In its beginnings, the theoretical postulates and preconceptions of modern science are drawn from the scholastic speculations of the late Middle Ages; the problems which the new science undertook to handle, on the other hand, were, by and large, such concrete and material questions as the current difficulties of technology brought to the notice of the investigators. These traditional postulates, preconceptions, canons, and logical methods that stood over from the past were essentially of a theological complexion, and were the outcome of much time, attention and insight spent on the systematisation of knowledge in a cultural situation whose substantial core was the relation of master and servant, and under the guidance of a theological bias worked out on the same ground. The postulates of this speculative body of knowledge and the preconceptions with which the scholastic speculators went to their work of systematisation, accordingly, are of a highly anthropomorphic character; but it is not the anthropomorphism of workmanship, at least not in the naïve form which the sense of workmanship gives to anthropomorphic interpretation among more primitive peoples.[128] It may be taken as a matter of course that the sense of workmanship is present in its native, direct presentment throughout the intellectual life of the middle ages, as it necessarily is under all the permutations of human culture; but it is equally a matter of course that the promptings of an unsophisticated sense of workmanship do not afford the final test of what is right and good in a cultural situation drawn on rigid lines of mastery and submission. During the middle ages the faith had taken on an extremely authoritative and coercive character, to answer to the similar principles of organisation and control that ruled in secular affairs; so that at the transition to modern times the religious cult of Christendom was substantially a cult of fearsome subjection and arbitrary authority. Much else, of a more genial character, was of course comprised in the principles of the faith of that time, but when all is said the fact remains that even in its genial traits it was a cult of irresponsible authority and abject submission,--a cult of the pastoral-predatory type, adapted and perfected to answer the circumstances of feudal Europe, and so embodying the principles (habits of thought) that characterised the feudal system.