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From the purport of what he said I apperceived that he was of quite a different genius from those Schoolmen who first arose, namely, that he hatched what he wrote from his own thought, and from the same source produced his philosophical system, so that the terms which he invented, and applied to subjects of thought, were forms of expression by which he described interior things; also that he was excited to such pursuits by a delight of the affection, and by a desire of knowing the things that belonged to the thought and the understanding; and that he followed obediently whatever his spirit had dictated.
It is produced and maintained by law and institutions, and is, therefore, concrete and historical. Sometimes we speak distinctively of civil liberty; but if there be any liberty other than civil liberty that is, liberty under law it is a mere fiction of the schoolmen, which they may be left to discuss.
And how great a happiness is this, think you? while, as if Holy Writ were a nose of wax, they fashion and refashion it according to their pleasure; while they require that their own conclusions, subscribed by two or three Schoolmen, be accounted greater than Solon's laws and preferred before the papal decretals; while, as censors of the world, they force everyone to a recantation that differs but a hair's breadth from the least of their explicit or implicit determinations.
In his dogmatic treatise, De doctrina Christiana, Milton formulated this sentiment in the thesis, borrowed from the schoolmen, that the soul was communicated "in semine patris."
So if a man's wit be wandering, let him study the mathematics; for in demonstrations, if his wit be called away never so little, he must begin again: if his wit be not apt to distinguish or find differences, let him study the schoolmen; for they are cymini sectores: if he be not apt to beat over matters, and to call one thing to prove and illustrate another, let him study the lawyers' cases: so every defect of the mind may have a special receipt.
The mediaeval schoolmen turned aside from the hard path of skepticism, long searchings and investigation of actual phenomena, and confidently believed that they could find truth by the easy way of revelation and the elaboration of unquestioned dogmas. This reliance on authority is a fundamental primitive trait.
The objections are well taken, but the middleman is not only a reality; he also has a name by which he is known in business. If Prof. Walker wants to have a cellar dug or rock blasted, he can go to Pennsylvania and find a "venturer" to undertake the work; and there seems to be no good reason why a term that is already in common use and well understood should be rejected by the schoolmen.
When the schoolmen talked of the essence of an individual, they did not mean the properties implied in its name, for the names of individuals imply no properties.
We have spoken of the zeal of the Milesian Chiefs in accumulating MSS. and in rewarding Bards and Scribes. We are enabled to form some idea of the mental resources of an Anglo-Irish nobleman of the fifteenth century, from the catalogue of the library remaining in Maynooth Castle, in the reign of Henry VIII. Of Latin books, there were the works of several of the schoolmen, the dialogues of St.
Viewed in relation to the subsequent mental activity of New England, it may be said to have occupied a position somewhat similar to that which the polemics of the medieval schoolmen occupied in relation to the European thought of the Renaissance, and of the age of Hobbes and Descartes.
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