There, surrounded by the most famous men of his time, the new imperator of the west loved to spend his hours of leisure. And so great was his respect for academic democracy that he dropped all etiquette and as simple Brother David took an active share in the conversation and allowed himself to be contradicted by the humblest of his professors. But when we come to examine the problems that interested this goodly company and the questions they discussed, we are reminded of the list of subjects chosen by the debating teams of a rural high school in Tennessee. They were very naïve, to say the least. And what was true in the year 800 held equally good for 1400. This was not the fault of the medieval scholar, whose brain was undoubtedly quite as good as that of his successors of the twentieth century. But he found himself in the position of a modern chemist or doctor who is given complete liberty of investigation, provided he does not say or do anything at variance with the chemical and medical information contained in the volumes of the first edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica of the year 1768 when chemistry was practically an unknown subject and surgery was closely akin to butchery. As a result (I am mixing my metaphors anyway) the medieval scientist with his tremendous brain capacity and his very limited field of experimentation reminds one somewhat of a Rolls-Royce motor placed upon the chassis of a flivver. Whenever he stepped on the gas, he met with a thousand accidents. But when he played safe and drove his strange contraption according to the rules and regulations of the road he became slightly ridiculous and wasted a terrible lot of energy without getting anywhere in particular. Of course the best among these men were desperate at the rate of speed which they were forced to observe. They tried in every possible way to escape from the everlasting observation of the clerical policemen. They wrote ponderous volumes, trying to prove the exact opposite of what they held to be true, in order that they might give a hint of the things that were uppermost in their minds. They surrounded themselves with all sorts of hocus pocus; they wore strange garments; they had stuffed crocodiles hanging from their ceilings; they displayed shelves full of bottled monsters and threw evil smelling herbs in the furnace that they might frighten their neighbors away from their front door and at the same time establish a reputation of being the sort of harmless lunatics who could be allowed to say whatever they liked without being held too closely responsible for their ideas. And gradually they developed such a thorough system of scientific camouflage that even today it is difficult for us to decide what they actually meant. That the Protestants a few centuries later showed themselves quite as intolerant towards science and literature as the Church of the Middle Ages had done is quite true, but it is beside the point.