matter: "Bernard of Chartres used to say that we were like dwarfs seated on the shoulders of giants. If we see more and further than they, it is not due to our own clear eyes or tall bodies, but because we are raised on high and upborne by their gigantic bigness."[1]
Echoes of this same controversy—have they ever quite died away?—are heard in letters of the scholarly Peter of Blois, who was educated at Paris in the middle of the twelfth century, became a secretary of Henry Plantagenet and spent the greater part of his life in England, dying about the year 1200. He writes to a friend:
"You greatly commend your nephew, saying that never have you found a man of subtler vein: because, forsooth, skimming over grammar, and skipping the reading of the classical authors, he has flown to the trickeries of the logicians, where not in the books themselves but from abstracts and note-books, he has learned dialectic. Knowledge of letters cannot rest on such, and the subtilty you praise may be pernicious. For Seneca says, nothing is more odious than subtilty when it is only subtilty. Some people, without the elements of education, would discuss point and line and superficies, fate, chance and free-will, physics and matter and the void, the causes of things and the secrets of nature and the sources of the Nile! Our tender years used to be spent in rules of grammar, analogies, barbarisms, solecisms, tropes, with Donatus, Priscian, and Bede, who would not have devoted pains to these matters had they supposed that a solid basis of knowledge could be got without them. Quintilian, Caesar, Cicero, urge youths to study grammar. Why condemn the writings of the ancients? it is written that in antiquis est scientia. You rise from the darkness of ignorance to the light of science only by their diligent study. Jerome glories in having read Origen; Horace boasts of reading Homer over and over. It was much to my profit, when as a little chap I was studying how to make verses, that, as my master bade me, I took my matter not from fables but from truthful histories. And I profited from the letters of Hildebert of Le Mans, with their elegance of style and sweet urbanity; for as a boy I was made to learn some of them by heart. Besides other books, well known in the schools, I gained from keeping company with Trogus Pompeius, Josephus, Suetonius, Hegesippus, Quintus Curtius, Tacitus and Livy, all of whom throw into their histories much that makes for moral edification and the advance of liberal science. And I read other books, which had
nothing to do with history—very many of them. From all of them- ↑ Metalogicus, iii. 4 (Migne 199, col. 900).
