Unfortunately, he does not quite drop them with the chart. In a note “To the Reader” he refers to them as “half-legendary.” It is odd that a school which included the leading thinker, secular or sacred, of the Thirteenth Century, the age of Dante, should have become legendary in the New York of 1926, from which Durant dates his book. Turning from legends, we come to Benedetto Croce, who, writes Durant[215] “is a sceptic with an almost German gift for obscurity ... an anti-clerical who writes like an American Hegelian ... an Italian Catholic who has kept nothing of his religion except its scholasticism and its devotion to beauty.” And lo, we are back to legend again! “Perhaps the comparative infertility of Italy in the philosophy of the last hundred years,” Durant goes on, “is due in some part to the retention of scholastic attitudes and methods even by thinkers who have abandoned the old theology.” Adding,[216] “He [Croce] is, after all, a product of the scholastic tradition ... he is a germanized Italian.” Now it is quite true that, though Thomas Aquinas was a native of the Kingdom of Naples, he studied under Albertus Magnus at Cologne--probably during the year 1244; returned to Cologne in 1284; and perhaps visited it several times thereafter. But both he and his illustrious master were scholastics of the school of St. Augustine, who died in the year 430. The one German thing about St. Augustine is that Eucken, the German philosopher, says of him: “If our age wishes to take up and treat in an independent way the problems of religion, it is not so much to Schleiermacher or Kant or even Luther or St. Thomas that it must refer as to Augustine, and outside of religion, there are points upon which Augustine is more modern than Hegel or Schopenhauer.” Durant surely cannot mean that a living Italian has been “Germanized” through having absorbed the teachings of a master who died in 1280 and was the follower of another master, in Hippo, who died in 430. As one of the chief tenets of Scholasticism is that the Christian creed can be proven by reason alone without recourse to Revelation, Croce of course had to repudiate his scholasticism, German or not, along with his religion. All that can remain to him, if anything remains, is a certain training of the mind. Whether he has shown the effects of such training, or made good use of it, is a matter of opinion. What Durant shows here is total unfamiliarity with his subject. He is merely applying certain notions which he picked up uncritically from unauthorative sources. But having mentioned this Scholasticism which he seems not to have read, he goes on, _re_ Croce, to ask: “How could an Italian be unkind to a Church that had brought all the world to Canossa, and had levied imperial tribute on every land to make Italy the art-gallery of the world?”