. Others suppose that he died in Paris, 891. A spirit of inquiry having been thus awakened among a few intellectual monks, they began to speculate about those questions which had agitated the Grecian schools: whether _genera_ and _species_--called "universals," or ideas--have a substantial and independent existence, or whether they are the creation of our own minds; whether, if they have a real existence, they are material or immaterial essences; whether they exist apart from objects perceptible by the senses. It is singular that such questions should have been discussed in the ninth century, since neither Plato nor Aristotle were studied. That age was totally ignorant of Greek. It may be doubted whether there was a Greek scholar in Western Europe,--or even in Rome.