Yet even as an Organon, Logic had to sink to a lower rank. As traditionalism grew supreme, and religion ossified into a stereotyped form of belief and practice, logic had less to do as an organiser of dogma. It sank, or seemed to sink (for it would be rash to speak too categorically of an epoch of thought so far removed from modern sympathy and understanding as the age of the Schoolmen), into a futile (and as it seems occasionally almost a viciously-despairing) play with _pro_ and _contra_,--into a lust of argumentation which in masters like Ockam comes perilously close to scepticism or agnosticism. More and more, Scholastic thought, which, at one time, had been in the centre of such intellectual life as there was, came to be stranded on the shore, while the onward-flowing tide spread in other directions. These were the great days of logical sway, when it seemed as if logic could create new truth: as if forms could beget matter. So at least ran an outside rumour, which was probably based on some amount of real folly. But the more important point was that the old logic had lost touch with reality. New problems were arising, which it was--without a profound reconstruction--quite incapable of solving. Of these there were obviously two--not unconnected perhaps, but arising in different spheres of life. There was the revival of religious experience, growing especially since the thirteenth century with an ever-swelling stream in the souls of men and women, till it burst through all bounds of outward organisation in the catastrophe of the Reformation. Luther may have been historically unjust (as Bacon afterwards was) to the 'blind heathen master,' as he called Aristotle: but he was governed by a true instinct when (unlike the compromise-loving Melanchthon) he found the traditional system of logic and metaphysics no proper organon for the new phase of faith and theory. So, too, the new attempts at an inception and instauration of the sciences grew up outside the walls of old tradition, and were at first perhaps discouraged and persecuted as infidel and heretical, and were, even without that burden, pursued at much hap-hazard and with much ignorance both in aims and methods. Intelligent onlookers,--especially if inspired by an enthusiasm for the signs of an age happier for human welfare--could not but sec how needful it was to come to some understanding on the aims and methods of the rising sciences.