Abelard, in the twelfth century, tried to prove that the interminable dispute about entities and words was founded on a misapprehension.

Roger Bacon, at the beginning of the thirteenth century, anticipated modern science, and proclaimed that man, by use of nature, can do all things.

Joachim of Flora, intermediate between the two, drank one drop of the cup of prophecy offered to his lips, and cried that 'the Gospel of the Father was past, the Gospel of the Son was passing, the Gospel of the Spirit was to be.' These three men, each in his own way, the Frenchman as a logician, the Englishman as an analyst, the Italian as a mystic, divined the future but inevitable emancipation of the reason of mankind.

Nor were there wanting signs, especially in Provence, that Aphrodite and Phoebus and the Graces were ready to resume their sway.

The premature civilization of that favored region, so cruelly extinguished by the Church, was itself a reaction of nature against the restrictions imposed by ecclesiastical discipline; while the songs of the wandering students, known under the title of _Carmina Burana_, indicate a revival of Pagan or pre-Christian feeling in the very stronghold of mediaeval learning.