EUROPE
At the beginning of the Middle Ages the torch of knowledge flickered dimly and all the
literary and artistic achievements of the classical past seemed destined to he lost for ever
under the young and vigorous Germanic races which had risen to political power in the
northern and western parts of Europe. The new rulers found neither pleasure nor honor in
the philosophy, literature and arts of the nations outside their frontiers and appeared to be
as filthy as their minds were filled with superstition. Their monks and clergymen, passing
their lives in a long routine of useless and atrocious self-torture, and wailing before the
ghastly phantoms of their delirious brains, were abhorrent to the company of human be-
ings. They still debated the point whether a woman had the soul of a human being or of a
beast, or was she blest with a finite or infinite spirit. She could neither acquire nor inherit
any property nor had the right to sell or transfer the same.
Robert Briffault writes in the Making of Humanity:
"From the fifth to the tenth century Europe lay sunk in a night of barbarism which grew
darker and darker. It was a barbarism far more awful and horrible than that of the primitive
savage, for it was the decomposing body of what had once been a great civilization. The
features and impress of that civilization were all but completely effaced. Where its devel-
opment had been fullest, e. g. in Italy and Gaul, all was ruin, squalor and dissolution."