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Ireland and the Making
of Britain
ments of learning, will therefore be admitted as not lack-
ing in clearness. But is there any
evidence that the Irish
intellectuals went further than this? Did their studies
ever soar above the mechanical tradition of Bede and
Rhabanus Maur in the West or of Choeroboscus and
Photius in the East? Did they, like them, merely learn
by rote what had been handed down to them by Greek and
Roman teachers and pass it on to newer generations? Is
there any evidence of an Irish independent culture, of
a self-sustaining mental cultivation, of a development
and expansion of knowledge, of any addition of learning,
and of the employment of the varied powers of the mind
in the investigation of new fields of thought, and the fer-
tilization of new ideas? It would indeed be remarkable
that an Ireland capable of improvising the habitations
and paraphernalia of knowledge as no other land was
able to improvise them and of maintaining its educational
organizations through periods of time of which no other
people before them could show a like record, should not
have added to the stores of knowledge represented by
Greco-Roman and Christian learning.
Undoubtedly Ireland so added. But we must remember
that Ireland's main energies were directed along two
important channels namely, the preservation and development
of her own immemorial culture and civilization,
as distinct and unique as the civilization of Greece or
Egypt, and the transmission to the newer peoples of
Europe of Greco-Roman learning transfused by the doctrines
of Christianity. Her devotion to her own culture
has enriched the world with an heroic literature even in
its fragments inferior only to the Grecian, and the example
of that devotion probably preserved to the world such
monuments of early literature as at this day belong to
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