conditions were almost equally bad. Viewed, though, from the standpoint of
what had prevailed in western Europe during the dark period of the early
Middle Ages, it represented a marked advance in method and content--except
in pure literature, where there was an undoubted decline due to the
absorbing interest in Dialectic--and it particularly marked a new spirit,
as nearly critical as the times would allow. Despite the heterogeneous and
but partially civilized student body, youthful and but poorly prepared for
study, the drunkenness and fighting, the lack of books and equipment, the
large classes and the poor teaching methods, and the small amount of
knowledge which formed the grist for their mills and which they ground
exceeding small, these new universities held within themselves, almost in
embryo form, the largest promise for the intellectual future of western
Europe which had appeared since the days of the old universities of the
Hellenic world (R. 124). In these new institutions knowledge was not only
preserved and transmitted, but was in time to be tremendously advanced and
extended. They were the first organizations to break the monopoly of the
Church in learning and teaching; they were the centers to which all new
knowledge gravitated; under their shadow thousands of young men found
intellectual companionship and in their classrooms intellectual
stimulation; and in encouraging "laborious subtlety, heroic industry, and
intense application", even though on very limited subject-matter, and in
training "men to think and work rather than to enjoy" (R. 124), they were
preparing for the time when western Europe should awaken to the riches of
Greece and Rome and to a new type of intellectual life of its own. From
these beginnings the university organization has persisted and grown and
expanded, and to-day stands, the Synagogue and the Catholic Church alone
excepted, as the oldest organized institution of human society.

The manifest tendency of the universities toward speculation, though for
long within limits approved by the Church, was ultimately to awaken