He was an intellectual force of the first magnitude and a master of dialectic; he was also an egotist through and through, and a man of strong passions.

He would and did use his logical faculty and his mastery of dialectic to justify his own desires, whether these were for carnal satisfaction or the maintenance of an original intellectual concept.

It was precisely this danger that aroused the fears of the "rigourists" and in the light of succeeding events in the domain of intellectualism it is impossible to deny that there was some justification for their gloomy apprehensions.

In St.Thomas Aquinas this intellectualizing process marked its highest point and beyond there was no margin of safety.
He himself did not overstep the verge of danger, but after him this limit was overpassed.

The perfect balance between mind and spirit was achieved by Hugh of St.Victor, but afterwards the severance began and on the one side was the unwholesome hyper-spiritualization of the Rhenish mystics, on the other the false intellectualism of Descartes, Kant and the entire modern school of materialistic philosophy.