Hence it comes that this instinct of free thought among these peoples reaches expression very early, much earlier than the modern learned world commonly suspects.  “We are mistakenly in the habit of thinking of free scientific inquiry as a fruitage of modern times.  But among these peoples that instinct is an ancient one which asserts that free inquiry must be bound neither by the authority of a person nor by a human ordinance; that, on the contrary, it is a power in itself, resting immediately upon its own divine right, superior to and antedating all human institutions whatever.

“Quasi lignum vitae,” says Pope Alexander IV. in a constitution addressed to the University of Paris in 1256, “Quasi lignum vitae in Paradiso Dei, et quasi lucerna fulgoris in Domo Domini, est in Sancta Ecclesia Parisiensis Studii disciplina.”  “As the tree of life in God’s Paradise and the lamp of glory in the house of God, such in the Holy Church is the place of the Parisian corporation of learning.”  To appreciate the import of these words of the holy father, it should be borne in mind that in the Middle Ages all things whatever lived only by virtue of a corporate existence, so that learning existed only as incorporated in a university.

It would be a serious mistake to believe that the universities of the Middle Ages rested that prerogative of scientific censure—­censura doctrinatis—­to which they laid claim in such a comprehensive way, upon these and other like papal or imperial and royal decrees of establishment.  Petrus Alliacensis, a man whom the University of Paris elected as its magnus magister in 1381, and who afterward wore the archiepiscopal and also the cardinal’s hat, tells us that not ex jure humano, not from human legislation, but ex jure divino, from divine law, does science derive its competence to exercise the censura; and the privileges and charters granted by popes, emperors and kings are nothing more than the acts of recognition of this prerogative of science that comes to it ex jure divino, or, as an alternative expression has it, ex jure naturali, by the law of nature.  And in this, Petrus Alliacensis is substantially borne out by all the later scholastics.

Gentlemen, we are in the habit of giving ourselves airs and of looking down on the Middle Ages as a time of darkness and barbarism.  But in so doing we are frequently in the wrong, and in no respect are we more thoroughly in the wrong than in passing such an opinion upon the position of science in the Middle Ages.  Frequent and most solemn are the cases in which recognition is made of the right of science to raise her voice without all regard to king and pope, and even against king and pope.

We have recently witnessed a conflict between the government and the house of deputies as to the meeting of expenditures not granted by the house.  An impression has been diligently spread abroad through the country that this is an unheard of piece of boldness and a subversive assumption of power on the part of the house of deputies, and indeed there have not been wanting deputies who have been astonished at their own daring, and have taken some pride in it.