Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 3, 2025
He describes the hypothesis of vortices and the doctrine of innate ideas as no longer tenable, and even as ridiculous; but do not let us forget, he says with a fine movement of candour, that it was Descartes who opened the way; he who set an example to men of intelligence, of shaking off the yoke of scholasticism, of opinion, of authority in a word, of prejudices and barbarism.
Alas, these words are but pedantic and rhetorical cloaks for our ignorance, and to project them behind the facts and regard them as presiding from thence over the course of nature is a piece of the most deplorable scholasticism.
That trumpet-call which rang through Europe, which summoned the scholasticism and genius of the modern ages, from the endless battles of the human dogmas and conceits, into the field of true knowledge, that summons which recalled, and disciplined, and gave the word of command to the genius of the modern ages, that was already tumultuously rushing thither, that call which was able to command the modern learning, and impose on it, for immediate use, the New Machine of Learning, that Machine which, even in its employment in the humblest departments of observation, has already formed, ere we know it, the new mind, which has disciplined and trained the modern intelligence, and created insidiously new habits of judgment and belief, created, too, a new stock of truths, which are accepted as a part of the world's creed, and from which the whole must needs be evolved in time, this, in itself, was no small step towards securing the great ends of this enterprise.
Keeping steadily in sight the truth that the real quality of the Renaissance was intellectual, that it was the emancipation of the reason for the modern world, we may inquire how feudalism was related to it. The mental condition of the Middle Ages was one of ignorant prostration before the idols of the Church dogma and authority and scholasticism.
The political action of Savonarola forms but a short episode in the history of Florence. His moral revival belongs to the history of popular enthusiasm. His philosophical and theological writings are chiefly interesting to the student of post-medæival scholasticism.
It is easy to appreciate, then, what Professor Saintsbury said in a recent volume on the thirteenth century: And there have even been in these latter days some graceless ones who have asked whether the science of the nineteenth century after an equal interval will be of any more positive value whether it will not have even less comparative interest than that which appertains to the scholasticism of the thirteenth.
A narrower scholasticism would not have tolerated them, much less pressed for their adoption. Wellesley is one of the earliest of the colleges to place the fine arts and music on her list of electives counting for an academic degree.
And the scholasticism is not more obtrusive here, the learned sock is not more ostentatiously paraded, than in some critical places in those performances; while the humour that underlies the erudition issues from a depth of learning not less profound.
Then it was, that, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Occidental mind, astir under the oceanic movements of the modern, arose to break the spell of scholasticism that had fettered and frozen the intellect of man. An all-invading spirit of inquiry, analysis, skepticism, became rife. An unappeasable hunger for facts, facts, facts, took possession of the general intellect.
The statement is no doubt coloured by the contempt of the new scholars for the scholastic philosophy which had taken the place of letters in England as elsewhere, but even scholasticism was now at its lowest ebb.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking