QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
1. Why is it that a strong religious control is never favorable to originality in thinking?
2. Show how the work of the Nestorian Christians for the Mohammedan faith was another example of the Hellenization of the ancient world.
3. Would it be possible for any people anywhere in the world today to make such advances as were made at Bagdad, in the late eighth and early ninth centuries, without such work permanently influencing the course of civilization and learning everywhere? To what is the difference due?
4. What were the chief obstacles to Europe adopting at once the learning from Mohammedan Spain, instead of waiting centuries to discover this learning independently? 5. Why did Aristotle's work seem of much greater value to the mediaeval scholar than the Moslem science? What are the relative values to-day?
6. Why should the light literature of Spain be spoken of as a gay contagion? Did this Christian attitude toward fiction and poetry continue long?
7. In what ways was the Sic et Non of Abelard a complete break with mediaeval traditions?
8. How did the fact that Dialectic (Logic) now became the great subject of study in itself denote a marked intellectual advance? What was the significance of the prominence of this study for the future of thinking?
9. What was the effect on inquiry and individual thinking of the method of presentation used by Saint Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologica?
10. How do you explain the all-absorbing interest in scholasticism during the greater part of a century?
11. State the significance, for the future, of the revival of the study of Roman law: (a) intellectually; (b) in shaping future civilization.
12. How do you explain the Christian attitude toward disease, and the scientific treatment of it? Has that attitude entirely passed away? Illustrate.
13. Why was it such a good thing for the future of civilization in England and France that so many of its nobility perished in the Crusades?
14. State a number of ways in which the Crusade movements had a beneficial effect on western Europe.
15. Show how the revival of commerce was an educative and a civilizing influence of large importance. 16. Would the organization of commerce and banking, and the establishment of the sanctity of obligations in a country, be one important measure of the civilization to which that country had attained? Illustrate.
17. Show how the development of industry and commerce and the accumulation of wealth tend to promote order and security, and to extend educational advantages.
18. Contrast a mediaeval guild and a modern labor union. A guild and a modern fraternal and benevolent society.
19. Why did apprenticeship education continue so long with so little change, when it is now so rapidly being superseded?
20. Does the rise of a new Estate in society indicate a period of slow or rapid change? Why is such an evolution of importance for education and civilization?