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This is what Anselm essayed to do; but the Schoolmen who succeeded Abélard often drew dialectical inferences from what appeared to be true, while some of them were so sophistical as to argue from false premises.
But, apart from the fact that the narratives so carefully compiled have, in many cases, turned out to be perversions of the truth, and granting even that all these allegations are impartial and true, the general tenor and tendency of the history of those times is now admitted to be ample refutation of such accusations, and impartial writers confess that the ecclesiastical influence, during those ages, was clearly set against the oppression of the people, and finally resulted in the formation of those representative and moderate governments which are the boast of the present age; and that the principles enunciated by the great schoolmen, led by Thomas Aquinas, founded the order of society on justice, religion, and right.
And after him, by many schoolmen, such as Aquinas, Alensis, Albertus, Bonaventura, Richardus, and Dominicus Soto, all mentioned by the Archbishop of Spalato, lib. 2, cap. 4, num. 25.
Primitive animism continues to enchain the minds of the people, despite the differentiation established between the higher and the secondary powers, and despite the high point of development reached by the schoolmen in their attempts to systematize and, in a measure, to purify the ancient beliefs.
The Schoolmen of the Middle Ages, while condemning abortion from the time of conception, preferred the opinion of Aristotle, that the rational soul is not infused till the fœtus is sufficiently developed to receive it.
Its being, he says, consists in being perceived: in the Latin of the schoolmen its 'esse' is 'percipi'. He fully admits that the tree must continue to exist even when we shut our eyes or when no human being is near it.
But now they send us learned eloquence; with British aid we shall chase away barbarity and come by our own again. The teaching of the Schoolmen made its way into Italy, but had little vogue; and with the Church, through such Popes as Nicholas V, on the side of the Renaissance, resistance almost disappeared.
As for the souls or substantial forms, M. Bayle is right in adding: 'that there is nothing more inconvenient for those who admit substantial forms than the objection which is made that they could not be produced save by an actual creation, and that the Schoolmen are pitiable in their endeavours to answer this. But there is nothing more convenient for me and for my system than this same objection.
As The Rover, with her nimble cargoes, was first cousin to The Flying Dutchman, with his crew of ghosts, so the bills received by Severne, as purchase-money for his ship, necessarily partook of that ship's aerial character. Indeed they existed, as the schoolmen used to say, in posse, but not in esse. To be less pedantic and more exact, they existed as slips of blank paper, with a Government stamp.
In 1501, when he had reached his eighteenth year, he entered the university of Erfurt, with the view of qualifying himself for the legal profession. He went through the usual studies in the classics and the schoolmen, and took his degree of doctor of philosophy, or master of arts, in 1505, when he was twenty-one years of age.
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