It seems remarkable to us that, in spite of this active discouragement of independent thinking, the Dark and Middle Ages were, beyond dispute, the cradle of European philosophy. Perhaps this was because men did not yet feel the need for such independence. The leading quality of medieval thought was its receptiveness, and towards the end of its life it seems to have become almost conscious of this itself; for it is hardly possible to open a volume of Chaucer without lighting on some half-respectful, half-ironical reference to “olde clerkes” or “olde bokes”. But the profound respect in which the written word had been held throughout the Middle Ages survives in many other curious ways as well. We still use the word _authority_ in its two separate meanings of ‘a quotation from a book’ and ‘the power of controlling’. Of these the first meaning is the older, and from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries it may almost be said to have included the latter within it. Again, our word _glamour_, a later form of _gramarye_, suggests an almost mystical reverence for the ‘grammar’ which—along with most of the other branches of medieval learning—was derived entirely from the works of Aristotle. The popularity and general use of _term_, which began life as a subtle technicality of Aristotelian logic, reminds us again of the universal study of that writer in the Middle Ages, and _spice_—a corrupted form of ‘species’—is but another indication of the way in which the jargon of classical philosophy crept into their everyday thought.