Peter Abélard was born towards the close of the eleventh century. No other personality that we may choose to study leads to so clear and true an insight into those strange days as does that of the luckless Breton philosopher. It was the time of transition from the darkest hour of mediæval Europe to a period of both moral and intellectual brilliance. The gloom of the ‘century of iron’ still lay on the land, but it was already touched with the faint, spreading dawn of a new idealism. There is, amongst historians, a speculation to the effect that the year 1000 of the Christian era marked a real and very definite stage in the history of thought. Usually we do violence to events by our chronologi…
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