troyed all personality, conducted to fatalism; denied creation, revelation, the Trinity, the efficacy of prayers, alms, and litanies. So, too, with the Jews in France and Spain. They committed the works of their great writer, Maimonides (A.D. 11391205), who had espoused this doctrine, to the flames. But Averroism long maintained its ground. At length the Church took decisive action against it. The Lateran Council, A.D. 1512, condemned the doctrines as detestable. The last Vatican Council (1870) has also anathematized them. It must be borne in mind, however, that these opinions are held by a majority of the human race. We now see a glimpse of the way which Averroism prepared, in the middle ages, for the new philosophy of Materialism in Europe. But beside this, we are indebted to the Arabian civilisation of the middle ages for achievements in the sphere of positive inquiry, of mathematics, and the natural sciences. The brilliant services of the Arabians in the field of the natural and physical sciences are not sufficiently recognised. It was these studies particularly which, connecting themselves with Greek traditions, again made room for the idea of the regularity and subjection to law of the course of nature. This happened at a time when the degeneracy of belief in the Christian world had come to regard everything as possible, and nothing as necessary. In these studies was implied, as a pre-supposition, the belief in a regular progress following eternal laws. And this belief has formed one of the most powerful springs in the whole development of culture from the middle ages to modern times. In their schools of medicine, in their studies of the animal and vegetable worlds, everywhere, in short, in organic nature, the fine sense of the Arabians traced not only the particularities of the given object, but its development, its generation, and decay-just those departments, therefore, in which the mystic theory of life finds its foundation. Humboldt affirms that the Arabians are to be considered as the proper founders of the physical sciences in the signification of the term which we are now accustomed to give it. So flowed the sources on all sides to form the mighty stream of modern intellectual life, along which, under numerous modifications, we have to pursue the course of our examination. When Christianity had lost the most interesting countries over which her influence had once spread, Africa, Egypt, Syria, The Holy Land, Asia Minor,-she fell back upon Europe. Charlemagne, grandson of Charles Martel, cemented the alliance with the Church entered into by his father Pepin, and was crowned by Pope Leo the third at Rome on Christmas-day A.D. 800, as "Emperor of the West." Though unlearned himself, no one appreciated better than Charlemagne the value of knowledge. He laboured assiduously for the elevation and enlightenment of his people. He collected together learned men; established places of teaching; erected noble buildings; organised the trades, and gave to his towns a police. After his death, his successors made closer union with the ecclesiastical power, which gradually acquired that moral and spiritual supremacy that enabled the Church to dominate the crowned heads of Europe and all their subjects. To enable us to understand the mission of the Church in these times, we must advert to the rise and progress of the monastic orders. As early as A.D. 370, St. Basil, bishop of Cæsarea, incorporated the hermits and cœnobites of his diocese into one order. One hundred and fifty years later, St. Benedict, under a milder rule, organised those who have passed under his name, and found for them occupation in suitable employments of manual and intellectual labour. In the ninth century, another Benedict revised the rule of the order, and made it more austere. Offshoots arose, as those of Cluny, A.D. 900; the Carthusians A.D. 1084; the Cistercians, A.D. 1098. The Augustinians were founded in the eleventh century. The influence to which monasticism attained in the course of three centuries was immense. Of these orders were the highest dignitaries of the Church; together with emperors, kings, and nobles. Vast numbers of authors and learned men were produced by them. It was mainly by the monasteries that the peasant class of Europe was pointed out the way of civilisation. To see the lands around these noble buildings turned from a wilderness into a garden; to see labour exalted and ennobled by holy hands; to see the wealth lavished upon shrines and altars these were things that arrested the attention of the barbarians of Europe, and led them on to civilization. The Scholastic philosophy which was dominant in the ecclesiastical system of the middle ages began by dealing with scanty, and at the same time, much corrupted traditions. The chief portion of its materials was derived from the works of Aristotle. Charlemagne was honoured with a theological epistle in which the "nothing" out of which God created the world is explained as an actually existing entity, and that for the extremely simple reason that every name must refer to some corresponding thing. Here, then, was opened at the very outset of philosophical studies a wide source of school controversy. Whether abstractions of the mind represent independent existences, or, in other words, realities; or whether they are merely in the mind itself, and are only names—this was the question that divided the medieval school-men into two camps, the Realists and the Nominalists. The doctrine of Aristotle was that man, as the highest product of creation, carries within himself the nature of all the lower stages. From this the school-men derived three independent elements of human existence, of which man has the first in common with the plant, as growth and multiplication; the second in common with the animal, as sensation, motion and appetite; while the last alone is immortal, viz. :-the reason. On the rise of the mendicant orders, Scholasticism received a great impulse through Thomas Aquinas, the Dominican, and Duns Scotus, the Franciscan, founding rival schools, which wrangled for three centuries. These disputes have ceased to possess any but an historical interest. A man who in this age can read with enjoyment of mind the works of an Abelard or an Aquinas, must have a native affinity for purely dialectical ingenuity. We are no longer perplexed by their problems, but we are interested in the fact that such problems did once perplex the most eminent minds. We must not forget, however, that to Scholasticism we owe the emancipation of Philosophy from the trammels of Theology. The Church was dominant, and its Theology had to be dissolved by metaphysics before science could gain a hearing. It was Scholasticism which acted as the solvent. Something, also, may be said in its favour as an art of disputation. It made Paris for many years into a sort of Athens. The diploma of philosophy was given there. From the remote corners of Britain and the fastnesses of Calabria, from Spain and Germany, from Italy and Poland, came thither the young clerks who felt within them the restlessness of thought. Of its many renowned teachers only a few names have now a familiar sound. Its controversy, commencing in the middle of the ninth century with the name of John Scotus, an Irishman-hence the surname of Erigena,-may be said to have exhausted itself with the Englishman, William Occam, in the middle of the fourteenth century-a Franciscan monk, a disciple of Duns Scotus, like him, a Nominalist, and the most effective champion of the later Nominalism. We may regard the later Nominalism as the beginning of the end of Scholasticism, as preparing the way again for Materialism, and for a deliverance from the usurpation of idle words in speculation, and for a renewal of the connection of our thoughts more with things than traditional expressions and word-play. Nominalism was more than a mere opinion of the schools, like any other. It was really the principle of scepticism asserting itself against the whole medieval love of authority. In the place of positive achievements, the domination of Scholasticism in the sphere of the sciences resulted only in a system of notions and terms. Nevertheless, its formulas formed a common element of intellectual intercourse for the whole of Europe. One man, however, deserves to be signalised as pursuing, in the thirteenth century, the experimental sciences in the modern spirit and practice. Roger Bacon, a Franciscan monk (A.D. 1214-1292), was the chief of a small group of independent inquirers, who, under the example and encouragement of Robert Grossetete, bishop of Lincoln, kept aloof from the prevailing disputation of words, and addressed themselves to mathematics and the physical sciences. He was acquainted with Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, and Chaldaic. He tells us that he had spent 2,000 livres in conducting experiments. His fame was such that Pope Clement IV.-notwithstanding the suspicion of heresy that attached itself to Bacon-privately desired him to send the book which he had heard Bacon was preparing, and urged him to do it secretly and hastily. He grew poor. His superiors forbade him to teach his pupils; imprisoned him on bread and water if he ventured to instruct some curious brother; forbade his writing, and destroyed his books. Yet his spirit was victorious over all obstacles. In eighteen months he had composed and written out for the Pope the "Opus Majus," "Opus Minus," and the "Opus Tertium." The fate of the works written under such disadvantages has been pitiable. Too much in advance of their age to be appreciated, they have only in quite modern times been rescued from the neglect and destruction too inevitably attending manuscripts. He died at the age of seventy-eight, a disappointed and thwarted man. Let us remember what he says in his third letter to Pope Clement: "It is on account of the ignorance of those with whom I have had to deal that I have not been able to accomplish more." CHAPTER II. The Renascence of Science and Philosophy; The Rise of Modern Science and Philosophy; Kant and his Successors. In estimating the influences that preceded the renascence of Science and Philosophy in Europe from the close of Scholasticism, the chief incidents to be considered are the restoration of Greek literature in Italy; the formation of modern tongues from the vulgar dialect; and the invention of Printing. These, joined to the moral and intellectual influences at that time predominating, led to the great movement known as the Reformation. Philosophical discussion commenced to be popular in Italy. Petrus Pomponatius published a book in the year 1516 on the Immortality of the Soul. The Church took offence at the work, and the author expressed his submission to its judgment after this manner: There are no natural proofs of immortality, and it rests, therefore, solely on revelation. This equivocal character of the relation between faith and knowledge is, in many ways, a characteristic and constant feature of the period of transition to the modern freedom of thought. Already in the year 1348, at Paris, Nicolas de Autricuria had been compelled to make recantation of several doctrines, and, amongst others, this: That in the processes of nature there is nothing to be found but the motion of the combination and separation of atoms. To the Italian movement of the 16th and 17th centuries must be ascribed the revival of the monistic philosophy. The elder Scaliger was one of the reforming thinkers. Vanini was burnt by the Church at Toulouse in the year 1619, on account of the extreme freedom of his speculations. Telesius had previously suffered long persecutions from the same source. Campanella was kept for twenty-seven years in strict confinement, and died in 1639. With this last philosophic thinker and poet, the external world is a revelation of the Divine Being. His sonnets (recently translated into English by J. A. Symonds), display an energic mind. The world is there depicted as an animal. It lives: "Deem you that only you have soul and sense, While heaven and all its wonders, Sun and Earth, Scorned in your dulness, lack intelligence: Fool! what produced you? These things gave you birth, |