Human faculties form a correlated whole; and this composite human nature seeks to act, to _function_. Thus the whole man strives to realize the fullest actuality of his being, and satisfy or express the whole of him, and not alone his reason, nor yet his emotions, or his appetites. This uttermost realization of human being--man’s _summum bonum_ or _summa necessitas_--cannot unite the incompatible within its synthesis. It must be kept a consistent ideal, a possible whole. Here the demiurge is the discriminating and constructive intelligence, which builds together the permanent and valuable elements of being, and excludes whatever cannot coexist in concord with them. Yet the intelligence does not always set its own rational activities as man’s furthest goal of realization. It may place love above reason. And, of course, its discriminating judgment will be affected by current knowledge and by dominant beliefs as to man and his destiny, the universe and God. Manifestly whatever the thoughtful idealizing man in any period (and our attention may at once focus itself upon the Middle Ages) adjudges to belong to the final realization of his nature, will become an object of intellectual interest for him; and he will deem it a proper subject for study and meditation. The rational, spiritual, or even physical elements, which may enter and compose this, his _summum bonum_, represent those intellectual interests which may be termed ultimate, for the very reason, that they relate to what the thinker deems his beatitude. These ultimate intellectual interests possess an absolute sanction, for the lack of which whatever lies outside of them tends to adjudge itself vain. The philosophy, theology, and the profoundly felt and reasoned piety, of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries made up that period’s ultimate intellectual interests. We are not concerned with other matters occupying its attention, save as they bore on man’s supreme beatitude, which was held to consist in his everlasting salvation and all that might constitute his bliss in that unending state. The elements of this blessedness were not deemed to lie altogether in rational cognition and its processes; for the conception of the soul’s beatitude was catholic; and while with some men the intellectual elements were dominant, with others salvation’s summit was attained along the paths of spiritual emotion.