connect well-ascertained facts; inasmuch as the ideas in which it dealt were vague and unstable, and the temper in which they were contemplated was an urgent and aspiring enthusiasm, which could not submit to a calm conference with experience upon even terms. The fervour of thought in some degree supplied the place of reason in producing belief; but opinions so obtained had no enduring value; they did not exhibit a permanent record of old truths, nor a firm foundation for new. Experience collected her stores in vain, or ceased to collect them, when she had only to pour them into the flimsy folds of the lap of mysticism; who was, in truth, so much absorbed in looking for the treasures which were to fall from the skies, that she heeded little how scantily she obtained, or how loosely she held, such riches as might be found near her.

CHAPTER IV.

OF THE DOGMATISM OF THE STATIONARY PERIOD.

IN speaking of the character of the age of commentators, we noticed principally the ingenious servility which it displays;-the acuteness with which it finds ground for speculation in the expression of other men's thoughts;-the want of all vigour and fertility in acquiring any real and new truths. Such was the character of the reasoners of the stationary period from the first; but, at a later day, this character, from various causes, was modified by new features. The servility which had yielded itself to the yoke, insisted upon forcing it on the necks of others; the subtlety which found all the truth it needed in certain accredited writings, resolved that no one should find there, or in any other region, any other truths; speculative men became tyrants without ceasing to be slaves; to their character of commentators they added that of dogmatists.

1. Origin of the Scholastic Philosophy.-The causes of this change have been very happily analysed and described by several modern writers'. The general nature of the process may be briefly stated to have been the following.

1 Dr. Hampden, in the Life of Thomas Aquinas, in the Encyc. Metrop. Degerando, Hist. Comparée, vol. iv. Also Tennemann, Hist. of Phil. vol. viii. Introduction.

The tendencies of the later times of the Roman empire to a commenting literature, and a secondhand philosophy, have already been noticed. The loss of the dignity of political freedom, the want of the cheerfulness of advancing prosperity, and the substitution of the unphilosophical Latin language for the delicate intellectual mechanism of the Greek; fixed and augmented the prevalent feebleness and barrenness of intellect. Men forgot, or feared, to consult nature, to seek for new truths, to do what the great discoverers of other times had done; they were content to consult libraries, to study and defend old opinions, to talk of what great geniuses had said. They sought their philosophy in accredited treatises, and dared not question such doctrines as they there found.

The character of the philosophy to which they were thus led, was determined by this want of courage and originality. There are various antagonist principles of opinion, which seem alike to have their root in the intellectual constitution of man, and which are maintained and developed by opposing sects, when the intellect is in vigorous action. Such principles are, for instance,―the claims of authority and of reason to our assent ;— the source of our knowledge in experience or in ideas; the superiority of a mystical or of a sceptical turn of thought. Such oppositions of doctrine were found in writers of the greatest fame; and two of those, who most occupied the attention of students,

Plato and Aristotle, were, on several points of this nature, very diverse from each other in their tendency. The attempt to reconcile these philosophers by Boëthius and others, we have already noticed; and the attempt was so far successful, that it left on men's minds the belief in the possibility of a great philosophical system which should be based on these writers, and have a claim to the assent of all sober speculators.

But, in the mean time, the Christian religion had become the leading subject of men's thoughts; and divines had put forward its claims to be, not merely the guide of men's lives, and the means of reconciling them to their heavenly Master; but also to be a philosophy in the widest sense in which the term had been used; a consistent speculative view of man's condition and nature, and of the world in which he is placed.

These claims had been acknowledged; and, unfortunately, from the intellectual condition of the times, with no due apprehension of the necessary ministry of observation, and reason dealing with observation, by which alone such a system can be embodied. It was held, without any regulating principle, that the philosophy which had been bequeathed to the world by the great geniuses of heathen antiquity, and the philosophy which was deduced from, and implied by, the revelations made by God to man, must be identical; and therefore, that theology is the only true philosophy. Indeed, the Neoplatonists had already

arrived, by other roads, at the same conviction. John Scot Erigena, in the reign of Alfred, and consequently before the existence of the scholastic philosophy, properly so called, had reasserted this doctrine. Anselm, in the eleventh century, again brought it forward; and Bernard de Chartres, in the thirteenth*.

This view was confirmed by the opinion which prevailed, concerning the nature of philosophical truth; a view supported by the theory of Plato, the practice of Aristotle, and the general propensities of the human mind: I mean, the opinion that all science may be obtained by the use of reasoning alone;—that by analysing and combining the notions which common language brings before us, we may learn all that we can know. Thus logic came to include the whole of science; and accordingly this Abelard expressly maintained. I have already explained, in some measure, the fallacy of this belief, which consists, as has been well said", "in mistaking the universality of the theory of language for the generalization of facts." But on all accounts this opinion is readily accepted; and it led at once to the conclusion, that the theological philosophy which we have described, is complete as well as true.

Thus a universal science was established, with the authority of a religious creed. Its universality rested on erroneous views of the relation of words and truths; its pretensions as a science were admitted 4 Ib. iv. 418.

2 Deg. iv. 351.

3. Ib. iv. 388.