Note 151 — Chapter IV

To this conception of the time, that the secular side of education was a necessary evil, of which a minimum use must be made, the school disciplines had in reality been adapting themselves for centuries by their growing formalism and loss of content. Among the seven liberal arts rhetoric is the best example of the former characteristic. It was so purely conventional a discipline in Isidore’s time that, even though he wrote of it, he confesses that it made no impression on him, either good or bad. “When it is laid aside,” he says, “all recollection vanishes.” The loss of content, on the other hand, is best seen in Isidore’s account of the four mathematical sciences, especially in that of geometry, which consists of nothing more than a few definitions.