590 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
because the citations in it from the fathers are selected and interpreted for a purpose, that it really expressed just the mores of the time. "The Decretals were invented to furnish what was entirely lacking, that is, a documentary authority, running back to Apostolic times, for the divine institution of the primacy of the pope and of the teaching office of bishops."* The period entirely lacked historical sense and critical method. What it had received from the last preceding generation was, and must have been always. But that was the mores. Horror of heretics, witches, Mohammedans, Jews, was in them, and so were all the other intense faiths, loves, desires, hates, and efforts of the period. In the lack of reading, travel, and discussion there was very little skepticism. Life went on from day to day by repetition along grooves of usage and habit. Such life makes strong mores, but also rigid and mechanical ones. In modern times the thirst for reality has developed criticism and skepti- cism; everything is discussed and questioned. There are few certainties in our knowledge. Our mores are flexible, elastic, and to some extent unstable, but they have strong guarantees. They are to a great extent rational, because if they are not rational they perish. They are open and intelligent, because they are supported by literature and wide discussion. They are also tough, and rather organic than mechanical.
All modern students of the mediaeval world have noted the contradictions and inconsistencies of living and thinking. Of these the most important is the contradiction between renun- ciation of the world and ruling the world; a Gregory VII, or an Innocent III, goes from one to the other of these without a sense of moral jar, and the modern students who fix their minds on one or the other have two different conceptions of the Middle Ages. Phantasms and ideals have no consistency. A man who deals with them instead of dealing with realities may have a kaleidoscopic relation between his ideas, which relation may be symmetrical, and poetically beautiful; he will have no nexus of thought between his ideas, and therefore no productive com- bination of them. The mediaeval pyeople had a great number
- Eicken, Mittelalt. Weltanschauung, p. 656.
