Initial intellectual breakthroughs come easily but sustained inquiry meets resistance

Evidence

It often happens that the first step in a new direction, though long delayed, is taken in the end with surprising ease, but the second and third steps come up against unexpected difficulties. So it was in this case. A habit of independent inquiry became established in western Europe in the early twelfth century, and showed itself in these traces of candid appraisal of Islam. But then there was a check. It was one thing to base a reasonable judgment on facts which lay ready at hand; it was quite another to seek new information for its own sake or for the sake of some future synthesis. It is very clear to us that when matters had been brought to the point at which we have seen them in the authors I have quoted, the next step must be to obtain authoritative texts for enlarging the gap in the curtain. — R. W. Southern, Western Views of Islam in the Middle…, 199

Categorization

• APHORISMS: A generalizable observation about how intellectual progress stalls after an initial easy step — the first move comes easily, the next requires building entirely new machinery.

Related

• Islam’s intellectual peak came within four centuries, far faster than the medieval West’s (similarity 0.82)
• European intellectual confrontation with Islam began in the twelfth century (similarity 0.78)
• Mid-fifteenth-century European thought on Islam surpassed all earlier and later centuries (similarity 0.78)