But perhaps their total lack of historical imagination is brought home to us most forcibly by the prevalent belief that—apart from the Chosen People—all the inhabitants of the pre-Christian world were doomed to eternal exclusion from paradise. When we recollect that for some time the doctors of medieval universities were obliged to swear upon oath that they would teach nothing contrary to the doctrines of a Greek philosopher who must already have been in this situation for three hundred years at the birth of the Redeemer, and when we further reflect that it was the acute brains of these very doctors which were engaged in building up our present thinking apparatus, we may well feel inclined to give up as hopeless the task of sympathetically recreating the medieval cosmos in our imaginations—unless we realize, as indeed the history of meanings clearly shows, that it is not merely ideas and theories and feelings which have changed, but the very method of forming ideas and of combining them, the very channels, apparently eternal, by which one thought or feeling is connected with another. Possibly the Middle Ages would have been equally bewildered at the facility with which twentieth-century minds are brought to believe that, intellectually, humanity languished for countless generations in the most childish errors on all sorts of crucial subjects, until it was redeemed by some simple scientific dictum of the last century. There is another difference between the past and the present which it is hard for us to realize; and perhaps this is the hardest of all. For with the seventeenth century we reach the point at which we must at last try to pick up and inspect that discarded garment of the human soul, intimate and close-fitting as it was, into which this book has been trying from the fifth chapter onwards to induce the reader to re-insert his modern limbs. The consciousness of ‘myself’ and the distinction between ‘my-self’ and all other selves, the antithesis between ‘myself’, the observer, and the external world, the observed, is such an obvious and early fact of experience to every one of us, such a fundamental starting-point of our life as conscious beings, that it really requires a sort of training of the imagination to be able to conceive of any different kind of consciousness. Yet we can see from the history of our words that this form of experience, so far from being eternal, is quite a recent achievement of the human spirit. It was absent from the old mythological outlook; absent, in its fullness, from Plato and the Greek philosophers; and, though it was beginning to light up in the Middle Ages, as we see in the development of Scholastic words like _individual_ and _person_, yet the medieval soul was still felt to be joined by all sorts of occult ties both to the physical body and to the world. Self-consciousness, as we know it, seems to have first dawned faintly on Europe at about the time of the Reformation, and