The great intellectual achievement of the Middle Ages was the recovery of the learning of the world that had vanished before the onset of the Hun, the Vandal and the Lombard.[70] That learning was in part classical, in part patristic. But as the process of absorption was the achievement of the Church, the emphasis was on theology, and the works of the Fathers bulked very much more largely than the profane literatures of Greece and Rome. There was much in the teaching of Augustine that was Neoplatonic, that was akin to the speculations of Plato himself. But the whole point of view, method and cast of mind of the mediæval thinker were radically different from those of the pagan philosopher. The latter set out upon the search for abstract truth without any preconceptions; the former started from the postulate of a divine revelation. His primary object was not to investigate, but to justify the ways of God to man. For him all knowledge must be a theodicæa. He was not, therefore, an original thinker; for the foundations of his scholarship being revealed truth, his most marked characteristic was a sincere deference to authority. He was, moreover, ever conscious that the salvation of the soul was a matter of greater cogency than even the exposition of God’s dealings with the world. At the same time mediæval philosophy was of a peculiarly formal pattern; and to the modern world it is apt to appear pedantic indeed, ‘cabined, cribbed, confined.’ It rested upon the tripod of grammar, rhetoric, logic. It was a matter very largely of dialectic, and it may seem to us of mere verbal juggling. The _Trivium_ was an introduction to metaphysics, but the metaphysics were strongly theological in bias and nakedly logical in form. Their clue to the processes of thought being logic, not psychology, mediæval thinkers did not clearly distinguish between problems of the human mind and problems of reality, assuming an exact correspondence between mental conceptions and the ultimate facts of the universe.