DUNS SCOTUS AND OCCAM
The thirteenth century was a time of potent Church unity, when the papacy,
triumphant over emperors and kings, was drawing further strength from the
devotion of the two Orders, who were renewing the spiritual energies of
Western Christendom. Scholasticism was still whole and unbroken, in spite
of Roger Bacon, who attacked its methods with weapons of his own forging,
yet asserting loudly the single-eyed subservience of all the sciences to
theology. This assertion from a man of Bacon’s views, was as vain as the
_Unam sanctam_ of Pope Boniface VIII., fulminated in 1302, arrogating for
the papacy every power on earth. In earlier decades such pretensions had
been almost acquiesced in; but the _Unam sanctam_ was a senile outcry from
a papacy vanquished by the new-grown power of the French king, sustained
by the awakening of a French nation.
The opening years of the fourteenth century, so fatal for the papacy, were
also portentous for scholasticism. The _Summa_ of Thomas was impugned by
Joannes Duns Scotus, whose entire work, constructive as well as critical,
was impressed with qualities of finality, signifying that in the forms of
reasoning represented by him as well as Thomas, thought should advance no
farther. Bacon’s attack upon scholastic methods had proved abortive from
its tactlessness and confusion, and because men did not care for, and
perhaps did not understand, his arguments. It was not so with the
arguments of Duns Scotus. Throughout the academic world, thought still was
set to chords of metaphysics; and although men had never listened to quite
such dialectic orchestration as Duns provided, they liked it, perceived
its motives, and comprehended the meaning of its themes. So his generation
understood and appreciated him. That he was the beginning of the end of
the scholastic system, could not be known until the manner of that ending
had disclosed itself more fully. We, however, discern the symptoms of
scholastic dissolution in his work. His criticism of his predecessors was
disintegrating, even when not destructive. His own dialectic was so
surpassingly intricate and dizzy that, like the choir of Beauvais, it
might some day collapse. With Duns Scotus, scholasticism reasoned itself
out of human reach. And with him also, the wholeness of the scholastic
purpose finally broke. For he no longer maintained the union of
metaphysics and theology. The latter, to be sure, was valid absolutely;
but, from a speculative, it has become a practical science. It neither
draws its principles from metaphysics, nor subordinates the other
sciences--all human knowledge--to its service. Although rational in
content, it possesses proofs stronger than dialectic, and stands on
revelation.
There had always been men who maintained similar propositions. But it was
quite another matter that the severance between metaphysics and theology
should be demonstrated by a prodigious metaphysical theologian after a
different view had been carried to its farthest reaches by the great
Aquinas. Henceforth philosophy and theology were set on opposite
pinnacles, only with theology’s pinnacle the higher. In spite of the last
circumstance, the coming time showed that men cannot for long possess in
peace two standards of truth--philosophy and revelation; but will be
driven to hold to the one and ignore the other. By breaking the rational
union of philosophy and theology, Duns Scotus prepared the way for Occam.
The latter also asserts vociferously the superiority of the divine truth
over human knowledge and its reasonings. But the popes are at Avignon, and
the Christian world no longer bows down before those willing Babylonian
captives. Under such a blasted condition of the Church, how should any
inclusive Christian synthesis of thought and faith be maintained?
Duns Scotus[657] could not have been what he was, had he not lived after
Thomas. He was indeed the pinnacle of scholasticism; set upon all the
rest. Yet this pinnacle had its more particular supports--or antecedents.
And their special line may be noted without intending thereby to suggest
that the influences affecting the thought of Duns Scotus did not include
all the men he heard or read, and criticised.
That Duns Scotus was educated at Oxford, and became a Franciscan, and not
a Dominican, had done much to set the lines of thought reflected in his
doctrines. Anselm of Aosta, of Bec, of Canterbury, had been an
intellectual force in England. Duns was strongly influenced by his bold
realism, by his emphasis upon the power and freedom of the will, and by
his doctrine of the atonement.[658] But Anselm also affected Scotus
indirectly through the English worthy who stands between them.
This, of course, was Robert Grosseteste, to whom we have had occasion to
refer, yet, despite of his intrinsic worth, always in relation to his
effect on others. He was a great man; in his day a many-sided force,
strong in the business of Church and State, strong in censuring and
bridling the wicked, strong in the guidance of the young university of
Oxford, and a mighty friend of the Franciscan Order, then establishing
itself there. To his pupils, and their pupils apparently, he was a
fruitful inspiration; yet the historian of thought may be less interested
in the master than in certain of these pupils who brought to explicit form
divers matters which in Grosseteste seem to have been but inchoate.[659]
One thinks immediately of Roger Bacon, who was his pupil; and then of
Duns, the metaphysician, who possibly may have listened to some aged pupil
of Grosseteste. In different ways, Duns as well as Bacon took much from
the master. And it is possible to see how the great teacher and bishop
may have incited the genius of Scotus as well as that of Bacon to perform
its task. For Grosseteste was a rarely capable and clear-eyed man, honest
and resolute, who with the entire strength of a powerful personality
insisted upon going to the heart of every proposition, and testing its
validity by the surest means obtainable. By virtue of his training and
intellectual inheritance, he was an Augustinian and a Platonist; a
successor of Anselm, rather than a predecessor of the great Dominican
Aristotelians. He was accordingly an emphatic realist, yet one who would
co-ordinate the reality of his “universals” with the reality of
experience. Even had he not been an Augustinian, such a masterful
character would have realised the power of the human will, and felt the
practical insistencies of the _art_ of human salvation, which was the
_science_ of theology.
Views like these prevailed at Oxford. They may be found clearly stated by
Richard of Middleton, an Oxford Franciscan somewhat older than Duns
Scotus. He declares that theology is a practical science, and emphasises
the primacy and freedom of the will. _Voluntas est nobilissima potentia in
anima._ Again: _Voluntas simpliciter nobilior est quam intellectus_: the
intellect indeed goes before the Will, as the servant who carries the
candle before his lord. So the idea of the Good, toward which the Will
directs itself, is higher than that of the True, which is the object of
the mind; and loving is greater than knowing.[660] Roger Bacon had also
held that Will (_Voluntas_) was higher than the knowing faculty
(_intellectus_); and so did Henry of Ghent,[661] a man of the Low
Countries, _doctor solemnis_ hight, and a ruling spirit at the Paris
University in the latter part of the thirteenth century. Many of his
doctrines substantially resembled those of Scotus, although attacked by
him.
So we seem to see the pit in which Duns may have digged. This man, who was
no mere _fossor_, but a builder, and might have deserved the name of
Poliorcetes, as the overthrower of many bulwarks, has left few traces of
himself, beyond his twenty tomes of metaphysics, which contain no personal
references to their author. The birthplace of Johannes Duns Scotus,
whether in Scotland, England or Ireland, is unknown. The commonly accepted
date, 1274, probably should be abandoned for an earlier year. It is known
that he was a Franciscan, and that the greater part of his life as student
and teacher was passed at Oxford. In a letter of commendation, written by
the General of his Order in 1304, he is already termed _subtilissimus_. He
was then leaving for Paris, where, two or three years later, in 1307, he
was made a Doctor. The following year he was sent to Cologne, and there he
died an enigmatical death on November 8, 1308. Report has it that he was
buried alive while in a trance.[662] Probably there was little to tell of
the life of Duns Scotus. His personality, as well as his career, seems
completely included and exhausted in his works. Yet back of them, besides
a most acutely reasoning mind, lay an indomitable will. The man never
faltered in his labour any more than his reasoning wavered in its
labyrinthic course to its conclusions. His learning was complete: he knew
the Bible and the Fathers; he was a master of theology, of philosophy, of
astronomy, and mathematics.
The constructive processes of his genius appear to issue out of the action
of its critical energies. Duns was the most penetrating critic produced by
scholasticism. Whatever he considered from the systems of other men he
subjected to tests that were apt to leave the argument in tatters. No
logical inconsequence escaped him. And when every point had been examined
with respect to its rational consistency, this dialectic genius was
inclined to bring the matter to the bar of psychological experience. On
the other hand he was a churchman, holding that even as Scripture and
dogma were above question, so were the decrees of the Church, God’s
sanctioned earthly _Civitas_.
Having thus tested whatever was presented by human reason, and accepting
what was declared by Scripture or the Church, Duns proceeds to build out
his doctrine as the case may call for. No man ever drove either
constructive logic or the subtilties of critical distinctions closer to
the limits of human comprehension or human patience than Duns Scotus. And
here lies the trouble with him. The endless ramification and refinement
of his dialectic, his devious processes of conclusion, make his work a
_reductio ad absurdum_ of scholastic ways of reasoning. Logically,
eristically, the argumentation is inerrant. It never wanders aimlessly,
but winding and circling, at last it reaches a conclusion from some point
unforeseen. Would you run a course with this master of the syllogism? If
you enter _his_ lists, you are lost. The right way to attack him, is to
stand without, and laugh. That is what was done afterwards, when whoever
cared for such reasonings was called a _Dunce_, after the name of this
most subtle of mediaeval metaphysicians.
Thus a man is judged by his form and method, and by the bulk of his
accomplishment. Form, method, bulk of accomplishment, with Scotus were
preposterous. When the taste or mania for such dialectics passed away,
this kind of form, this maze of method, this hopelessness of bulk, made an
unfit vehicle for a philosophy of life. Men would not search it through to
find the living principles. Yet living principles were there; or, at
least, tenable and consistent views. The main positions of Duns Scotus,
some of which he held in opposition to Thomas, may strike us as quite
reasonable: we may be inclined to agree with him. Perhaps it will surprise
us to find sane doctrine so well hidden in such dialectic.
He held, for example, that there is no real difference between the soul
and its faculties. Thomas never demonstrated the contrary quite
satisfactorily. Again, Duns Scotus was a realist: the Idea exists, since
it is conceived. For the intellect is passive, and is moved by the
intelligible. Therefore the Universal must be a something, in order to
occasion the conception of it. Thus the reality of the concept proves the
actuality of the Idea.[663] Duns adds further explanations and
distinctions regarding the actuality of universals, which are somewhat
beyond the comprehension of the modern mind. But one may remark that he
reaches his views of the actuality of universals through analysis of the
processes of thought. Sense-perception occasions the Idea in us; there
must exist some objective correspondence to our general concepts, as there
must also be in things some objective correspondence to our perception of
them as individuals, whereby they become to us this or that individual
thing. Such individual objectivity is constituted by the _thisness_ of the
thing, its _haecceitas_ which is to be contra-distinguished from its
general essence, to wit, its _whatness_, or _quidditas_. Duns holds that
we think individual things directly as we think abstract Ideas; and so
their _haecceitas_ is as true an object of our thought as their
_quidditas_. This seems a reasonable conclusion, seeing that the
individual and not the type is the final end of creation. So our
conceptions prove for us the actuality both of the universal and the
concrete; and the proof of one and the other is rooted in
sense-perception.
Nothing was of greater import with Duns than the doctrine of the primacy
of the Will over the intellect. Duns supports it with intricate argument.
The soul in substance is identical with its faculties; but the latter are
formally distinguishable from it and from each other. Knowing and willing
are faculties or properties of the soul. The will is purely spiritual, and
to be distinguished from sense-appetite: the will, and the will alone, is
free; absolutely undetermined by any cause beyond itself. Even the
intellect, that is the knowing faculty, is determined from without.
Although some cognition precedes the act of willing, the will is not
determined by cognition, but uses it. So the will, being free, is higher
than the intellect. It is the will that constitutes man’s greatness; it
raises him above nature, and liberates him from her coercions. Not the
intellect, but the will directs itself toward the goal of blessedness, and
is the subject of the moral virtues. Such seems to be Duns’s main
position; but he distinguishes and refines the matter beyond the limits of
our comprehension.[664]
Another fundamental doctrine with Duns Scotus is that theology is not a
speculative, but a practical, science--a position which Duns
unfortunately disproved with his tomes of metaphysics! But in spite of the
personal _reductio ad absurdum_ of his argument, the position taken by him
betokens the breaking up of the scholastic system. The subject of
theology, at least for men, is the revelation of God contained in
Scripture. “Holy Scripture is a kind of knowledge (_quaedam notitia_)
divinely given in order to direct men to a supernatural end--_in finem
supernaturalem_.”[665] The knowledge revealed in Scripture relates to
God’s free will and ordainment for man; which is, that man should attain
blessedness. Therefore the truths of Scripture are practical, having an
end in view; they are such as are necessary for Salvation. The Church has
authority to declare the meaning of Scripture, and supplement it through
its Catholic tradition.
Is theology, then, properly a science? Duns will not deny it; but thinks
it may more properly be called a _sapientia_, since according to its
nature, it is rather a knowledge of principles than a method of
conclusions. It consists in knowledge of God directly revealed. Therefore
its principles are not those of the human sciences: for example, it does
not accept its principles from metaphysics, although that science treats
of much that is contained in theology. Nor are the sciences--we can hardly
say the _other_ sciences--subordinated to it; since their province is
natural knowledge obtained through natural means. Theology, if it be a
science, is one apart from the rest. The knowledge which makes its
substance is never its end, but always means to its end; which is to say,
that it is practical and not speculative. By virtue of its primacy as well
as character, theology pertains to the Will, and works itself out in
practice: practical alike are its principles and conclusions. Apparently,
with Duns, theology is a science only in this respect, that its substance,
which is most rational, may be logically treated with a view to a complete
and consistent understanding of it.[666]
In entire consistency with these fundamental views, Duns held that man’s
supreme beatitude lay in the complete and perfect functioning of his will
in accordance with the will of God. This was a strong and noble view of
man, free to think and act and will and love, according to the will, and
aided by the Grace, of the Creator of his will and mind. The trouble lay,
as said before, in the method by which all was set forth and proved. The
truly consequent person who made theology a practical matter, was such a
one as Francis of Assisi, with his ceaselessly-burning Christlike love
actualizing itself in living act and word--or possibly such a one as
Bonaventura with his piety. But can it ever seem other than fantastic, to
state this principle, and then bulwark it with volumes of dialectic and a
metaphysics beyond the grasp of human understanding? Not from such does
one learn to do the will of God. This was scarcely the way to make good
the ultimate practical character of religion, as against Thomas’s frankly
intellectual view. Duns is as intellectual as Thomas; but Thomas is the
more consistent. And shall we say, that with Duns all makes toward God, as
the final end, through the strong action of the human will and love? So be
it--Thomas said, through intellection and through love. Again one queries,
did the Scotian reasoning ever foster love?
And then Duns set theology apart,--and supreme. Again, so be it. Let the
impulsive religion of the soul assert its primacy. But this was not the
way of Duns. Theology and philosophy do not rest on the same principles,
says he; but how does he demonstrate it? By substantiating this severance
by means of metaphysical dialectic, and using the same dialectic and the
same metaphysics to prove that theology can do without either. Not by
dialectic and metaphysics can theology free itself from them, and set
itself on other foundations.
Duns Scotus exerted great influence, both directly and through the
reaction occasioned by certain of his teachings. The next generations were
full of Scotists, who were proud if only they might be reputed more subtle
than their master. They succeeded in becoming more inane. There were other
men, whom the critical processes of Duns led to deny the validity of his
constructive metaphysics. Of those who profited by his teaching, yet
represented this reaction against parts of it, the ablest was the
Franciscan, William of Occam, a man but few years younger than Duns. He
was born in England, in the county of Surrey; and studied under Duns at
Paris. It is known that in 1320 he was lecturing with distinction at this
centre of intellectual life. Three years afterward, he quitted his chair,
and in the controversies then rending his Order, hotly espoused the cause
of the _Spirituales_--the Franciscans who would carry out the precepts of
Francis to the letter. Next, he threw himself with all the ardour of his
temper into the conflict with the papacy, and became the literary champion
of the rights of the State. He was cited before the pope, and imprisoned
at Avignon, but escaped, in 1328, and fled to the Court of the emperor,
Louis of Bavaria, to whom, as the accounts declare, he addressed the proud
word: _Tu me defendas gladio, ego te defendam calamo_. He died about 1347.
The succession, as it were, of Occam to Duns Scotus, is of great interest.
It was portentous for scholasticism. The pupil, for pupil in large measure
he was, profited by the critical methods and negations of the master. But
he denied the validity of the metaphysical constructions whereby Duns
sought to rebuild what his criticism had cast down or shaken. Especially,
Occam would not accept the subtle Doctor’s fabrication of an external
world in accord with the apparent necessities of thought. For with all
Duns’s critical insistency, never did a man more unhesitatingly make a
universe to fit the syllogistic processes of his reason, projected into
the external world. Here Occam would not follow him, as Aristotle would
not follow Plato.
It were well to consider more specifically these two sides of Occam’s
succession to Duns Scotus, shown in his acceptance and rejection of the
master’s teaching. He followed him, of course, in emphasising the
functions of the will; and accepted the conception of theology as
practical, and not speculative, in its ends; and, like Duns, he
distinguished, nay rather, severed, theology from philosophy, widening the
cleft between them. If, with Duns, theology was still, in a sense, a
science; with Occam it could hardly be called one. Although Duns denied
that theology was to be controlled by principles drawn from metaphysics,
he laboured to produce a metaphysical counterfeit, wherein theology,
founded on revelation and church law, should present a close parallel to
what it would have been, had its controlling principles been those of
metaphysics. Occam quite as resolutely as his master, proves the
untenability of current theological reasonings. More unreservedly than
Duns, he interdicts the testing of theology by reason: and goes beyond him
in restricting the sphere of rationally demonstrable truth, denying, for
instance, that reason can demonstrate God’s unity, infinity, or even
existence. Unlike Duns, he would not attempt to erect a quasi-scientific
theology, in the place of the systems he rejects. To make up for this
negative result, Occam asserted the verity of Scripture unqualifiedly, as
Duns also did. With Occam, Scripture, revelation, is absolutely
infallible, neither requiring nor admitting the proofs of reason. To be
sure he co-ordinates with it the Law of Nature, which God has implanted in
our minds. But otherwise theology, faith, stands alone, very isolated,
although on the alleged most certain of foundations. The provinces of
science and faith are different. Faith’s assent is not required for what
is known through evidence; science does not depend on faith. Nor does
faith or theology depend on _scientia_. And since, without faith, no one
can assent to those verities which are to be believed (_veritatibus
credibilibus_), there is no _scientia proprie dicta_ respecting them. So
the breach in the old scholastic, Thomist, unity was made utter and
irreparable. Theology stands on the surest of bases, but isolated,
unsupported; philosophy, all human knowledge, extends around and below
it, and is discredited because irrelevant to highest truth.
Thus far as to Occam’s loyal and rebellious succession to the theology of
Duns. In philosophy, it was much the same. He accepted his critical
methods, but would not follow him in his constructive metaphysics.
Although the older man was pre-eminently a metaphysician, the critical
side of his intellect drew empiric processes within the sweep of its
energies. Occam, unconvinced of the correspondence between the logic of
concepts and the facts of the external world, seeks to limit the
principles of the former to the processes of the mind. Accordingly, he
rejects the inferences of the Scotian dialectic which project themselves
outward, as proofs of the objective existence of abstract or general
ideas. It is thus from a more thoroughgoing application of the Scotian
analysis of mental processes, and a more thoroughgoing testing of the
evidence furnished by experience, that Occam refuses to recognise the
existence of universals save in the mind, where evidently they are
necessary elements of thinking. Manifestly, he is striving very earnestly
not to go beyond the evidence; and he is also striving to eliminate all
unevidenced and unnecessary elements, and those chimeras of the mind,
which become actual untruths when posited as realities of the outer world.
Such were the motives of Occam’s far from simple theory of cognition. In
it, mental perceptions, or cognitions, were regarded as symbols (_signa_,
_termini_) of the objects represented by them. They are natural, as
contrasted with the artificial symbols of speech and writing. They fall
into three classes; first, sense-perception of the concrete object, and
thirdly, so to speak, the abstract concept representative of many objects,
or of some ideal figment or quality. Intermediate between the two, Occam
puts _notitia intuitiva_, which relates to the existence of concrete
things. It serves as a basis for the cognition of their combinations and
relationships, and forms a necessary antecedent to abstract knowledge.
_Notitia abstractiva praesupponit intuitivam._[667] Occam holds that
_notitia intuitiva_ presents the concrete thing as it exists. Otherwise
with abstract or general concepts. They are _signa_ of mental
presentations, or processes; and there is no ground for transferring them
to the world of outer realities. Their existence is confined to the mind,
where they are formed from the common elements of other _signa_,
especially those of our _notitia intuitiva_. “And so,” says Occam, “the
genus is not common to many things through any sameness _in them_, but
through the common nature (_communitatem_) of the _signum_, by which the
same _signum_ is common to many things signified.”[668] These universals
furnish predicates for our judgments, since through them we conceive of
realities as containing a common element of nature. They are not mere
words; but have a real existence in the mind, where they perform functions
essential to thinking. Indirectly, through their bases of _notitiae
intuitivae_, they even reflect outer realities. “The Universal is no mere
figment, to which there is no correspondence of anything like it (_cui non
correspondet aliquod consimile_) in objective being, as that is figured in
the thinker.”
It results from the foregoing argument, that science, ordered knowledge,
which seeks co-ordination and unity, has not to do with things; but with
propositions, its object being that which is known, rather than that which
is. Things are singular, while science treats of general ideas, which are
only in the mind. “It should be understood, that any science, whether
_realis_ or _rationalis_, is only concerned with propositions
(_propositionibus_); because propositions alone are known.”[669]
It was not so very great a leap from the realism of Duns, which ascribed a
certain objective existence to general ideas, to the nominalism, or rather
conceptualism, of Occam, which denied it, yet recognised the real
existence and necessary functions of universals, in the mind. The
metaphysically proved realities of Duns were rather spectral, and Occam’s
universals, subjective though they were, lived a real and active life. One
feels that the realities of Duns’s metaphysics scarcely extended beyond
the thinker’s mind. In many respects Occam’s philosophy was a strenuous
carrying out of Duns’s teachings; and when it was not, we see the younger
man pushed, or rather repelled, to the positions which he took, by the
unsatisfying metaphysics of his teacher. History shows other rebounds of
thought, which seem abrupt, and yet were consequential in the same dual
way that Occam’s doctrine followed that of Duns. Out of the Brahmin
Absolute came the Buddhist wheel of change; even as Parmenides was
followed hard by Heraclitus. And how often Atheism steps on Pantheism’s
heels!
Thus, developing, revising, and changing, Occam carried out the work of
Duns, and promulgated a theory of knowledge which pointed on to much later
phases of thinking. In his school he came to be called _venerabilis
inceptor_, a proper title for the man who shook loose from so much
previous thought, and became the source of so many novel views. He had,
indeed, little fear of novelty. “Novelties (_novitates_) are not
altogether to be rejected; but as what is old (_vetusta_), on becoming
burdensome, should be abolished, so novelties when, to the sound judgment,
they are useful, fruitful, necessary, expedient, are the more boldly to be
embraced.”[670]
It is not, however, as the inceptor of new philosophies or of novel views
on the relations between State and Papacy that we are viewing Occam here
at the close of this long presentation of the ultimate intellectual
interests of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. But rather as the man
who represented the ways in which the old was breaking up, and embodied
the thoughts rending the scholastic system; who even was a factor in the
palpable decadence of scholastic thinking that had set in before his eyes
were closed. For from him came a new impulse to a renewed overstudy of
formal logic--with Thomas, for example, logic had but filled its proper
rôle. Withdrawing from metaphysics the matter pertaining to the problem of
universals and much more besides, Occam transferred the same to logic,
which he called _omnium artium aptissimum instrumentum_.[671] This
reinstatement of logic as the instrument and means of all knowledge was to
be the perdition of emptier-minded men, who felt no difference between
philosophy and the war of words. And in this respect at least the
decadence of scholasticism took its inception from this bold and virile
mind which had small reverence for popes or for the idols of the schools.
We shall not follow the lines of this decay, but simply notice where they
start.
In the growth and decline of thought, things so go hand in hand that it is
hard to say what draws and what is drawn. In the scholastic decadence, the
preposterous use of logic was a palpable element. Yet was it cause or
effect? Obviously both. Scholasticism was losing its grasp of life; and
the universities in the fourteenth century were crowded with men whose
minds mistook words for thoughts; and because of this they gave themselves
to hypertrophic logic. On the other hand, this windy study promoted the
increasing emptiness of philosophy.
Likewise, as cause and effect, inextricably bound together, the other
factors work, and are worked upon. The number of universities increases;
professors and students multiply; but there is an awful dearth of thinkers
among them. There ceases even to be a thorough knowledge of the scholastic
systems; men study from compendia; and thereby remain most deeply
ignorant, and unfecundated by the thoughts of their forbears. Cause and
effect again! We can hardly blame them, when tomes and encyclopaedias were
being heaped mountain high, with life crushed beneath the monstrous pile,
or escaping from it. But whether cause or effect, the energies of study
slackened, and even rotted, both at the universities and generally among
the members of the two Student Orders, from whom had come the last
creators--and perhaps destroyers--of scholasticism.
Next: the language of philosophy deteriorated, becoming turbid with the
barbarisms of hair-splitting technicalities. Likewise the method of
presentation lost coherence and clarity. All of which was the result of
academic decadence, and promoted it.
So decay worked on within the system, each failing element being both
effect and cause, in a general subsidence of merit. There were also
causes, as it were, from without; which possibly were likewise effects of
this scholastic decay As the life of the world once had gone out of
paganism, and put on the new vigour of Christianity, so the life of the
world was now forsaking scholasticism, and deriding, shall we say, the
womb it had escaped from. Was the embryo ripe, that the womb had become
its mephitic prison? At all events, the fourteenth century brought forth,
and the next was filled with, these men who called the readers of Duns
Scotus _Dunces_--and the word still lives. Men had new thoughts; the power
of the popes was shattered, and within the Church, popes and councils
fought for supremacy; there was no longer any actual unity of the Church
to preserve the unity of thought; Wicliffe had risen; Huss and Luther were
close to the horizon; a new science of observation was also stirring, and
a new humanism was abroad. The life of men had not lessened nor their
energies and powers of thought. Yet life and power no longer pulsed and
wrought within the old forms; but had gone out from them, and disdainfully
were flouting the emptied husks.