text:  Writers innumerable have declaimed on the night of the Middle Ages--on the deluge of barbarism which under the Goths flooded the world--on the torpor of the human mind under the combined pressure of savage violence and priestly superstition; yet this was precisely the period when the minds of men deprived of external vent turned inwards on themselves; and that the learned and thoughtful shut out from any active part in society by the general prevalence of military violence sought in the solitude of the cloister employment in reflecting on the mind itself and the general causes which under its guidance operated upon society