Among the historians of Christian culture alive today, two stand out with particular distinction: M. Etienne Gilson and Mr Christopher Dawson. They are both prolific writers, and neither is always equal to his own standard; but their best work is of a very high quality indeed. These qualities differ, however, and it is interesting to compare diem. Both men are scholars through and through, and both possess to a very unusual degree the real historian’s gift of generalising from particular data. But their points of view differ, and their data. M. Gilson is a connoisseur of ideas; of other men’s ideas, in studying which he discovers his own. He knows much about many human minds, precisely in so far as these minds have become articulate in conceptual thought, and expresses this thought in words and writing. An expert in philosophies, he is scrupulously careful to respect his documentary data; but he wrings all he can out of it. For he makes it his business to discern and define what is individual and original in each thinker he studies; to study therefore each case in and for itself before passing on to another one. Then, having so treated a number of cases, he pauses to consider interconnections; and so draws up patterns of intellectual transmission and differentiation. All his work is a study of minds in their expressed ideas; with a view, first, to discovering originality and then to tracing derivations.

Mr Dawson’s very different work is harder to characterise. His range is of course wider, materially, but it is less abstract. He is called a philosopher of history, but he is hardly a historian of philosophy. Though his work teems with individual testimonies he never, or scarcely ever, pauses long to consider an individual.