the subtle Doctor gathered around him 30,000 pupils. At Paris he was not heard by less eager or countless crowds. From Paris he went to Cologne, and there died. The vast writings of Duns Scotus, which as lectures, thousands thronged to hear, spread out as the dreary sandy wilderness of philosophy; if its border be now occasionally entered by some curious traveller, he may return with all the satisfaction, but hardly the reward, of a discoverer. The toil, if the story of his early death be true, the rapidity, of this man's mental productiveness, is perhaps the most wonderful fact in the intellectual history of our race. He is said to have died at the age of thirty-four, a period at which most minds are hardly at their fullest strength, having written thirteen closely-printed folio volumes, without an image, perhaps without a superfluous word, except the eternal logical formularies and amplifications. These volumes do not contain his Sermons and Commentaries, which were of endless extent. The mind of Duns might seem a wonderful reasoning machine; whatever was thrown into it came out in syllogisms: of the coarsest texture, yet in perfect flawless pattern. Logic was the idol of Duns; and this Logic-worship is the key to his whole philosophy. Logic was asserted by him not to be an art, but a science; ratiocination was not an instrument, a means for discovering truth: it was an ultimate end; its conclusions were truth.

• Haureau adopts this account of the age of Duns without hesitation; it has been controverted, however, rather from the incredibility of the fact than from reascns drawn from the very few known circumstances or dates of his life. See Schroeckh, xxiv. 437. Trithemius, a

Even his language was

very inaccurate writer, makes him a hearer of Alexander Hales in 1245; if so, at his death in 1308, he must have been above sixty. But no doubt the authority, whoever he was, of Trithemius wrote Scholar (follower), not Hearer.

Logic-worship. The older Schoolmen preserved something of the sound, the flow, the grammatical construction, we must not say of Cicero or Livy, but of the earlier Fathers, especially of St. Augustine. The Latinity of Duns is a barbarous jargon. His subtle distinctions constantly demanded new words: he made them without scruple. It would require the most patient study, as well as a new Dictionary, to comprehend his terms. Logic being a science, not an art, the objects about which it is conversant are not representatives of things, but real things; the conceptions of human thought, things, according to the Thomist theory, of second intention, are here as things of first intention, actual as subsistent. Duns, indeed, condescended to draw a distinction between pure and applied Logic; the vulgar applied Logic might be only an instrument; the universals, the entities of pure logic, asserted their undeniable reality. Duns Scotus is an Aristotelian beyond Aristotle, a Platonist beyond Plato; at the same time the most sternly orthodox of Theologians. On the eternity of matter he transcends his master: he accepts the hardy saying of Avicembron, of the universality of

f Scotus has neither the philosophic dignity nor the calm wisdom of Thomas; he is rude, polemic. He does not want theologic hatred. "Saraceni-vilissimi porci―asini Manichei. Ille maledictus Averrhoes."-Ritter, p. 360.

"Die Richtung, welche er seiner Wissenschaft gegeben hat, ist durchaus kirchlich."-Ritter, p. 336.

"Je reviens, dit-il, à la thèse d'Avicembron (ego autem ad positionem Avicembronis redeo), et je soutiens d'abord que toute substance, créée, corporelle ou spirituelle, participe de la matière. Je prouve ensuite que cette

h

matière est une en tous-quod sit unica materia."-Haureau, p. 328. "Selbst die Materie, obwohl sie die niedrigste von allem Seienden ist, muss doch also ein Seiendes gedacht werden und hat ihre Idee in Gott."-Ritter, p. 432. The modern Baconian philosophy may appear in one sense to have reached the same point as the metaphysical philosophy of Duns Scotus, to have subtilised matter into immateriality, to have reached the point where the distinction between the spiritual and material seems to be lost, and almost mocks definition. It is arrived at centres of

matter. He carries matter not only higher than the intermediate world of Devils and Angels, but up into the very Sanctuary, into the Godhead itself. And how is this? by dematerialising matter, by stripping it of everything which, to the ordinary apprehension, and not less to philosophic thought, has distinguished matter; by spiritualising it to the purest spirituality. Matter only became material by being conjoined with form. Before that it subsisted potentially only, abstract, unembodied, immaterial; an entity conceivable alone, but as being, conceivable, therefore real. For this end the Subtle Doctor created, high above all vulgar common matter, a primary primal, a secondary primal, a tertiary primal matter; and yet this matter was One. The universal Primary primal matter is in all things; but as the secondary primal matter has received the double form of the corruptible and incorruptible, it is shared between these two. The tertiary primal matter distributes itself among the infinite species which range under these genera. It is strange to find Scholasticism, in both its opposite paths, gliding into Pantheism. An universal infinite Matter, matter refined to pure Spiritualism, comprehending the finite, sounds like the most extreme Spinosism. But Scotus, bewildered by his own skilful word-juggling, perceives not this, and repudiates the consequence with indignation. God is still with him

force, powers impalpable, imponder- | ruptionis, quam mutant et transmutant able, infinite. But it is one thing to agentia creata, seu angeli seu agentia refine away all the qualities of matter by experiment, and to do it by stripping words of their conventional meaning. Mr. Faraday's discoveries and his fame will not meet the fate of Duns Scotus. i "Dicitur materia secundo prima quæ est subjectum generationis et cor

corruptibilia; quæ ut dixi, addit ad materiam primo primam, quia esse subjectum generationis non potest sine aliquâ formâ substantiali aut sine quantitate, quæ sunt extra rationem materiæ primo primæ.”—Haureau.

the high, remote Monad, above all things, though throughout all things. In him, and not without him, according to what is asserted to be Platonic doctrine, are the forms and ideas of things. With equal zeal, and with equal ingenuity with the Thomists, he attempts to maintain the free will of God, whom he seems to have bound in the chain of inexorable necessity." He saves it by a distinction which even his subtlety can hardly define. Yet, behind and without this nebulous circle, Duns Scotus, as a metaphysical and an ethical writer, is remarkable for his bold speculative views on the nature of our intelligence, on its communication with the outward world, by the senses, by its own innate powers, as well as by the influence of the superior Intelligence. He thinks with perfect freedom; and if he spins his spider-webs, it is impossible not to be struck at once by their strength and coherence. Translate him, as some have attempted to translate him, into intelligible language, he is always suggestive, sometimes conclusive.

The war of Scotists and Thomists long divided the

Haureau, p. 359.

66

L'origine de toutes les erreurs propagées au sujet de la Création vient, dit-il, de ce que les philosophes ont témérairement assimilé la volonté divine à la volonté humaine, aussi combat-il de toutes ses forces cette assimilation, sans réussir, toutefois, à démêler d'une manière satisfaisante ce que c'est la determination temporelle d'une acte éternelle.". Haureau, p. 363. The reader who may be curious to learn how Duns Scotus solves other important physical and metaphysical questions, the principle of motion, the personality and immortality of the soul,

will do well to read the chapters of M. Haureau, compared, if he will, with the heavier synopsis of Brucker, the neater of Tenneman, the more full and elaborate examination of Ritter. Ritter dwells more on the theological and ethical part of the system of Duns Scotus, whom he ranks not only as the most acute and subtlest, but, as should seem, the highest of the Schoolmen. The pages in which he traces the theory of Scotus respecting the means by which our knowledge is acquired are most able, and full of interest for the metaphysical reader.

Schools, not the less fierce from the utter darkness in which it was enveloped. It is not easy to define in what consisted their implacable, unforgiven points of difference. If each combatant had been compelled rigidly to define every word or term which he employed, concord might not perhaps have been impossible; but words were their warfare, and the war of words their business, their occupation, their glory. The Conceptualism or Eclecticism of St. Thomas (he cannot be called a Nominalist) admitted so much Realism, under other forms of speech; the Realism of Duns Scotus was so absolutely a Realism of words, reality was with him something so thin and unsubstantial; the Augustinianism of St. Thomas was so guarded and tempered by his high ethical tone, by his assertion of the loftiest Christian morality; the Pelagianism charged against Scotus is so purely metaphysical, so balanced by his constant, for him vehement, vindication of Divine grace," only with notions peculiar to his philosophy, of its mode of operation, and with almost untraceable distinctions as to its mode of influence, that nothing less than the inveterate pugnacity of Scholastic Teaching, and the rivalry of the two Orders, could have perpetuated the strife.

That

Ritter, p. 359. He is not only vollziehn."-Scotus draws a distinction orthodox on this point; he is hierar- (he saves everything by a distinction chical to the utmost. He adopts the which his subtlety never fails to furphrase ascribed to St. Augustine, that nish) between the absolute and secondhe would not believe the Gospel but ary will of God. on the witness of the Church. The power of the keys he extends not only to temporal, but to eternal punishments -"doch mit dem Zusatze, dass hierbei, so wie in andern Dingen der Priester nur als Werkzeug Gottes handle, welcher selbst eines bösen Engels sich bedienen könnte um einer gültige Taufe zu | be free. VOL. IX.

Ritter thinks their philosophy vitally oppugnant (p. 364), but it is in reconciling their philosophy with the same orthodox theology that they again approximate. One defines away necessity till it ceases to be necessity, the other fetters free-will till it ceases to

L