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They are making a practical experiment with the classics, and to their surprise do not find them 'good for life. Here is the School, then, with the classics on trial in the persons of these new school-men. That is the central group. What more do we want? Here is the new and the old already.
Our inward experiences were thus arranged in three separate classes, the passive sense, or what the School-men call the merely receptive quality of the mind; the voluntary; and the spontaneous, which holds the middle place between both.
Who shall say that this department of the human life this alone, is going to be held back to the past, with bonds and cramps of iron, while all else is advancing; that this is going to be held forever as a place where the old Aristotelian logic, which we have driven out of every other field, can keep its hold unchallenged still, as a place for the metaphysics of the school-men, the empty conceits, the old exploded inanities of the Dark Ages, to breed and nestle in undisturbed?
Archbishop Fitz-Ralph, John Scotus of Down, William of Drogheda, Professor of both laws at Oxford, are respectable representatives among the last and greatest group of the School-men. Another illustrious name remains to be added to the roll of Irish Scholastics, that of Maurice O'Fihely, Archbishop of Tuam.
The following is Charles Lamb's letter to Mr. 1st. Whether God loves a lying angel better than a true man? 2nd. Whether the archangel Uriel could affirm an untruth, and if he could, whether he would? 3rd. Whether honesty be an angelic virtue, or not rather to be reckoned among those qualities which the school-men term 'Virtutes minus splendidae'? 4th.
There is not, indeed, any single view of human nature under its present condition, which is not sufficient to extinguish in us all the secret seeds of pride; and, on the contrary, to sink the soul into the lowest slate of humility, and what the school-men call self-annihilation. Pride was not made for man, as he is, A sinful, An ignorant, A miserable being.
Whewell says that the ancients, or the school-men, or any modern inquirers, missed discovering the real law of a phenomenon because they applied to it an inappropriate instead of an appropriate conception; he can only mean that in comparing various instances of the phenomenon, to ascertain in what those instances agreed, they missed the important points of agreement; and fastened upon such as were either imaginary, and not agreements at all, or, if real agreements, were comparatively trifling, and had no connection with the phenomenon, the law of which was sought.
Of the former clause in this assertion, as it respects the comparative merits of the ancient metaphysicians, including their commentators, the School-men, and of the modern and British and French philosophers from Hobbes to Hume, Hartley, and Condillac, this is not the place to speak.
The axioms to which he attributes this exceptional emancipation from the limits which confine all our other possibilities of knowledge; the chinks through which, as he represents, one ray of light finds its way to us from behind the curtain which veils from us the mysterious world of Things in themselves—are the two principles, which he terms, after the school-men, the Principle of Contradiction, and the Principle of Excluded Middle: the first, that two contradictory propositions can not both be true; the second, that they can not both be false.
Thomas Aquinas, who, as a theologian, has perhaps had greater weight in the Catholic Church than any other man. His testimony may also show us what were the general sentiments of the school-men in the thirteenth century, when he wrote.
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