In Thomas Aquinas the certitude of faith, the sense of grace, the ardour of love, never quenched the conscious action of the reasoning and knowing mind; nor did reasoning quench devotion. A balance too, though perhaps with one scale higher than the other, was kept by Bonaventura, whose mind had reason’s faculty, but whose heart burned perpetually toward God. Another rationally ardent soul was Bonaventura’s intellectual forerunner, Hugo of St. Victor. In these men intellect did not outstrip the fervours of contemplation. But such catholic balance did not hold with Abaelard and Bacon, who lacked the pietistic temperament. With others, conversely, the strength of the pietistic and emotional nature overbore the intellect; the mind was less exacting; and devotional ardour used reason solely for its purposes. The mightiest of these were Bernard and Francis. To the same key might chime the woman, St. Hildegard of Bingen. We narrow down from these to hectic souls content with a few thoughts which serve as a basis for the heart’s fervours. The varying attitudes of mediaeval thinkers toward reason and authority, and even their different views upon the limits of the field of salutary knowledge, are exemplified in their methods, or rather in the variations of their common method. Here the factors were again authority and the intellect which considers the authority, and in terms of its own rational processes reacts upon the proposition under view. The intellect might simply accept authority; or, on the other hand, it might, through dialectic, seek a conclusion of its own. But midway between a mere acceptance of authority, and the endeavour of dialectic for a conclusion of its own, there is the reasoning process which perceives divergence among authorities, compares, discriminates, interprets, and at last acts as umpire. This was the combined and catholic scholastic method. It contained the two factors of its necessary duality; and its variations (besides the gradual perfecting of its form from one generation to another) consisted in the predominant employment of one factor or the other.