Now all of this conception—the notion that the mind has a faculty of thought apart from things, the notion that this faculty is constructed, in and of itself, with a fixed framework, the notion that thinking is the imposing of this fixed framework on some unyielding matter called particular objects, or facts—all of this conception appears to me as highly scholastic, as the last struggle of mediævalism to hold thought in subjection to authority. Nothing is more surprising than the fact that while it is fashionable to reject, with great scorn, all the results and special methods of scholasticism, its foundation-stone should still be accepted as the corner-stone of the edifice of modern doctrine. It is still more surprising when we reflect that the foundation-stone is coherent only with the mediæval superstructure. The scholastics when they held that the method of thought was a faculty pursuing its own method apart from the course of things, were at least consistent. They did not conceive that thought was free, that intelligence had rights, nor that there was possible science independent of data authoritatively laid down. Really believing what they professed,—that thought was something _in se_,—they held that it must be supplied with a fixed body of dogmatic fact, from tradition, from revelation—from external authority. They held that thought in its workings is confined to extracting from this dogmatic body of fact what is already contained in it, and to rearranging the material and its implications. To examine the _material_, to test its truth; to suppose that intelligence could cut loose from this body of authority and go straight to nature, to history itself, to find the truth; to build up a free and independent science—to this point of incoherency mediæval scholasticism never attained. To proclaim the freedom of thought, the rejection of all external authority, the right and the power of thought to get at truth for itself, and yet continue to define thought as a faculty apart from fact, was reserved for modern enlightenment! And were it not somewhat out of my present scope, I should like to show that modern culture is thus a prepared victim for the skilful dialectician of the reactionary army. If the modern _Zeitgeist_ does not fall a prey to the cohorts of the army of external authority, it is not because it has any recognised methods or any recognised criterion by which it can justify its raising the “banner of the free spirit.” It is simply the obstinate bulwark of outer fact, built up piecemeal by science, that protects it.