Even the monkish writers of the _Life of St. Goswin_, whose attitude towards his person is clear, grant him ‘a sublime eloquence.’ The epitaphs that men raised over him, the judgments of episcopal Otto von Freising and John of Salisbury, the diplomatic letter of Prior Fulques, the references of all the chroniclers of the time, I refrain from quoting. We learn his power best from his open enemies. ‘Wizard,’ ‘rhinoceros,’ ‘smiter,’ ‘friend of the devil,’ ‘giant,’ ‘Titan,’ ‘Prometheus,’ and ‘Proteus,’ are a few of their compliments to his ability: the mellifluous St. Bernard alone would provide a rich vocabulary of flattering encomiums of that character: ‘Goliath,’ ‘Herod,’ ‘Leviathan,’ ‘bee,’ ‘serpent,’ ‘dragon,’ ‘hydra,’ ‘Absalom,’ are some of his epithets. When, later, we find St. Bernard, the first orator and firmest power in France, shrink nervously from an oral encounter with him, and resort to measures which would be branded as dishonourable in any other man, we shall more faithfully conceive the charm of Abélard’s person and the fascination of his lectures. Yet no careful student of his genius will accept the mediæval estimate which made him the ‘Socrates of Gaul,’ the peer of Plato and of Aristotle. He had wonderful penetration and a rare felicity of oral expression, but he was far removed from the altitude of Socrates and Plato and the breadth of Aristotle. He had no ‘system’ of thought, philosophical or theological; and into the physical and social world he never entered. His ideas—and some of them were leagues beyond his intellectual surroundings—came to him piecemeal. Yet we shall see that in some of those which were most abhorrent to Bernard—who was the Church for the time being—he did but anticipate the judgment of mature humanity on certain ethical and intellectual features of traditional lore. The thesis cannot be satisfactorily established until a later stage. When we proceed to examine the erudition which gave occasion to the epitaph, ‘to him alone was made clear all that is knowable,’ we must bear in mind the limitations of his world. When Aristotle lent his mind to the construction of a world system, he had the speculations of two centuries of Greek thinkers before him; when Thomas of Aquin began to write, he had read the thoughts of three generations of schoolmen after Abélard, and all the Arabic translations and incorporations of Greek thought. At the beginning of the twelfth century there was little to read beside the fathers. If we take ‘all that was knowable’ in this concrete and relative sense, the high-sounding epitaph is not far above the truth.