Old Medieval Quotes

In Esimore, Sulux was returning from tending to the herd as it grazed the summer pastures. The lone traveller was dressed in light blue clothing that shimmered white in the evening sun. The old prophesies had finally been fulfilled.

There is an old joke about socialism as the synthesis of the highest achievements of the whole human history to date: from prehistoric societies it took primitivism; from the Ancient world it took slavery; from medieval society brutal domination; from capitalism exploitation; and from socialism the name..

But now science is the belief system that is hundreds of years old. And, like the medieval system before it, science is starting not to fit the world any more. Science has attained so much power that its practical limits begin to be apparent. Largely through science, billions of us live in one small world, densely packed and intercommunicating. But science cannot help us decide what to do with that world, or how to live. Science can make a nuclear reactor, but it cannot tell us not to build it. Science can make pesticide, but cannot tell us not to use it. And our world starts to seem polluted in fundamental ways---air, and water, and land---because of ungovernable science.

The Reformation was a time when men went blind, staggering drunk because they had discovered, in the dusty basement of late medievalism, a whole cellar full of fifteen-hundred-year-old, two-hundred proof Grace–bottle after bottle of pure distilate of Scripture, one sip of which would convince anyone that God saves us single-handedly. The word of the Gospel–after all those centuries of trying to lift yourself into heaven by worrying about the perfection of your bootstraps–suddenly turned out to be a flat announcement that the saved were home before they started…Grace has to be drunk straight: no water, no ice, and certainly no ginger ale; neither goodness, nor badness, not the flowers that bloom in the spring of super spirituality could be allowed to enter into the case.

As Audun detached the orb from the staff he heard the old alchemist’s words echo in his mind. “Your anger is good Audun, your power lies in your anger.” Audun opened his eyes again and lay back down in the wet grass as the words repeated themselves. Robert Reid – The Son

Blair continued. “The old man only visits me in dreams. Dressed always in black with amber fire as his companion, he is older than the mountains. He is the fire of othium and he comes with an ancient name, Oien. He demands you take your throne and raise his armies. You will rebuild for him the glory of the second age.” Robert Reid – The Son

A man inherited a field in which was an accumulation of old stone, part of an older hall. Of the old stone some had already been used in building the house in which he actually lived, not far from the old house of his fathers. Of the rest he took some and built a tower. But his friends coming perceived at once (without troubling to climb the steps) that these stones had formerly belonged to a more ancient building. So they pushed the tower over, with no little labour, and in order to look for hidden carvings and inscriptions, or to discover whence the man's distant forefathers had obtained their building material. Some suspecting a deposit of coal under the soil began to dig for it, and forgot even the stones. They all said: 'This tower is most interesting.' But they also said (after pushing it over): 'What a muddle it is in!' And even the man's own descendants, who might have been expected to consider what he had been about, were heard to murmur: 'He is such an odd fellow! Imagine using these old stones just to build a nonsensical tower! Why did not he restore the old house? he had no sense of proportion.' But from the top of that tower the man had been able to look out upon the sea.

He belonged to a walled city of the fifteenth century, a city of narrow, cobbled streets, and thin spires, where the inhabitants wore pointed shoes and worsted hose. His face was arresting, sensitive, medieval in some strange inexplicable way, and I was reminded of a portrait seen in a gallery I had forgotten where, of a certain Gentleman Unknown. Could one but rob him of his English tweeds, and put him in black, with lace at his throat and wrists, he would stare down at us in our new world from a long distant past—a past where men walked cloaked at night, and stood in the shadow of old doorways, a past of narrow stairways and dim dungeons, a past of whispers in the dark, of shimmering rapier blades, of silent, exquisite courtesy.

The old man’s eyes sparked. “Elan of Ember, you I know, take me to your King.” He paused. “Now!” The old man spoke like a crack of thunder and red lightning flashed from his open hand. The portal gate beside Elan flashed with fire and disappeared. Without thought, Elan’s sword flew to his hand as he made towards the traveller. But again the red fire flashed. The sword glowed and like the gate, it was consumed by the fire. Elan collapsed, clutching the burnt fragments of his sword in his injured hand. “Take him to the King,” he grunted in pain. The guards did so without delay.

Later, back in the Den of Thieves, Rafe explained it all to Raimund. The boy was partially mollified. Rafe did not know about Raimund’s dreams, and Raimund did not enlighten him, so Raimund puzzled by himself. What did it mean? How had Aleana come to be in the prison cell under the protection of the young man from his dreams – in the arms of the young man who was now the occupant of his family’s old cottage? How had the man ended up in prison, and what was his crime? Most importantly, what would happen to Aleana?

The more one knows, the sooner one grows old.

Those darling byegone times, Mr Carker,' said Cleopatra, 'with their delicious fortresses, and their dear old dungeons, and their delightful places of torture, and their romantic vengeances, and their picturesque assaults and sieges, and everything that makes life truly charming! How dreadfully we have degenerated!

He assumed that Audun, who obviously knew whether or not he had murdered Holger, believed it was possible that Arvid’s nephew was guilty. There were two problems with this: first, of course, Raimund knew that the blood-soaked clothes came from the unsolved murder of a jeweller four years earlier, a crime that Arvid was guilty of. Secondly, Arvid had not seen the boy since that bloody night in 1505. Back then the boy had been ten years old; now he would be fourteen and probably more man than boy. Arvid wondered if he would recognise Raimund even if he saw him. Nonetheless, given the circumstances, he knew he had better be helpful, not least because he was somewhat scared of the huntsman.

Why are you so weird?” “Because my weird has to be able to cancel out your weird, Lady Cross-stitch.” “At least what I do is considered an art form,” Chubs said. “Yes, in ye olde medieval Europe you would’ve been quite the catch—

Pippin was crowned the first king of the Carolingian dynasty in the city of Soissons, in a brand-new sacred ceremony that involved anointing with holy oil in the manner of an Old Testament theocratic king.*

Current theories on the creation of the Universe state that, if it were created at all and didn't just start, as it were, unofficially, it came to being between ten and twenty thousand million years ago. By the same token the earth itself is generally supposed to be about four and a half thousand million years old. These dates are incorrect. Medieval Jewish scholars put the date of the Creation at 3760BC. Greek Orthodox theologians put Creation as far back as 5508BC. These suggestions are also incorrect. Archbishop James Usher (1580-1656) published Annales Veteris et Novi Testamenti in 1654, which suggested that the Heaven and the Earth were created in 4004BC. One of his aides took the calculation further, and was able to announce triumphantly that the Earth was created on Sunday the 21st of October, 4004BC, at exactly 9.00 a.m., because God liked to get work done early in the morning while he was feeling fresh. This too was incorrect. By almost a quarter of an hour. The whole business with the fossilized dinosaur skeletons was a joke the paleontologists haven't seen yet.

And when he looked over, his dad was dead and glowing on top of the bed. Glare from a street lamp had snuck in through the curtain and had lit up the old boy like some medieval saint.

Trickster foxes appear in old stories gathered from countries and cultures all over the world -- including Aesop's Fables from ancient Greece, the "Reynard" stories of medieval Europe, the "Giovannuzza" tales of Italy, the "Brer Fox" lore of the American South, and stories from diverse Native American traditions.

Try as we will to take the “cure” of ineffectuality; to meditate on the Taoist fathers’ doctrine of submission, of withdrawal, of a sovereign absence; to follow, like them, the course of consciousness once it ceases to be at grips with the world and weds the form of things as water does, their favorite element—we shall never succeed. They scorn both our curiosity and our thirst for suffering; in which they differ from the mystics, and especially from the medieval ones, so apt to recommend the virtues of the hair shirt, the scourge, insomnia, inanition, and lament. “A life of intensity is contrary to the Tao,” teaches Lao Tse, a normal man if ever there was one. But the Christian virus torments us: heirs of the flagellants, it is by refining our excruciations that we become conscious of ourselves. Is religion declining? We perpetuate its extravagances, as we perpetuate the macerations and the cell-shrieks of old, our will to suffer equaling that of the monasteries in their heyday. If the Church no longer enjoys a monopoly on hell, it has nonetheless riveted us to a chain of sighs, to the cult of the ordeal, of blasted joys and jubilant despair. The mind, as well as the body, pays for “a life of intensity.” Masters in the art of thinking against oneself, Nietzsche, Baudelaire, and Dostoevsky have taught us to side with our dangers, to broaden the sphere of our diseases, to acquire existence by division from our being. And what for the great Chinaman was a symbol of failure, a proof of imperfection, constitutes for us the sole mode of possessing, of making contact with ourselves.

For I am inclined to believe that my beloved Arthur of the future is sitting at this very moment among his learned freinds, in the Combination Room of the College of Life, and that they are thinking away in there for all they are worth, about the best means to help our curious species: and I for one hope that some day, when not only England but the World has need of them, and when it is ready to listen to reason, if it ever is, they will issue forth from their rath in joy and power: and then perhaps, they will give us happiness in the world once more and chivalry, and the old medieval blessing of certain simple people - who tried, at any rate, in their own small way, to still the ancient brutal dream of Attila the Hun.

This is a smashing place, isn't it? But I must say it scares me a bit. Do you suppose one dares to ask for tea?' 'I expect so, though heaven knows how. Perhaps you blow a peal on a slughorn, or beat on your shield with your sword -- or, I'll tell you what, if you look around you'll find a long embroidered tassel, and if you pull it you'll hear a bell clanging hollowly in some dark corridor a million miles away, and then some bent old servitor will come shuffling in--' 'There's a telephone by the bed,' said Timothy. 'Good heavens, so there is. How disappointing.

Sir Wystan,” Ryla stated. “You have come. Is the danger quite near?” “Not yet, little one, but it is always wise to be several steps ahead of it,” the old knight said gently.

It was time to make my move. Like the old saying goes. Carp Diem. Seize the fish

I never was the type of noblewoman to stay by the hearth while the men rode into battle anyway. As my father always used to say with the shake of his head, the blood of the Old Tribes runs strong in me.

Humanity does not pass through phases as a train passes though stations: being alive, it has the privilege of always moving yet never leaving anything behind. Whatever we have been, in some sort we still are. Neither the form nor the sentiment of this old poetry has passed away without leaving indelible traces on our minds.

science is the belief system that is hundreds of years old. And, like the medieval system before it, science is starting not to fit the world any more. Science has attained so much power that its practical limits begin to be apparent. Largely through science, billions of us live in one small world, densely packed and intercommunicating. But science cannot help us decide what to do with that world, or how to live. Science can make a nuclear reactor, but it cannot tell us not to build it. Science can make pesticide, but cannot tell us not to use it. And our world starts to seem polluted in fundamental ways—air, and water, and land—because of ungovernable science.

We’ve got nothing to do with right-wing, left-wing or any other half-assed political category. If you work within the system, you come to one of the either/or choices that were implicit in the system from the beginning. You’re talking like a medieval serf, asking the first agnostic whether he worships God or the Devil. We’re outside the system’s categories. You’ll never get the hang of our game if you keep thinking in flat-earth imagery of right and left, good and evil, up and down. If you need a group label for us, we’re political non-Euclideans. But even that’s not true. Sink me, nobody of this tub agrees with anybody else about anything, except maybe what the fellow with the horns told the old man in the clouds: Non serviam.

There are, I know, those who prefer not to go beyond the impression, however accidental, which an old work makes on a mind that brings to it a purely modern sensibility and modern conceptions; just as there are travellers who carry their resolute Englishry with them all over the Continent, mix only with other English tourists, enjoy all they see for its ‘quaintness’, and have no wish to realise what those ways of life, those churches, those vineyards, mean to the natives. They have their reward. I have no quarrel with people who approach the past in that spirit. I hope they will pick none with me. But I was writing for the other sort. C.

To look up at the towering medieval universe is much more like looking at a great building. The ‘space’ of modern astronomy may arouse terror, or bewilderment or vague reverie; the spheres of the old present us with an object in which the mind can rest, overwhelming in its greatness but satisfying in its harmony. That is the sense in which our universe is romantic, and theirs was classical.

this attempt to control … We are talking about Western attitudes that are five hundred years old. They began at the time when Florence, Italy, was the most important city in the world. The basic idea of science—that there was a new way to look at reality, that it was objective, that it did not depend on your beliefs or your nationality, that it was rational—that idea was fresh and exciting back then. It offered promise and hope for the future, and it swept away the old medieval system, which was hundreds of years old. The medieval world of feudal politics and religious dogma and hateful superstitions fell before science.

I wish we could sit together around the fire and tell one another the story of WOMAN, recounting the ceremonies of reverence for our deity and us in Her Image. I wish we could collectively hear the seasoned voices of our aunties, our grand-mothers and their grand-mothers through them, telling the age-old story of the love of woman, the love of life, the love our connection to the great mother Earth, from whence we come and into whose loving womb we will return when this journey is over, to be reborn again.

All this attempt to control... We are talking about Western attitudes that are five hundred years old... The basic idea of science - that there was a new way to look at reality, that it was objective, that it did not depend on your beliefs or your nationality, that it was rational - that idea was fresh and exciting back then. It offered promise and hope for the future, and it swept away the old medieval system, which was hundreds of years old. The medieval world of feudal politics and religious dogma and hateful superstitions fell before science. But, in truth, this was because the medieval world didn't really work any more. It didn't work economically, it didn't work intellectually, and it didn't fit the new world that was emerging... But now... science is the belief system that is hundreds of years old. And, like the medieval system before it, science is starting to not fit the world any more. Science has attained so much power that its practical limits begin to be apparent. Largely through science, billions of us live in one small world, densely packed and intercommunicating. But science cannot help us decide what to do with that world, or how to live. Science can make a nuclear reactor, but it can not tell us not to build it. Science can make pesticide, but cannot tell us not to use it. And our world starts to seem polluted in fundamental ways - air, and water, and land - because of ungovernable science... At the same time, the great intellectual justification of science has vanished. Ever since Newton and Descartes, science has explicitly offered us the vision of total control. Science has claimed the power to eventually control everything, through its understanding of natural laws. But in the twentieth century, that claim has been shattered beyond repair. First, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle set limits on what we could know about the subatomic world. Oh well, we say. None of us lives in a subatomic world. It doesn't make any practical difference as we go through our lives. Then Godel's theorem set similar limits to mathematics, the formal language of science. Mathematicians used to think that their language had some inherent trueness that derived from the laws of logic. Now we know what we call 'reason' is just an arbitrary game. It's not special, in the way we thought it was. And now chaos theory proves that unpredictability is built into our daily lives. It is as mundane as the rain storms we cannot predict. And so the grand vision of science, hundreds of years old - the dream of total control - has died, in our century. And with it much of the justification, the rationale for science to do what it does. And for us to listen to it. Science has always said that it may not know everything now but it will know, eventually. But now we see that isn't true. It is an idle boast. As foolish, and misguided, as the child who jumps off a building because he believes he can fly... We are witnessing the end of the scientific era. Science, like other outmoded systems, is destroying itself. As it gains in power, it proves itself incapable of handling the power. Because things are going very fast now... it will be in everyone's hands. It will be in kits for backyard gardeners. Experiments for schoolchildren. Cheap labs for terrorists and dictators. And that will force everyone to ask the same question - What should I do with my power? - which is the very question science says it cannot answer.

Deprived of his trade unions, collective bargaining and the right to strike, the German worker in the Third Reich became an industrial serf, bound to his master, the employer, much as medieval peasants had been bound to the lord of the manor. The so-called Labor Front, which in theory replaced the old trade unions, did not represent the worker.

…like the horse in the old ballads, which Romanticism found in the medieval castle and left in the streets of our own century. The Romanticists rode the poor best until he was so nearly dead that he finally lay down in the gutter, where the realists found him, his flesh eaten away by sores and worms, and, out of pity, carried him away to their books.

She had thought Raymond handsome. But the Raven was something beyond handsome. Beyond gallant manners and teasing glances. He was like the old, old stories, like the unknown man who waited on a darkened hill, the mist around him, hand outstretched ... In the stories, if a woman went to him... she did not return. But she wanted to go ... She wanted.

Baseball’s oh so simple. You tag a man, he’s out. How different from being it. What spectral genius in the term, that curious part of childhood that sees through the rhymes and nonsense words, past the hidings and seekings and pretendings to something old and dank, some medieval awe, he thought, or earlier, even, that crawls beneath the midnight skin.

Do you think that cruelty is the privilege of kings?The old servant wasn't surprised. “I think it is the main trouble of all kings, My Lady.

Where do you think the term ‘count’ came from, anyway?” “Earth, I thought. A pre-atomic—late Roman, actually—term for a nobleman who ran a county. Or maybe the district was named after the rank.” “On Barrayar, it is in fact a contraction of the term ‘accountant.’ The first ’counts were Varadar Tau’s—an amazing bandit, you should read up on him sometime—Varadar Tau’s tax collectors.” “All this time I thought it was a military rank! Aping medieval history.” “Oh, the military part came immediately thereafter, the first time the old goons tried to shake down somebody who didn’t want to contribute. The rank acquired more glamour later.

Atticus adjusted his glasses as he peered down at the blanket. “Hey, is that the book Nellie told us about?” Jake’s eyes flicked to Olivia’s book. “You’ve got it outside in the sun? Are you out of your minds?” Amy crossed her arms. “We’re being careful.” “It’s not about careful, this is a five-hundred-year-old manuscript! You should be wearing gloves—Atticus brought some—and keeping it out of the sunlight.” “It didn’t take you long to start barking orders!” Any exclaimed, her face flushing. “But then you always know best, don’t you?” “Somebody has to be mature in this situation,” Jake said, his gaze flashing at Ian, who was now intently trying to brush cookie crumbs off his pants. “True. In that case, we’d rather consult your little brother,” Ian said with a smirk. “Medieval manuscripts are his field, am I right?” “Technically, it’s early Renaissance,” Jake said. “Thanks for the correction, my good man. Amy is right—you do know best.” Ian slipped his arm around Amy. “She’s so perceptive. One of the many things I adore about her.” “It’s getting chilly. Why don’t we go inside?” Amy suggested brightly as she tried to step out of the circle of Ian’s arm. Ian took the opportunity to rub her shoulder. “You do feel rather cold,” he said. “Let’s sit by the fire. Jake, since you’re so interested in proper handling, why don’t you take the book?” Jake snatched up the book and furiously stomped off toward the house. “You forgot to wear gloves!” Ian called after him. Amy pushed him away. “Really, Ian.” “What a touchy guy,” Ian said. “Frankly, I don’t know what you see in him.” He winced as the kitchen door slammed, then glanced at Amy’s red face. “Hmmm. It might be a good time for me to take a walk.

Rooks have clustered on either side of the long road. It is as if they line a grand parade route for our passage. Their black feathers are stark as soot against the white road and the snow. They stab at the ground with their strange bare bills and gray unfeathered faces. The birds are like rough-edged black stones on a string around this stripped cold neck of road. The old books tell us rooks bring the virtuous dead to heaven’s gate.

Airplane Dream #13' told the story, more or less, of a dream Rosa had had about the end of the world. There were no human beings left but her, and she had found herself flying in a pink seaplane to an island inhabited by sentient lemurs. There seemed to be a lot more to it -- there was a kind of graphic "sound track" constructed around images relating to Peter Tchaikovsky and his works, and of course abundant food imagery -- but this was, as far as Joe could tell, the gist. The story was told entirely through collage, with pictures clipped from magazines and books. There were pictures from anatomy texts, an exploded musculature of the human leg, a pictorial explanation of peristalsis. She had found an old history of India, and many of the lemurs of her dream-apocalypse had the heads and calm, horizontal gazes of Hindu princes and goddesses. A seafood cookbook, rich with color photographs of boiled crustacea and poached whole fish with jellied stares, had been throughly mined. Sometimes she inscribed text across the pictures, none of which made a good deal of sense to him; a few pages consisted almost entirely of her brambly writing, illuminated, as it were, with collage. There were some penciled-in cartoonish marginalia like the creatures found loitering at the edges of pages in medieval books.

The notion that such a charm could also ward off evil comes from the separate medieval belief that rabbits, whose young are born with their eyes open, had the power of second sight, so could warn people if evil spirits approached.

Wouldn't it be nice to return to some of the old theories? Soul and body? The four humours?' 'Oh, they never worked.' 'Of course they did. Everything works in its own period. Don't you think that people were cured by medieval doctors, soaking up black melancholy bile with white salpetre? We could no more use their remedies than they could use ours, but they did work once. That's what you have to remember. Of course some people say that they might work again.

I wouldn’t say so. I’ve told people I’m a medieval historian when asked what I do. It freezes conversation. If one tells them one’s a poet, one gets these odd looks which seem to say, “Well, what’s he living off?” In the old days a man was proud to have in his passport, Occupation: Gentleman. Lord Antrim’s passport simply said, Occupation: Peer—which I felt was correct. I’ve had a lucky life. I had a happy home, and my parents provided me with a good education. And my father was both a physician and a scholar, so I never got the idea that art and science were opposing cultures—both were entertained equally in my home. I cannot complain. I’ve never had to do anything I really disliked. Certainly I’ve had to do various jobs I would not have taken on if I’d had the money; but I’ve always considered myself a worker, not a laborer. So many people have jobs they don’t like at all. I haven’t, and I’m grateful for that.

The Russian Revolution is a radical change in history. The abolition of private property has created a new world. You may like it or detest it, but it’s new. Hitler’s socialism was a sham to get a mob of gangsters into power. He’s frozen the German economy just as it was, smashed the labor unions, lengthened the working hours, cut the pay, and kept all the old rich crowd on top, the Krupps and Thyssens, the men who gave him the money to run for office. The big Nazis live like barons, like sultans. The concentration camps are for anybody who still wants the socialist part of National Socialism." [...] "I’m sorry. I’m impressed with Hitler’s ability to use socialist prattle when necessary, and then discard it. He uses doctrines as he uses money, to get things done. They’re expendable. He uses racism because that’s the pure distillate of German romantic egotism, just as Lenin used utopian Marxism because it appealed to Russia’s messianic streak. Hitler means to hammer out a united Europe.... He understands them, and he may just succeed. A unified Europe must come. The medieval jigsaw of nations is obsolete. The balance of power is dangerous foolishness in the industrial age. It must all be thrown out. Somebody has to be ruthless enough to do it, since the peoples with their ancient hatreds will never do it themselves. It’s only Napoleon’s original vision, but he was a century ahead of his time.

What finally helped was an image from a medieval monk, Brother Lawrence, who saw all of us as trees in winter, with little to give, stripped of leaves and color and growth, whom God loves unconditionally anyway. My priest friend Margaret, who works with the aged and who shared this image with me, wanted me to see that even though these old people are no longer useful in any traditional meaning of the word, they are there to be loved unconditionally, like trees in the winter. When

books that Uncle bought in Odessa or acquired in Heidelberg, books that he discovered in Lausanne or found in Berlin or Warsaw, books he ordered from America and books the like of which exist nowhere but in the Vatican Library, in Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, classical and modern Greek, Sanskrit, Latin, medieval Arabic, Russian, English, German, Spanish, Polish, French, Italian, and languages and dialects I had never even heard of, like Ugaritic and Slovene, Maltese and Old Church Slavonic.

But now,” he continued, “science is the belief system that is hundreds of years old. And, like the medieval system before it, science is starting not to fit the world any more. Science has attained so much power that its practical limits begin to be apparent. Largely through science, billions of us live in one small world, densely packed and intercommunicating. But science cannot help us decide what to do with that world, or how to live. Science can make a nuclear reactor, but it cannot tell us not to build it. Science can make pesticide, but cannot tell us not to use it. And our world starts to seem polluted in fundamental ways—air, and water, and land—because of ungovernable science.” He sighed. “This much is obvious to everyone.

Modernity has abandoned the household gods, not because we have rejected the idolatry as all Christians must, but because we have rejected the very idea of the household. We no longer worship Vesta, but have only turned away from her because our homes no longer have any hearths. Now we worship Motor Oil. If our rejection of the old idols were Christian repentance, God would bless it, but what is actually happening is that we are sinking below the level of the ancient pagans. But when we turn to Christ in truth, we find that He has ordained every day of marriage as a proclamation of his covenant with the church. A man who embraces what is expected of him will find a good wife and a welcoming hearth. He who loves his wife loves himself.

Naturally she knew of him. She had her own copies of these works in the White Acre library. She had read Boehme, though she never admired him. Jacob Boehme was a sixteenth-century cobbler from Germany who had mystical visions about plants. Many people considered him an early botanist. Alma’s mother, on the other hand, had considered him a cesspool of residual medieval superstition. So there was considerable conflict of opinion surrounding Jacob Boehme. The old cobbler had believed in something he called “the signature of all things”—namely, that God had hidden clues for humanity’s betterment inside the design of every flower, leaf, fruit, and tree on earth. All the natural world was a divine code, Boehme claimed, containing proof of our Creator’s love.

The fact that the scientist has succeeded where the magician failed has put such a wide contrast between them in popular thought that the real story of the birth of Science is misunderstood. You will even find people who write about the sixteenth century as if Magic were a medieval survival and Science the new thing that came in to sweep it away. Those who have studied the period know better. There was very little magic in the Middle Ages: the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are the high noon of magic. The serious magical endeavour and the serious scientific endeavour are twins: one was sickly and died, the other strong and throve. But they were twins. They were born of the same impulse. I allow that some (certainly not all) of the early scientists were actuated by a pure love of knowledge. But if we consider the temper of that age as a whole we can discern the impulse of which I speak. There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the ‘wisdom’ of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique; and both, in the practice of this technique, are ready to do things hitherto regarded as disgusting and impious—such as digging up and mutilating the dead. If we compare the chief trumpeter of the new era (Bacon) with Marlowe's Faustus, the similarity is striking.

The novel’s merit, then—or its offence, depending where you stood—was not that it was authentic, but that it was credible. The bad dream turned out to be one that a lot of people in the world were sharing, since it asked the same old question that we are asking ourselves fifty years later: How far can we go in the rightful defence of our Western values without abandoning them along the way? My fictional chief of the British Service—I called him Control—had no doubt of the answer: “I mean, you can’t be less ruthless than the opposition simply because your government’s policy is benevolent, can you now?” Today, the same man, with better teeth and hair and a much smarter suit, can be heard explaining away the catastrophic illegal war in Iraq, or justifying medieval torture techniques as the preferred means of interrogation in the twenty-first century, or defending the inalienable right of closet psychopaths to bear semi-automatic weapons, and the use of unmanned drones as a risk-free method of assassinating one’s perceived enemies and anybody who has the bad luck to be standing near them. Or, as a loyal servant of his corporation, assuring us that smoking is harmless to the health of the Third World, and great banks are there to serve the public. What have I learned over the last fifty years? Come to think of it, not much. Just that the morals of the secret world are very like our own.

A souvenir meant for nostalgia, Wandering in the old world of catholic conscience, So petite but a requiem to promiscuous melancholy, The first cherries of spring reminds me of her lips, The peaches of autumn are her cheeks, She is the love that dwells on the long forgotten roads…

During periods of root expansion things have always looked as confused and topsy-turvy and purposeless as they do now. The whole Renaissance is supposed to have resulted from the topsy-turvy feeling caused by Columbus’ discovery of a new world. It just shook people up. The topsy-turviness of that time is recorded everywhere. There was nothing in the flat-earth views of the Old and New Testaments that predicted it. Yet people couldn’t deny it. The only way they could assimilate it was to abandon the entire medieval outlook and enter into a new expansion of reason.

What we would think of as a beef animal had the double purpose of being a working or draught animal that could pull heavy loads. There is an old adage, "A year to grow, two years to plough and a year to fatten." The beef medieval people would have eaten would have been a maturer, denser meat than we are used to today. I have always longed to try it. The muscle acquired from a working ox would have broken down over the fattening year and provided wonderful fat covering and marbling. Given the amount of brewing that took place, the odds are that the animals would have been fed a little drained mash from time to time. Kobe beef, that excessively expensive Japanese beef, was originally obtained from ex-plough animals whose muscles were broken down by mash from sake production and by massage. I'd like to think our beef might have had a not dissimilar flavour.

The old dream that has tempted man from the beginning, the medieval legend of the man who sells his soul for an inexhaustible purse, which recurs with an enticing insistence through all the changes of civilization, is perhaps in process of being realized, and not a for a single man but all.

News, like men, traveled slowly; intelligence of Barbarossa’s death in Cilicia took four months to reach Germany.16 Medieval man could eat his breakfast without being disturbed by the industriously collected calamities of the world; or those that came to his ken were fortunately too old for remedy.

When Toad found himself immured in a dank and noisome dungeon, and knew that all the grim darkness of a medieval fortress lay between him and the outer world of sunshine and well-metalled high roads where he had lately been so happy, disporting himself as if he had bought up every road in England, he flung himself at full length on the floor, and shed bitter tears, and abandoned himself to dark despair. 'This is the end of everything' (he said), 'at least it is the end of the career of Toad, which is the same thing; the popular and handsome Toad, the rich and hospitable Toad, the Toad so free and careless and debonair! How can I hope to be ever set at large again' (he said), 'who have been imprisoned so justly for stealing so handsome a motor-car in such an audacious manner, and for such lurid and imaginative cheek, bestowed upon such a number of fat, red-faced policemen!' (Here his sobs choked him.) 'Stupid animal that I was' (he said), 'now I must languish in this dungeon, till people who were proud to say they knew me, have forgotten the very name of Toad! O wise old Badger!' (he said), 'O clever, intelligent Rat and sensible Mole! What sound judgments, what a knowledge of men and matters you possess! O unhappy and forsaken Toad!' With lamentations such as these he passed his days and nights for several weeks, refusing his meals or intermediate light refreshments, though the grim and ancient gaoler, knowing that Toad's pockets were well lined, frequently pointed out that many comforts, and indeed luxuries, could by arrangement be sent in—at a price—from outside.

Tis not fair, you know. I have no life left, not even enough to get up, and you are footslogging around this chamber as if you have fire under your…” She paused. “My what?” He was grinning at her. “Your big feet.” He laughed loud and heartily and tossed the towel aside. “You know what the old wives say about big feet.

The Silmarils are Eorclanstánas (also treated as an Old English noun with plural Silmarillas). There are several different forms of this Old English word: eorclan-, eorcnan-, and eorcan- from which is derived the 'Arkenstone' of the Lonely Mountain. The first element may be related to Gothic airkns, 'holy'. With middangeard line 37 cf. my father's note in Guide to the Names in The Lord of the Rings, in A Tolkien Compass, p. 189: 'The sense is ''the inhabited lands of (Elves and) Men'', envisaged as lying between the Western Sea and that of the Far East (only known in the West by rumour). Middle-Earth is a modern alteration of medieval middel-erde from Old English middan-geard'.

When you consider the superstitions and the imaginings of the old Cornish country-folk up to my grandmother's day, how their lives were swaddled in them from the cradle to the grave, their daily actions in large part determined by them - so many things you would not think of doing, like starting a journey on a Friday, or looking at the moon through a pane of glass, or failing to wear something new on Whitsunday - their minds haunted by ghosts and fears, you have a fair idea of what the minds of these people in the sixteenth century were like. It was a life full of shadows that frightened them and dangers that might come home to them; how much more so in those days when their fears had the sanction, and even the corroboration, of the elect and the intelligent: when a uniform religion existed to enforce its lessons and draw the moral. However, no doubt it filled up life for them, made it more interesting and exciting, more mysterious and incalculable; it added a dimension to it, where the modern uneducated, rid of their fears and ghosts, are apt to find life empty and void of meaning.

[...] The idea of honor in battle has been passed down for generations. It went from Greece to Rome, to the medieval world and the Crusades. It was beloved of Sir Philip Sidney, Essex and Southampton [...]. In many ways, the British Empire was founded on it [...] The idea came to a halt in the First World War [...] The poets, led by Wilfred Owen, told the truth about it "[...] The old lie : 'Dulce el decorum est pro patria mori'. [...]Henry IV Part I is a play with much "honor". Honor is its central theme. So let's examine Henry IV Part I for a moment, to understand the ingredients of "honor". [...] You will notice there are not many women in these plays [about honor]-and when they appear, they are usually whores or faifthful wives. Honor is not a woman's story[...] 'What is honour? A word', (...) a mere scutcheon" [says] Falstaff's iconoclasm and truthful vision about honor. {...]There are several things we can see in all this. The first is that war is a man´s game, it is intolerable, and the only way you can get people to do it is to make the alternative seem a hundred times worse [...] Therefore, valor must be glorified, if not deified. [...]

It's this accursed science.... It's the very Devil. The medieval priests and persecutors were right and the Moderns are all wrong. You tamper with it--and it offers you gifts. And directly you take them it knocks you to pieces in some unexpected way. Old passions and new weapons--now it upsets your religion, now it upsets your social ideas, now it whirls you off to desolation and misery!

Barcelona has always been more a city of capital and labor than of nobility and commoners; its democratic roots are old and run very deep. Its medieval charter of citizens’ rights, the Usatges, grew from a nucleus which antedated the Magna Carta by more than a hundred years. Its government, the Consell de Cent (Council of One Hundred), had been the oldest protodemocratic political body in Spain.

The emphasis usually falls on the past splendour rather than on the subsequent decline. Medieval and nineteenth-century man agreed that their present was no very admirable age; not to be compared (said one) with the glory that was, not to be compared (said the other) with the glory that is still to come. The odd thing is that the first view seems to have bred on the whole a more cheerful temper. Historically as well as cosmically, medieval man stood at the foot of a stairway; looking up, he felt delight. The backward, like the upward, glance exhilarated him with a majestic spectacle, and humility was rewarded with the pleasures of admiration. And, thanks to his deficiency in the sense of period, that packed and gorgeous past was far more immediate to him than the dark and bestial past could ever be to a Lecky or a Wells. It differed from the present only by being better. Hector was like any other knight, only braver. The saints looked down on one’s spiritual life, the kings, sages, and warriors on one’s secular life, the great lovers of old on one’s own amours, to foster, encourage, and instruct. There were friends, ancestors, patrons in every age. One had one’s place, however modest, in a great succession; one need be neither proud nor lonely. I

Once, during a concert of cathedral organ music, as I sat getting gooseflesh amid that tsunami of sound, I was struck with a thought: for a medieval peasant, this must have been the loudest human-made sound they ever experienced, awe-inspiring in now-unimaginable ways. No wonder they signed up for the religion being proffered. And now we are constantly pummeled with sounds that dwarf quaint organs. Once, hunter-gatherers might chance upon honey from a beehive and thus briefly satisfy a hardwired food craving. And now we have hundreds of carefully designed commercial foods that supply a burst of sensation unmatched by some lowly natural food. Once, we had lives that, amid considerable privation, also offered numerous subtle, hard-won pleasures. And now we have drugs that cause spasms of pleasure and dopamine release a thousandfold higher than anything stimulated in our old drug-free world.

In the nights, which he could create by turning the handle of a door, he lay for hours in contemplation of the skylight. The Earth’s disk was nowhere to be seen, the stars, thick as daisies on an uncut lawn, reigned perpetually with no cloud, no moon, no sunrise, to dispute their sway. There were planets of unbelievable majesty, and constellations undreamed of: there were celestial sapphires, rubies, emeralds and pin-pricks of burning gold. far out on the left of the picture hung a comet, tiny and remote: and between all and behind all, far more emphatic and palpable than it showed on Earth, the undimensioned, enigmatic blackness. The lights trembled: they seemed to grow brighter as he looked. Stretched naked on his bed, a second Dana, he found it night by night more difficult to disbelieve in old astrology: almost he felt, wholly he imagined, 'sweet influence' pouring or even stabbing into his surrendered body.

I had been concerned with the problem of Action, the oldest concern of political theory, and what had always troubled me about it was that the very term I adopted for my reflections on the matter, namely, vita activa, was coined by men who were devoted to the contemplative way of life and who looked upon all kinds of being alive from that perspective. Seen from that perspective, the active way of life is “laborious,” the contemplative way is sheer quietness; the active one goes on in public, the contemplative one in the “desert”; the active one is devoted to “the necessity of one’s neighbor,” the contemplative one to the “vision of God.” (Duae sunt vitae, activa et contemplativa. Activa est in labore, contemplativa in requie. Activa in publico, contemplativa in deserto. Activa in necessitate proximi, contemplativa in visione Dei.) I have quoted from a medieval author4 of the twelfth century, almost at random, because the notion that contemplation is the highest state of the mind is as old as Western philosophy. The thinking activity—according to Plato, the soundless dialogue we carry on with ourselves—serves only to open the eyes of the mind, and even the Aristotelian nous is an organ for seeing and beholding the truth. In other words, thinking aims at and ends in contemplation, and contemplation is not an activity but a passivity; it is the point where mental activity comes to rest.

Dogmatic theology is, by its very nature, unchangeable. The same can be said in regard to the spirit of the law. Law was and is to protect the past and present status of society and, by its very essence, must be very conservative, if not reactionary. Theology and law are both of them static by their nature. Philosophy, law and ethics, to be effective in a dynamic world must be dynamic; they must be made vital enough to keep pace with the progress of life and science. In recent civilization ethics, because controlled by theology and law, which are static, could not duly influence the dynamic, revolutionary progress of technic and the steadily changing conditions of life; and so we witness a tremendous downfall of morals in politics and business. Life progresses faster than our ideas, and so medieval ideas, methods and judgments are constantly applied to the conditions and problems of modern life. This discrepancy between facts and ideas is greatly responsible for the dividing of modern society into different warring classes, which do not understand each other. Medieval legalism and medieval morals- the basis of the old social structure-being by their nature conservative, reactionary, opposed to change, and thus becoming more and more unable to support the mighty social burden of the modern world, must be adjudged responsible in a large measure for the circumstances which made the World War inevitable.

About an hour’s drive from Istanbul’s city centre, on the shores of the Black Sea, sat an old Greek fishing village called Kilyos, famous for its powdery beaches, small hotels, sharp cliffs, and a medieval fortress that had not once succeeded in repelling an invading army. Over the centuries, many had come and many had gone, leaving their songs, prayers and curses behind: the Byzantines, the Crusaders, the Genoese, the corsairs, the Ottomans, the Don Cossacks, and for a brief period, the Russians.

The largest wooden old town in the Nordic countries, Vanha Rauma deserves its Unesco World Heritage status. Its 600 houses might be museum pieces, but they also form a living centre: residents tend their flower boxes and chat to neighbours, while visitors meander in and out of the low-key cafes, shops, museums and artisans’ workshops. Rauman giäl, an old sailors’ lingo that mixes up a host of languages, is still spoken here, and the town’s medieval lace-making heritage is celebrated during Pitsiviikko (Rauma Lace Week).

The medieval conception of reality is an old idea, one that predates Christianity. In his final book The Discarded Image, C. S. Lewis, who was a professional medievalist, explained that Plato believed that two things could relate to each other only through a third thing. In what Lewis called the medieval “Model,” everything that existed was related to every other thing that existed, through their shared relationship to God. Our relationship to the world is mediated through God, and our relationship to God is mediated through the world.

Dante is certainly not, as one sometimes hears said, vindictive, spiteful, sadistic. He is not merely engaged in score settling with old adversaries by assigning them to hell. The punishments in hell are horribly cruel, but the world in which he lived was horribly cruel. He had been sentenced to death both by burning and decapitation. Such sentences were almost routine. We think of the modern world as more civilised than his, but who could seriously argue that this is so, bearing in mind events on the world stage in the twentieth century?

Whenever technological change has divorced the old forms from the new moving forces of the economy, moral standards shift, and people begin to treat those in command of the old institutions with growing disdain. This widespread revulsion often comes into evidence well before people develop a new coherent ideology of change. So it was in the late fifteenth century, when the medieval Church was the predominant institution of feudalism. Notwithstanding popular belief in “the sacredness of the sacerdotal office,” both the higher and lower ranks of clergy were held in the utmost contempt—not unlike the popular attitude toward politicians and bureaucrats today.5

Sully's, on South Prospect, was the quintessential biker-bar, complete with hefty, leather-clad Harley worshippers, and stringy-haired heroin-addicted women who made the rounds among the bikers. Its décor was decidedly Medieval Garage Sale, with a dose of Americana thrown in. An old motorcycle carcass dangled from the vaulted section of the beamed ceiling, and the wood plank floors were littered with butts, scarred by bottle caps and splattered with homogenized bodily fluids. The only light to be had was from neon, dying sconces, and lit cigarettes. Various medieval swords perched on each wall, reminiscent of the times of Beowulf and Fire Dragons on the Barrow.

They listened to the last enchantments of the Middle Ages, heard the horns of Elfland, and made designs on the culture that our own age is only beginning fully to appreciate. They were philologists and philomyths: lovers of logos (the ordering power of words) and mythos (the regenerative power of story), with a nostalgia for things medieval and archaic and a distrust of technological innovation that never decayed into the merely antiquarian. Out of the texts they studied and the tales they read, they forged new ways to convey old themes—sin and salvation, despair and hope, friendship and loss, fate and free will—in a time of war, environmental degradation, and social change.

The 'most precious object of the Western world' is now a national monument of Ireland at the very highest level. It is probably the most famous and perhaps the most emotively charged medieval book of any kind. It is the iconic symbol of Irish culture. It is included in the Memory of the World Register compiled by UNESCO. A design echoing the Book of Kells was used on the former penny coin of Ireland (1971 to 2000) and on a commemorative twenty-euro piece in 2012. One of its initials was shown on the reverse of the old Irish five-pound banknote. It has been illustrated on the country's postage stamps. Probably every Irish bar in the world has some reflexion of its script or decoration.

Noisy shuddering little commuter trains, debatable links: Shaw spent half a day joining one cross-country service to another; hard enough work just to arrive mid-afternoon on the brown edge of Wales. The town, with its undecodable medieval topography and commanding position above the River Severn, had done well out of sheep; then out of brewing; and finally out of coal. Now, like most of those old places, post-colonial, post-industrial and – in the sense that its past had now become its present – fully post-historical, it was curating a collection of original burgage plots, timber-framed heritage structures and quaintly squalid street names. It had been pleased with itself for 700 years.

All changed! Even the thing with the spades. All of a sudden the Negroes are out of the hip scene, except for a couple of pushers like Superspade and a couple of characters like Gaylord and Heavy. The explanation around Haight-Ashbury is that Negroes don’t take to LSD. The big thing with spades on the hip scene has always been the quality known as cool. And LSD freaking well blows that whole lead shield known as cool, like it brings you right out front, hang-ups and all. Also the spades don’t get much of a kick out of the nostalgia for the mud that all the white middle-class kids who are coming to Haight-Ashbury like, piling into pads and living freaking basic, you understand, on greasy mattresses on the floor that the filthiest spade walkup in Fillmore wouldn’t have, and slopping up soda pop and shit out of the same bottle, just passing it around from mouth to mouth, not being hung up on that old American plumbing & hygiene thing, you understand, even grokking the weird medieval vermin diseases that are flashing through every groin—crab lice! you know that thing, man, where you first look down at your lower belly and see these little scars, they look like, little scabs or something, tiny little mothers, and like you pick one, root it out, and it starts crawling! Oh shit! and then they’re all crawling and you start exploring your mons pubis and your balls and they’re alive. It’s like a jungle you never saw before,

Imagine a vast hall in Anglo-Saxon England, not long after the passing of King Arthur. It is the dead of winter and a fierce snowstorm rages outside, but a great fire fills the space within the hall with warmth and light. Now and then, a sparrow darts in for refuge from the weather. It appears as if from nowhere, flits about joyfully in the light, and then disappears again, and where it comes from and where it goes next in that stormy darkness, we do not know. Our lives are like that, suggests an old story in Bede’s medieval history of England. We spend our days in the familiar world of our five senses, but what lies beyond that, if anything, we have no idea. Those sparrows are hints of something more outside – a vast world,

Did you have a kid in your neighborhood who always hid so good, nobody could find him? We did. After a while we would give up on him and go off, leaving him to rot wherever he was. Sooner or later he would show up, all mad because we didn't keep looking for him. And we would get mad back because he wasn't playing the game the way it was supposed to be played. There's hiding and there's finding, we'd say. And he'd say it was hide-and-seek, not hide-and-give-UP, and we'd all yell about who made the rules and who cared about who, anyway, and how we wouldn't play with him anymore if he didn't get it straight and who needed him anyhow, and things like that. Hide-and-seek-and-yell. No matter what, though, the next time he would hide too good again. He's probably still hidden somewhere, for all I know. As I write this, the neighborhood game goes on, and there is a kid under a pile of leaves in the yard just under my window. He has been there a long time now, and everybody else is found and they are about to give up on him over at the base. I considered going out to the base and telling them where he is hiding. And I thought about setting the leaves on fire to drive him out. Finally, I just yelled, "GET FOUND, KID!" out the window. And scared him so bad he probably wet his pants and started crying and ran home to tell his mother. It's real hard to know how to be helpful sometimes. A man I know found out last year he had terminal cancer. He was a doctor. And knew about dying, and he didn't want to make his family and friends suffer through that with him. So he kept his secret. And died. Everybody said how brave he was to bear his suffering in silence and not tell everybody, and so on and so forth. But privately his family and friends said how angry they were that he didn't need them, didn't trust their strength. And it hurt that he didn't say good-bye. He hid too well. Getting found would have kept him in the game. Hide-and-seek, grown-up style. Wanting to hide. Needing to be sought. Confused about being found. "I don't want anyone to know." "What will people think?" "I don't want to bother anyone." Better than hide-and-seek, I like the game called Sardines. In Sardines the person who is It goes and hides, and everybody goes looking for him. When you find him, you get in with him and hide there with him. Pretty soon everybody is hiding together, all stacked in a small space like puppies in a pile. And pretty soon somebody giggles and somebody laughs and everybody gets found. Medieval theologians even described God in hide-and-seek terms, calling him Deus Absconditus. But me, I think old God is a Sardine player. And will be found the same way everybody gets found in Sardines - by the sound of laughter of those heaped together at the end. "Olly-olly-oxen-free." The kids out in the street are hollering the cry that says "Come on in, wherever you are. It's a new game." And so say I. To all those who have hid too good. Get found, kid! Olly-olly-oxen-free.

Innovation in China too fluctuated markedly with time. Until around A.D. 1450, China was technologically much more innovative and advanced than Europe, even more so than medieval Islam. The long list of Chinese inventions includes canal lock gates, cast iron, deep drilling, efficient animal harnesses, gunpowder, kites, magnetic compasses, movable type, paper, porcelain, printing (except for the Phaistos disk), sternpost rudders, and wheelbarrows. China then ceased to be innovative for reasons about which we shall speculate in the Epilogue. Conversely, we think of western Europe and its derived North American societies as leading the modern world in technological innovation, but technology was less advanced in western Europe than in any other “civilized” area of the Old World until the late Middle Ages.

The great self-limitation practiced by man for ten centuries yielded, between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, the whole flower of the so-called "Renaissance." The root, usually, does not resemble the fruit in appearance, but there is an undeniable connection between the root's strength and juiciness and the beauty and taste of the fruit. The Middle Ages, it seems, have nothing in common with the Renaissance and are opposite to it in every way; nonetheless, all the abundance and ebullience of human energies during the Renaissance were based not at all on the supposedly "renascent" classical world, nor on the imitated Plato and Virgil, nor on manuscripts torn from the basements of old monasteries, but precisely on those monasteries, on those stern Franciscians and cruel Dominicans, on Saints Bonaventure, Anselm of Canterbury, and Bernard of Clairvaux. The Middle Ages were a great repository of human energies: in the medieval man's asceticism, self-abnegation, and contempt for his own beauty, his own energies, and his own mind, these energies, this heart, and this mind were stored up until the right time. The Renaissance was the epoch of the discovery of this trove: the thin layer of soil covering it was suddenly thrown aside, and to the amazement of following centuries dazzling, incalculable treasures glittered there; yesterday's pauper and wretched beggar, who only knew how to stand on crossroads and bellow psalms in an inharmonious voice, suddenly started to bloom with poetry, strength, beauty, and intelligence. Whence came all this? From the ancient world, which had exhausted its vital powers? From moldy parchments? But did Plato really write his dialogues with the same keen enjoyment with which Marsilio Ficino annotated them? And did the Romans, when reading the Greeks, really experience the same emotions as Petrarch, when, for ignorance of Greek, he could only move his precious manuscripts from place to place, kiss them now and then, and gaze sadly at their incomprehensible text? All these manuscripts, in convenient and accurate editions, lie before us too: why don't they lead us to a "renascence" among us? Why didn't the Greeks bring about a "renascence" in Rome? And why didn't Greco-Roman literature produce anything similar to the Italian Renaissance in Gaul and Africa from the second to the fourth century? The secret of the Renaissance of the fourteenth-fifteenth centuries does not lie in ancient literature: this literature was only the spade that threw the soil off the treasures buried underneath; the secret lies in the treasures themselves; in the fact that between the fourth and fourteenth centuries, under the influence of the strict ascetic ideal of mortifying the flesh and restraining the impulses of his spirit, man only stored up his energies and expended nothing. During this great thousand-year silence his soul matured for The Divine Comedy; during this forced closing of eyes to the world - an interesting, albeit sinful world-Galileo was maturing, Copernicus, and the school of careful experimentation founded by Bacon; during the struggle with the Moors the talents of Velasquez and Murillo were forged; and in the prayers of the thousand years leading up to the sixteenth century the Madonna images of that century were drawn, images to which we are able to pray but which no one is able to imitate. ("On Symbolists And Decadents")

But there were ulama who refused to accept the closing of the “gates of ijtihad.” Throughout Islamic history, at times of great political crisis—especially during a period of foreign encroachment—a reformer (mujdadid) would often renew the faith so that it could meet the new conditions. These reforms usually followed a similar pattern. They were conservative, since they attempted to go back to basics rather than create an entirely new solution. But in this desire to return to the pristine Islam of the Quran and sunnah, the reformers were often iconoclastic in sweeping away later medieval developments that had come to be considered sacred. They were also suspicious of foreign influence, and alien accretions, which had corrupted what they saw as the purity of the faith. This type of reformer would become a feature of Muslim society. Many of the people who are called “Muslim fundamentalists” in our own day correspond exactly to the old pattern set by the mujdadids.

When, during and after the Reformation, the universities lost their status as so many autonomous parts of the universal church, they lost their independence correspondingly. In Protestant Europe, they came under the jurisdiction of the national churches and of the rapacious national monarchies; in Catholic Europe --although to a lesser extent--they came under the jurisdiction of the reinvigorated and consolidated Papacy, and of the sovereigns who, as in Spain and France, made royal influence over the church establishment within their realms a condition of their support for the Roman cause. The dissolution of medieval universalism meant that learning, like nearly everything else, was forced to submit to new or more rigid denominations. With the complete or partial secularization of society which followed upon the French Revolutionary era, in nearly every country except Britain, the universities were stripped of what remained of their old rights and became little better than state corporations.

Did you ever read about bubonic plague in medieval Europe?” I asked. She nodded. She reads a lot the way I do, reads all kinds of things. “A lot of the continent was depopulated,” she said. “Some survivors thought the world was coming to an end.” “Yes, but once they realized it wasn’t, they also realized there was a lot of vacant land available for the taking, and if they had a trade, they realized they could demand better pay for their work. A lot of things changed for the survivors.” “What’s your point?” “The changes.” I thought for a moment. “They were slow changes compared to anything that might happen here, but it took a plague to make some of the people realize that things could change.” “So?” “Things are changing now, too. Our adults haven’t been wiped out by a plague so they’re still anchored in the past, waiting for the good old days to come back. But things have changed a lot, and they’ll change more. Things are always changing. This is just one of the big jumps instead of the little step-by-step changes that are easier to take.

Technology depends on religion because every invention has many potential applications, and the engineers need some prophet to make the crucial choices and point towards the required destination. Thus in the nineteenth century engineers invented locomotives, radios and internal combustion engines. But as the twentieth century proved, you can use these very same tools to create fascist societies, communist dictatorships and liberal democracies. Without religious convictions, the locomotives cannot decide which way to go. On the other hand, technology often defines the scope and limits of our religious visions, like a waiter that demarcates our appetites by handing us a menu. New technologies kill old gods and give birth to new gods. That’s why agricultural deities were different from hunter-gatherer spirits, why factory hands fantasised about different paradises than peasants and why the revolutionary technologies of the twenty-first century are far more likely to spawn unprecedented religious movements than to revive medieval creeds. Islamic

If I wished to satirise the present political order I should borrow for it the name which Punch invented during the first German War: Govertisement. This is a portmanteau word and means “government by advertisement.” But my intention is not satiric; I am trying to be objective. The change is this. In all previous ages that I can think of the principal aim of rulers, except at rare and short intervals, was to keep their subjects quiet, to forestall or extinguish widespread excitement and persuade people to attend quietly to their several occupations. And on the whole their subjects agreed with them. They even prayed (in words that sound curiously old-fashioned) to be able to live “a peaceable life in all godliness and honesty” and “pass their time in rest and quietness.” But now the organisation of mass excitement seems to be almost the normal organ of political power. We live in an age of “appeal,” “drives,” and “campaigns.” Our rulers have become like schoolmasters and are always demanding “keenness.” And you notice that I am guilty of a slight archaism in calling them “rulers.” “Leaders” is the modern word. I have suggested elsewhere that this is a deeply significant change of vocabulary. Our demand upon them has changed no less than theirs on us. For of a ruler one asks justice, incorruption, diligence, perhaps clemency; of a leader, dash, initiative, and (I suppose) what people call “magnetism” or “personality.

Not only does it matter politically how we rank the vices, but freedom demands that as a matter of liberal policy we must learn to endure enormous differences in the relative importance that various individuals and groups attach to the vices. There is a vast gulf between the seven deadly sins, with their emphasis on pride and self-indulgence, and putting cruelty first. These choice are not casual or due merely to the variety of our purely personal dispositions and emotional inclinations. These different ranking orders are parts of very dissimilar systems of values. Some may be extremely old, for the structure of beliefs does not alter nearly as quickly as the more tangible conditions of life. In fact, they do not die at all; they just accumulate one on top of the other. Europe has always had a tradition of traditions, as our demographic and religious history makes amply clear. It is no use looking back to some imaginary classical or medieval utopia of moral and political unanimity, not to mention the horror of planning one for the future. Thinking about the vices has, indeed, the effect of showing precisely to what extent ours is a culture of many subcultures, of layer upon layer of ancient religious and class rituals, ethnic inheritance of sensibility and manners, and ideological residues whose original purpose has by now been utterly forgotten. With this in view, liberal democracy becomes more a recipe for survival than a project for the perfectibility of mankind.

When I was nineteen years old, I discovered a collection of books in the Harvard library written by Jacob Boehme. Do you know of him?" Naturally she knew of him. She had her own copies of these works in the White Acre library. She had read Boehme, though she never admired him. Jacob Boehme was a sixteenth-century cobbler from Germany who had mystical visions about plants. Many people considered him an early botanist. Alma's mother, on the other hand, had considered him a cesspool of residual medieval superstition. So there was considerable conflict of opinion surrounding Jacob Boehme. The old cobbler had believed in something he called "the signature of all things"- namely, that God had hidden clues for humanity's betterment inside the design of every flower, leaf, fruit, and tree on earth. All the natural world was a divine code, Boehme claimed, containing proof of our Creator's love. That is why so many medicinal plants resembled the diseases they were meant to cure, or the organs they were able to treat. Basil, with its liver-shaped leaves, is the obvious ministration for ailments of the liver. The celandine herb, which produces a yellow sap, can be used to treat the yellow discoloration brought on by jaundice. Walnuts, shaped like brains, are helpful for headaches. Coltsfoot, which grows near cold streams, can cure the coughs and chills brought on by immersion in ice water. 'Polygonum,' with its spattering of blood-red markings on the leaves, cures bleeding wounds of the flesh.

Dubrovnik, Croatia Dubrovnik’s old architecture, all wrapped within its ancient stone walls, have made this city a World Heritage Site. It’s an old sea port that sits above the Adriatic Sea. Its background, from medieval times was trade between the east and Europe and the city rivalled Venice for its reach and connections. Today, however, the principle economy is based on tourism. The old town is a warren of narrow, cobbled streets, sometimes steep, but pedestrianised which makes it easy to walk. However, be careful – signs do not always point to where they say they are going – many of them are old and the hotels, restaurants, bus stations have moved. The City Walls might look familiar to fans of Game of Thrones – many scenes were filmed here and there are Game of Thrones tours to visit the film’s settings. The area suffered a devastating earthquake in the 17th century, therefore much of the original architecture did not survive. The Sponza Palace, near the Bell Tower, is one of the few Gothic buildings left in the city. The Stradun is the main street in the Old Town – restaurants, shops and bars all pour out onto here. It’s lively, especially towards the end of the day. Don’t forget that the city’s location on the coast means that it also has beautiful beaches. Lapad Beach is two miles outside of town, and has a chilled atmosphere. Banje Beach is closer to the old town. It has an entrance fee and is livelier. One of the reasons Dubrovnok appeals to solo travellers is because it has a low crime rate. In addition, its cobbled streets and artistic shops all make browsing easy.

Sometimes life could be astonishingly efficient in dispensing mortifications. In the space of a minute, she would be exposed before three male visitors to be both freakishly tall and an abominably poor sculptor. What would come next? Perhaps her father would invite the men to count her freckles, one by one. They’d be here until moonrise. Suddenly, Bramwell was at her side. “This?” he asked, touching a finger to the model’s edge. She cringed, wishing she could deny it. “Yes, thank you.” As he retrieved the model from the shelf, she stole glances at him out of the corner of her eye. She had to admit, the Rycliff title suited him. Give the man a mace and a chain mail vest, and she could easily have mistaken him for a medieval warrior, squeezed through some rocky gap in the centuries to emerge in modern day. From the sheer size of him, large and solid all over, to that squared jaw, shadowed with a day’s or more growth of whiskers. He moved with more power than grace, and he wore his dark hair long, tied back at his nape with a bit of leather cord. And the way he’d looked at her just before that kiss-as though he would devour her, and she would enjoy it-was straight from the Dark Ages. As he presented the crumbling mess of sun-dried clay and pasted-on moss, Susanna fought the urge to blow dust off the thing. Evidently the maids couldn’t reach this shelf, either. “Isn’t it clever?” Her father took the model from Bramwell’s hands and held it up. “Susanna made this when she was fifteen years old.” “Fourteen,” she corrected, cursing herself a moment later. Because “fourteen” somehow made it better?

Will she survive it? I told his lordship she would. I didn’t want to give him an excuse not to help her. Methinks that if he suspected she was near death, he would turn her out.” “I don’t know. Methinks it depends on her will to live. If she doesn’t want life, she’ll die.” Haldana sighed. “I’ll stay with her and watch over her. Please, direct the girls to take over my duties.” “Yea. ‘Tis already done.” Ulric narrowed his eyes in heavy contemplation, drawing back the coverlet at the girl’s bruised throat. His frown deepened. It looked as if she’d been strangled. “M’lord has put her in my charge until she awakens. He wishes to speak to her then.” “Methinks that m’lord is more frightened of her being here because she is a woman and a woman of his class.” “Yea, methought it also. He didn’t think much of me saying she was a beauty.” In truth, Ulric only saw the line of the lady’s slender body outlined by the coverlet and the fullness of her lips, but he’d mainly called her beautiful just to aggravate his lordship. He let go of the coverlet, letting the old material fall once more to cover the noblewoman’s neck. He moved his fingers to stroke the wiry hairs of his mustache. “Wouldn’t it be nice if she was sent here to melt the curse from his lordship’s heart?” Haldana sighed, wistful. “Yea, even the curse from this castle. Then the Monster of Lakeshire would leave us be once and fer all.” “You are a romantic dreamer, dear girl.” Ulric kissed Haldana briefly on her forehead and turned to leave. “Let me know at once when she awakens.” “Yea, Ulric, I will.” Haldana let her girlish giggle echo in the chamber as he shut the door. From outside the chamber, he heard her say, “Poor child. You don’t know what you have gotten yerself into coming here.

Once, during a concert of cathedral organ music, as I sat getting gooseflesh amid that tsunami of sound, I was struck with a thought: for a medieval peasant, this must have been the loudest human-made sound they ever experienced, awe-inspiring in now-unimaginable ways. No wonder they signed up for the religion being proffered. And now we are constantly pummeled with sounds that dwarf quaint organs. Once, hunter-gatherers might chance upon honey from a beehive and thus briefly satisfy a hardwired food craving. And now we have hundreds of carefully designed commercial foods that supply a burst of sensation unmatched by some lowly natural food. Once, we had lives that, amid considerable privation, also offered numerous subtle, hard-won pleasures. And now we have drugs that cause spasms of pleasure and dopamine release a thousandfold higher than anything stimulated in our old drug-free world. An emptiness comes from this combination of over-the-top nonnatural sources of reward and the inevitability of habituation; this is because unnaturally strong explosions of synthetic experience and sensation and pleasure evoke unnaturally strong degrees of habituation.90 This has two consequences. First, soon we barely notice the fleeting whispers of pleasure caused by leaves in autumn, or by the lingering glance of the right person, or by the promise of reward following a difficult, worthy task. And the other consequence is that we eventually habituate to even those artificial deluges of intensity. If we were designed by engineers, as we consumed more, we’d desire less. But our frequent human tragedy is that the more we consume, the hungrier we get. More and faster and stronger. What was an unexpected pleasure yesterday is what we feel entitled to today, and what won’t be enough tomorrow.

Wait a second,” said Ash. “How is there a ‘moon in springtime before the start of the new year’? I think it’s a riddle. It makes no sense.” “Yes, it does,” said Jared. “The new year was in March in England until the 1700s, when the pope introduced a new calendar.” Everyone stared at him. Jared flushed slightly, scar thrown into relief, and muttered, “I read a lot of old books.” “Well done,” said Jon. “See where learning gets you, lads? So much better than messing around with girls or playing those video games which one hears are full of violence.” Kami, as a witness to many of her father’s video game marathons, gave him a long judgmental stare. “You total hypocrite.” “Hypocrisy is what being a parent is all about,” Jon said. “Well done for cracking the books, Jared and Holly. You see how it pays off.” Holly smiled and the light of her smile seemed to spill all over the room, reflections of light refracted all over everywhere. “It’s true reading is a wonderful thing,” Rusty observed. “I read a Cosmo a year ago, and I still remember how to keep my nails in perfect condition and also ten top tips on how to dress to accentuate my ass.” Now everybody was staring at Rusty. Unlike Jared, he did not blush. “Those tips are working,” he said. “Don’t pretend you haven’t all noticed. I know the truth.” Kami rolled up a magazine on the table—sadly, for the sake of dramatic irony, not a Cosmo—and hit Rusty over the head with it. “Does anybody have anything else to say—I can’t stress this enough—specifically about Elinor Lynburn and medieval New Year?” “Want to know what it was called? You’ll like this,” Jared added, and he looked at Kami. It was a simple glance from his gray eyes, but it felt like being put in a room that was just the two of them. “Lady Day.” Kami beamed at him. “You know what I like, sugarprune

The Venetians catalogue everything, including themselves. ‘These grapes are brown,’ I complain to the young vegetable-dealer in Santa Maria Formosa. ‘What is wrong with that ? I am brown,’ he replies. ‘I am the housemaid of the painter Vedova,’ says a maid, answering the telephone. ‘I am a Jew,’ begins a cross-eyed stranger who is next in line in a bookshop. ‘Would you care to see the synagogue?’ Almost any Venetian, even a child, will abandon whatever he is doing in order to show you something. They do not merely give directions; they lead, or in some cases follow, to make sure you are still on the right way. Their great fear is that you will miss an artistic or ‘typical’ sight. A sacristan, who has already been tipped, will not let you leave until you have seen the last Palma Giovane. The ‘pope’ of the Chiesa dei Greci calls up to his housekeeper to throw his black hat out the window and settles it firmly on his broad brow so that he can lead us personally to the Archaeological Museum in the Piazza San Marco; he is afraid that, if he does not see to it, we shall miss the Greek statuary there. This is Venetian courtesy. Foreigners who have lived here a long time dismiss it with observation : ‘They have nothing else to do.’ But idleness here is alert, on the qui vive for the opportunity of sightseeing; nothing delights a born Venetian so much as a free gondola ride. When the funeral gondola, a great black-and-gold ornate hearse, draws up beside a fondamenta, it is an occasion for aesthetic pleasure. My neighbourhood was especially favoured this way, because across the campo was the Old Men’s Home. Everyone has noticed the Venetian taste in shop displays, which extends down to the poorest bargeman, who cuts his watermelons in half and shows them, pale pink, with green rims against the green side-canal, in which a pink palace with oleanders is reflected. Che bello, che magnifici, che luce, che colore! - they are all professori delle Belle Arti. And throughout the Veneto, in the old Venetian possessions, this internal tourism, this expertise, is rife. In Bassano, at the Civic Museum, I took the Mayor for the local art-critic until he interupted his discourse on the jewel-tones (‘like Murano glass’) in the Bassani pastorals to look at his watch and cry out: ‘My citizens are calling me.’ Near by, in a Paladian villa, a Venetian lasy suspired, ‘Ah, bellissima,’ on being shown a hearthstool in the shape of a life-size stuffed leather pig. Harry’s bar has a drink called a Tiziano, made of grapefruit juice and champagne and coloured pink with grenadine or bitters. ‘You ought to have a Tintoretto,’ someone remonstrated, and the proprietor regretted that he had not yet invented that drink, but he had a Bellini and a Giorgione. When the Venetians stroll out in the evening, they do not avoid the Piazza San Marco, where the tourists are, as Romans do with Doney’s on the Via Veneto. The Venetians go to look at the tourists, and the tourists look back at them. It is all for the ear and eye, this city, but primarily for the eye. Built on water, it is an endless succession of reflections and echoes, a mirroring. Contrary to popular belief, there are no back canals where tourist will not meet himself, with a camera, in the person of the another tourist crossing the little bridge. And no word can be spoken in this city that is not an echo of something said before. ‘Mais c’est aussi cher que Paris!’ exclaims a Frenchman in a restaurant, unaware that he repeats Montaigne. The complaint against foreigners, voiced by a foreigner, chimes querulously through the ages, in unison with the medieval monk who found St. Mark’s Square filled with ‘Turks, Libyans, Parthians, and other monsters of the sea’. Today it is the Germans we complain of, and no doubt they complain of the Americans, in the same words.

Clad in red velvet it came, the very covering my old Master had so loved, the dream king, Marius. It came swaggering and camping through the lighted streets of Paris as though God had made it. But it was a vampire child, the same as I, son of the seventeen hundreds, as they reckoned the time to be then, a blazing, brash, bumbling, laughing and teasing blood drinker in the guise of a young man, come to stomp out whatever sacred fire yet burnt in the cleft scar tissue of my soul and scatter the ashes. It was The Vampire Lestat. It wasn't his fault. Had one of us been able to strike him down one night, break him apart with his own fancy sword and set him ablaze, we might have had a few more decades of our wretched delusions. But nobody could. He was too damned strong for us. Created by a powerful and ancient renegade, a legendary vampire by the name of Magnus, this Lestat, aged twenty in mortal years, an errant and penniless country aristocrat from the wild lands of Auvergne, who had thrown over custom and respectability and any hope of court ambitions, of which he had none anyway since he couldn't even read or write, and was too insulting to wait on any King or Queen, who became a wild blond-haired celebrity of the boulevard gutter theatricals, a lover of men and women, a laughing happy-go-lucky blindly ambitious self-loving genius of sorts, this Lestat, this blue-eyed and infinitely confident Lestat, was orphaned on the very night of his creation by the ancient monster who made him, bequeathed to him a fortune in a secret room in a crumbling medieval tower, and then went into the eternal comfort of the ever devouring flames. This Lestat, knowing nothing of Old Covens and Old Ways, of soot covered gangsters who thrived under cemeteries and believed they had a right to brand him a heretic, a maverick and a bastard of the Dark Blood, went strutting about fashionable Paris, isolated and tormented by his supernatural endowments yet glorying in his new powers, dancing at the Tuileries with the most magnificently clad women, reveling in the joys of the ballet and the high court theater and roaming not only in the Places of Light, as we called them, but meandering mournfully in Notre Dame de Paris itself, right before the High Altar, without the lightning of God striking him where he stood. Armand’s description of Lestat from The Vampire Armand

Now, who and what is this minstrel in reality? Where does he come from? In what respects does he differ from his predecessors? He has been described as a cross between the early medieval court-singer and the ancient mime of classical times. The mime had never ceased to flourish since the days of classical antiquity; when even the last traces of classical culture disappeared, the descendants of the old mimes still continued to travel about the Empire, entertaining the masses with their unpretentious, unsophisticated and unliterary art. The Germanic countries were flooded out with mimes in the early Middle Ages; but until the ninth century the poets and singers at the courts kept themselves strictly apart from them. Not until they lost their cultured audience, as a result of the Carolingian Renaissance and the clericalism of the following generation, and came up against the competition of the mimes in the lower classes, did they have, to a certain extent, to become mimes themselves in order to be able to compete with their rivals. Thus both singers and comedians now move in the same circles, intermingle and influence each other so much that they soon become indistinguishable from one another. The mime and the scop both become the minstrel. The most striking characteristic of the minstrel is his versatility. The place of the cultured, highly specialized heroic ballad poet is now taken by the Jack of all trades, who is no longer merely a poet and singer, but also a musician and dancer, dramatist and actor, clown and acrobat, juggler and bear-leader, in a word, the universal jester and maître de plaisir of the age. Specialization, distinction and solemn dignity are now finished with; the court poet has become everybody’s fool and his social degradation has such a revolutionary and shattering effect on himself that he never entirely recovers from the shock. From now on he is one of the déclassés, in the same class as tramps and prostitutes, runaway clerics and sent-down students, charlatans and beggars. He has been called the ‘journalist of the age’, but he really goes in for entertainment of every kind: the dancing song as well as the satirical song, the fairy story as well as the mime, the legend of saints as well as the heroic epic. In this context, however, the epic takes on quite new features: it acquires in places a more pointed character with a new straining after effect, which was absolutely foreign to the spirit of the old heroic ballad. The minstrel no longer strikes the gloomy, solemn, tragi-heroic note of the ‘Hildebrandslied’, for he wants to make even the epic sound entertaining; he tries to provide sensations, effective climaxes and lively epigrams. Compared with the monuments of the older heroic poetry, the ‘Chanson de Roland’ never fails to reveal this popular minstrel taste for the piquant.

The diversity of India is tremendous; it is obvious: it lies on the surface and anybody can see it. It concerns itself with physical appearances as well as with certain mental habits and traits. There is little in common, to outward seeming, between the Pathan of the Northwest and the Tamil in the far South. Their racial stocks are not the same, though there may be common strands running through them; they differ in face and figure, food and clothing, and, of course, language … The Pathan and Tamil are two extreme examples; the others lie somewhere in between. All of them have still more the distinguishing mark of India. It is fascinating to find how the Bengalis, the Marathas, the Gujaratis, the Tamils, the Andhras, the Oriyas, the Assamese, the Canarese, the Malayalis, the Sindhis, the Punjabis, the Pathans, the Kashmiris, the Rajputs, and the great central block comprising the Hindustani-speaking people, have retained their peculiar characteristics for hundreds of years, have still more or less the same virtues and failings of which old tradition or record tells us, and yet have been throughout these ages distinctively Indian, with the same national heritage and the same set of moral and mental qualities.    There was something living and dynamic about this heritage, which showed itself in ways of living and a philosophical attitude to life and its problems. Ancient India, like ancient China, was a world in itself, a culture and a civilization which gave shape to all things. Foreign influences poured in and often influenced that culture and were absorbed. Disruptive tendencies gave rise immediately to an attempt to find a synthesis. Some kind of a dream of unity has occupied the mind of India since the dawn of civilization. That unity was not conceived as something imposed from outside, a standardization of externals or even of beliefs. It was something deeper and, within its fold, the widest tolerance of beliefs and customs was practiced and every variety acknowledged and even encouraged.    In ancient and medieval times, the idea of the modern nation was non-existent, and feudal, religious, racial, and cultural bonds had more importance. Yet I think that at almost any time in recorded history an Indian would have felt more or less at home in any part of India, and would have felt as a stranger and alien in any other country. He would certainly have felt less of a stranger in countries which had partly adopted his culture or religion. Those, such as Christians, Jews, Parsees, or Moslems, who professed a religion of non-Indian origin or, coming to India, settled down there, became distinctively Indian in the course of a few generations. Indian converts to some of these religions never ceased to be Indians on account of a change of their faith. They were looked upon in other countries as Indians and foreigners, even though there might have been a community of faith between them.6

In their eagerness to eliminate from history any reference to individuais and individual events, collectivist authors resorted to a chimerical construction, the group mind or social mind. At the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries German philologists began to study German medieval poetry, which had long since fallen into oblivion. Most of the epics they edited from old manuscripts were imitations of French works. The names of their authors—most of them knightly warriors in the service of dukes or counts—were known. These epics were not much to boast of. But there were two epics of a quite different character, genuinely original works of high literary value, far surpassing the conventional products of the courtiers: the Nibelungenlied and the Gudrun. The former is one of the great books of world literature and undoubtedly the outstanding poem Germany produced before the days of Goethe and Schiller. The names of the authors of these masterpieces were not handed down to posterity. Perhaps the poets belonged to the class of professional entertainers (Spielleute), who not only were snubbed by the nobility but had to endure mortifying legal disabilities. Perhaps they were heretical or Jewish, and the clergy was eager to make people forget them. At any rate the philologists called these two works "people's epics" (Volksepen). This term suggested to naive minds the idea that they were written not by individual authors but by the "people." The same mythical authorship was attributed to popular songs (Volkslieder) whose authors were unknown. Again in Germany, in the years following the Napoleonic wars, the problem of comprehensive legislative codification was brought up for discussion. In this controversy the historical school of jurisprudence, led by Savigny, denied the competence of any age and any persons to write legislation. Like the Volksepen and the Volkslieder, a nation s laws, they declared, are a spontaneous emanation of the Volksgeist, the nations spirit and peculiar character. Genuine laws are not arbitrarily written by legislators; they spring up and thrive organically from the Volksgeist. This Volksgeist doctrine was devised in Germany as a conscious reaction against the ideas of natural law and the "unGerman" spirit of the French Revolution. But it was further developed and elevated to the dignity of a comprehensive social doctrine by the French positivists, many of whom not only were committed to the principies of the most radical among the revolutionary leaders but aimed at completing the "unfinished revolution" by a violent overthrow of the capitalistic mode of production. Émile Durkheim and his school deal with the group mind as if it were a real phenomenon, a distinct agency, thinking and acting. As they see it, not individuais but the group is the subject of history. As a corrective of these fancies the truism must be stressed that only individuais think and act. In dealing with the thoughts and actions of individuais the historian establishes the fact that some individuais influence one another in their thinking and acting more strongly than they influence and are influenced by other individuais. He observes that cooperation and division of labor exist among some, while existing to a lesser extent or not at ali among others. He employs the term "group" to signify an aggregation of individuais who cooperate together more closely.