sublime simplicity of the Mosaic creation by the Word of God out of nothing. Since St. Augustine, the Platonic doctrine of the pre-existence of the forms, or the ideas, of all things in the mind of God, had been almost the accredited doctrine of the Church. Even Matter was in God, but before it became material, only in its form and possibility. Man, indeed, seems to be doomed, if he can soar above the corporeal anthropomorphism which arrayed the Deity in human form (the anthropomorphism of the poets, the sculptors, and the painters), to admit an intellectual anthropomorphism; to endeavour to comprehend and define the laws and the capacities of the Divine Intelligence according to his own. Yet when Albert thus accepted a kind of Platonic emanation theory of all things from the Godhead, he repudiated as detestable, as blasphemous, the absolute unity of the Divine Intelligence with the intelligence of man. This doctrine of Averrhoes destroyed the personality of man, if not of God. He recoils from Pantheism with religious horror. His perpetual object daraus erschlossen, dass Gott, die ewige Form, und die Materie nicht mit einander gemein haben könnten, also auch nicht die Ewigkeit. Hier gebraucht Albert diesen Satz des Aristoteles gegen den Aristoteles selbst."Ritter, pp. 201-2. f beauté parfaite, et il s'etait efforcé de les reproduire sur le bois ou sur la pierre. Pour représenter Dieu comme l'intelligence parfaite, le philosophe proceda suivant la même méthode; arrivant au dernier terme de l'abstraction, il trouva dans l'entendement humain, les idées générales, et il ne sut alors mieux faire, que de definir l'intelligence de Dieu le lieu primordial de ces idées."— Haureau, p. 84. Compare the whole passage, as just as it is brilliant. "Le Dieu des philosophes, c'est à dire des Theologiens éclairés, ne fut pas, il est vrai, celui des sculpteurs et des peintres; mais il eut bien avec lui, pour ne rien celer, quelques traits de ressemblance. Pour représenter la figure de Dieu, l'artiste avait choisi "Primum principium est indefidans la nature, avec les yeux du corps, nienter fluens, quo intellectus univerles formes qui lui avaient semblé ré-saliter agens indesinenter est intelligenpondre le mieux au concept ideal de la tias emittens "-Apud Ritter, p. 199. is to draw the distinction between the Eternal and the Temporal, the Infinite and the Finite; how knowledge is attained, how the knowledge of God differs from the enthusiastic contemplation of God. God, though not to be comprehended, may be known, and that not only by grace, but by natural means. God is as the Light, everywhere seen, but everywhere escaping the comprehension of the vision. God is omnipresent, all-working yet limited by the capacities of existing things. God the Creator (and Creation was an eternal, inalienable attribute of the God) was conceived, as having primarily called into being four coeval things of everlasting duration,-the primal Matter, Time, Heaven, the Everlasting Intelligence. But Matter, and Time, it should seem, were properly neither Matter nor Time. Matter has no proper existence, it is only privative; it is something by which and in which works Intelligence.h The Heavens exist (and in the Heavens, though this is something, as it were, apart from his theory, Albert admits the whole established order and succession of the Angels from Dionysius the Areopagite) and Intelligence, which subsists, though oppressed and bowed "Ille enim maxime intelligibilis est nita intelligibilia, capi vel compreet omnis intellectus et intelligibilis hendi potest ab intellectu creato." causa et in omni intelligibili attingitur, Summa Theolog., quoted in Ritter, sicut lumen quod est actus visibilium, p. 196. The finite cannot compreattingitur in omni visibili per visum. hend the Infinite. But Albert always Sicut tamen lumen secundum immensi- pre-supposes the moral as well as the tatem, quam habet in rota solis et Christian preparative for knowledge, secundum immensitatem potestatis, qua virtue, and faith. omnia visibilia comprehendere potest, non potest capi vel comprehendi a visu, ita nec intellectus divinus, secundum excellentiam, quâ excellit in se ipso, et secundum potestatem quâ illustrare potest super omnia, etiam super infi h Ritter, p. 205. The whole Universe was a progressive descendant development, and ascendant movement, towards perfection. down, even in lifeless things. But between the higher, imperishable intelligence of man and the intelligence of God there is nothing intermediate;k and yet there is eternal, irreconcileable difference. The Unity of God must develope itself in multiplicity. Man's Intelligence is a continual efflux from God, an operation of God, but yet not divine. As God it has its own Free Will." And so Albert goes on, and so went on Albert's successors, and so go on Albert's interpreters, with these exquisitely subtle distinctions of words, which they refuse to see are but words, making matter immaterial," forms actual beings or substances; making God himself, with perfect free-will, act under a kind of necessity; making thoughts things, subtilising things to thoughts; beguiling themselves and beguiling mankind with the notion that they are passing the impassable barriers of human knowledge; approaching boldly, then suddenly recoiling from the most fatal conclusions. In the pride and in the delight of conscious power, in the exercise of the reason, and its wonderful instrument Logic, these profound and hardy thinkers are still reproducing the same eternal problems; detaching the immaterial part of man, as it were, from his humanity, and blending him with the Godhead; bringing the Godhead down into the world, till the distinction is lost; and then perceiving k On the great mediaval question Albert would be at once a Realist, a Conceptualist, and a Nominalist. There were three kinds of Universals, one abstract, self-existing, one in the object, one in the mind.-Ritter, p. 219. Haureau, p. 14. M. Haureau treats this part at length. m Yet he does not deny, he asserts in other places, that which Christianity and Islam, Latin, Greek, and Arabian, equally admitted, the operation of God in the soul of man through Angels. n "Daher ist das Sein an einem jeden Geschöpfe verschieden von dem, was es ist."-Ritter, p. 211. The matter is only the outward vehicle, as it were,--the Form gives the Being. This is the theory of Averrhoes. See on this subject the just and sensible observation of M. Haureau, from p. 34. and crying out in indignation against what seems their own blasphemy. The close of all Albert the Great's intense labours, of his enormous assemblage of the opinions of the philosophers of all ages, and his efforts to harmonize them with the high Christian Theology, is a kind of Eclecticism, an unreconciled Realism, Conceptualism, Nominalism, with many of the difficulties of each. The intelligence of God was but an archetype of the intelligence of man, the intelligence of man a type of that of God; each peopled with the same ideas, representatives of things, conceptional entities, even words; existing in God before all existing things, before time, and to exist after time; in man existing after existing things, born in time, yet to share in the immortality of the intelligence. Thus religion, the Christian religion, by throwing upward God into his unapproachable, ineffable, inconceivable Mystery, is perhaps, in its own province, more philosophical than philosophy. Albert, in admitting the title of the Aristotelian or Greek, or Arabian philosophy, to scrutinize, to make comprehensible the Divine Intelligence; in attempting, however glorious the attempt, the Impossible, and affixing no limits to the power of human reason and logic, while he disturbed, to some extent unintentionally deposed, Theology, substituted no high and coherent Philosophy. Safe in his own deep religiousness, and his doctrinal orthodoxy, he saw not how with his philosophic speculations he undermined the foundations of his theology. But this view of Albert the Great is still imperfect and unjust. His title to fame is not that he introduced and interpreted to the world, the Metaphysics and Physics of Aristotle, and the works of the Arabian philosophers on these abstruse subjects but because he VOL. IX. K opened the field of true philosophic observation to mankind. In natural history he unfolded the more precious treasures of the Aristotelian philosophy, he revealed all the secrets of ancient science, and added large contributions of his own on every branch of it; in mathematics he commented on and explained Euclid; in chymistry, he was a subtle investigator; in astronomy, a bold speculator. Had he not been premature—had not philosophy been seized and again enslaved to theology, mysticism, and worldly politics-he might have been more immediately and successfully followed by the first, if not by the second, Bacon.° Thomas Of all the schoolmen Thomas Aquinas P has left the He was a son of the Count of greatest name. Aquinas. Aquino, a rich fief in the Kingdom of Naples. His mother, Theodora, was of the line of the old Norman Kings; his brothers, Reginald and Landolph, held high rank in the Imperial armies. His family was connected by marriage with the Hohenstaufens; they had Swabian blood in their veins, and so the great schoolman was of the race of Frederick II. Monasticism seized on Thomas in his early youth; he became an inmate of Monte Casino; at sixteen years of age he caught the more fiery and vigorous enthusiasm of the Dominicans. By them he was sent―no unwilling proselyte and pupil— to France. He was seized by his worldly brothers, and • "Nous n'avons interrogé que le philosophe; nous n'avons parcouru que trois ou quatre de ses vingt-un volumes in-folio, œuvre prodigieuse, presque surhumaine, à laquelle aucune autre ne saurait être comparée: que nous auraient appris, si nous avions eu le loisir de les consulter, le théologien formé à l'école des Pères, le scrupu ux investigateur des mystères de la nature, le chimiste subtil, l'audacieux |