Finally, the rise of the universities shows a most significant appearance of the modern spirit under the old sanctions. The range of secular studies was limited and the subject-matter to be studied was chiefly the doctrine of the Fathers. The teachers who drew thousands of eager young men about them were clerics. But the very fact that dialectics--the art of reasoning--was the focus of interest, shows the dawn of a spirit of inquiry. Such a book as Abelard's _Sic et Non_, which marshaled the opposing views of the Fathers in "deadly parallel," was a challenge to tradition and an assertion of reason. And it is not without significance that the same bold thinker was the first of the mediæval scholars to treat ethics again as a field by itself. The title "_Know Thyself_" suggests its method. The essence of the moral act is placed in the intent or resolve of the will; the criterion for judgment is agreement or disagreement with conscience. § 4. INDIVIDUALISM IN THE PROGRESS OF LIBERTY AND DEMOCRACY =Rights.=--It is not possible or necessary here to sketch the advance of political and civil liberty. Finding its agents sometimes in kings, sometimes in cities, sometimes in an aristocracy or a House of Commons, and sometimes in a popular uprising, it has also had as its defenders with the pen, Churchmen, Protestants, and freethinkers, lawyers, publicists, and philosophers. All that can be done here is to indicate briefly the moral significance of the movement. Some of its protagonists have been actuated by conscious moral purpose. They have fought with sword or pen not only in the conviction that their cause was just, but because they believed it just. At other times, a king has favored a city to weaken the power of the nobility, or the Commons have opposed the king because they objected to taxation. What makes the process significant morally is that, whatever the motives actuating those who have fought its battles with sword or pen, they have nearly always claimed to be fighting for "rights." They have professed the conviction that they are engaged in a just cause. They have thus made appeal to a moral standard, and in so far as they have sincerely sought to assert rights, they have been recognizing in some sense a social and rational standard; they have been building up a moral personality. Sometimes indeed the rights have been claimed as a matter of "possession" or of tradition. This is to place them on the basis of customary morality. But in such great crises as the English Revolutions of the seventeenth century, or the French and American Revolutions of the eighteenth, some deeper basis has been sought. A Milton, a Locke, a Rousseau, a Jefferson, has but voiced the sentiments of a people in formulating an explicitly moral principle. Sometimes this has taken the form of an appeal to God-given rights. All men are equal before God; why should one man assume to command another because of birth? In this sense the