But it will be asked, what did they learn? Well, the only answer that one can give is that they learned whatever there was to learn. Our literary friends have often still the impression that in the Middle Ages men spent their whole time in learning theology, and were afraid of other forms of knowledge, but this is a singular delusion. As the universities developed a system, their studies were arranged in the main under four heads, the general studies of what came to be called the Faculty of Arts, and the professional studies of the three superior Faculties of Law, Medicine, and Theology, but the student was not normally allowed to study in the three superior Faculties until he had spent some years in the studies of the Faculty of Arts. It is therefore with this latter that we are primarily occupied. The studies in the Faculty of Arts consisted, to use our modern terminology, of literature, philosophy, and science, and the accomplished mediaeval student was expected to know whatever there was to know. And this means--what is strangely often forgotten--that the studies of the mediaeval universities were primarily based upon the literature which had survived from the ancient world. The Latin poets and orators were their models of literary art, the surviving treatises of the ancients their text-books in medicine, and the Greek philosophers in Latin translations, or in Latin works founded on them, their masters in thought. To understand the extent of the influence and the knowledge of antiquity of a twelfth-century scholar we need only turn again to John of Salisbury, and we shall find him as familiar as any Renaissance scholar with Latin literature, and possessing a very considerable acquaintance with Greek literature so far as it could be obtained through the Latin.[30] Indeed, so much is he possessed by the literature of antiquity that in works like the _Policraticus_ he can hardly write two lines together without a quotation from some classical author. This type of literary scholarship has been too much overlooked, and, as I said before, too exclusive an attention has been given to the thirteenth-century schoolmen, who are neither from a literary nor from a philosophical point of view as representative of mediaeval scholars, and philosophically they are often really unmediaeval, for the general quality of mediaeval thought is its Platonism: the Aristotelian logic was indeed known to the Middle Ages through Boethius, but the other Aristotelian works were not known till towards the middle of the thirteenth century. It would be impossible here, even if I were competent, which I am not, to discuss the character of mediaeval thought, but one thing we can observe, one aspect of the intellectual method which may serve to clear away some confusion. The great intellectual master of the Middle Ages was Abelard, and the method which he elaborated in his _Sic et Non_ is the method which imposed itself upon all aspects of mediaeval thought.