dusty shelves of ancient libraries. Their system has been for nearly three centuries the constant butt of ignorant censure and stolid pretension. Yet a system which en(hiretl so Ion;;', which engrossed so many minds of wide cidture and of marvellous jjenetration, wliich at- tracted so much of contemporaneous regard, which en- listed such intense and general enthusiasm, which rilled the intellectual atmosphere for long generations, which almost "ruled the court, tlie camp, the grove,"' in the persons of Anselm and Occam and Abelard, cannot be dismissed with a sneer or safely repudiated with indif- ference. Hallam, following in the wake of Brucker, with whom he was probably unacquainted, has repeated the stale reproaches against the scholastics, though ac- knowledging that he had read ncitiier the works of the schoolmen themselves nor the historians of their pliilos- ophy {Middle Af/es, ch. ix, pt. ii). But the seconil-hand censures of Hallam are rendered ridiculous by the meas- ured commendations of Leibnitz, to which he inade- quately refers, and by the candid admiration of Sir William Hamilton and other competent judges. Sir William, speaking c>f Keid's repetition of the current abuse, observes: "This is the vulgar opinion in regard to the scholastic philosophy. The few are, however, now aware that the human mind, though partially, was never more powerfully developed than during the Jlid- dle Ages'" (Reid, Worh; [ed. Hamilton], p. 2(18, note; comp. Hamilton, Ditcuss. p. 54, note; "id ed. St. Hilaire, De la Lngique d\Aristote, pref. vol. i, p. v; Remusat, Abeliird, ii, 282, 548). St. Hilaire justly designates "La scolastiquc — berceau de I'intelligence moderne." The world cannot aft"ord to disown any of the laborious services by which knowledge and civilization have been advanced, no matter how strange the}' may now appear. Nor can it wisely forget those who have labored long and earnestly in its behalf. It may always be pre- sumed that whatever occupied the ardent endeavors of many generations had some serious meaning, whether this meaning does or does not lie open to hasty appre- hension; and that it solved some serious difficulties of the time and ministered to their removal from the on- ward path of humanity. It is certainly blindness and arrrogance to reject, without careful examination, what we do not understand, because we do not understand it ; and not to understand it, because unwilling to make an effort to understand it. There is much which is un- suited to modern habitudes of thought, much which is strange and bewildering under modern associations, and which is futile, perverse, or erroneous in the writings of tlie schoolmen; much that may be judiciously aban- doned as having served its turn and prepared and disci- plined modern intelligence. But, as Richard Baxter and Leibnitz — very dissimilar minds — both recognised, there will still remain much that is valuable and de- serving of sedulous appreciation. Indeed, to those who have sipped from the original fountains, who have pon- dered over the divisions of Aquinas or grappled with the distinctions of Duns Scotus, tliere will apjiear no ex- travagance in the question of a recent writer: "What doubts have since been mooted — wliat difficulties sug- gested in morals, religion, or politics during three cen- turies of unfettered religious inquiry wliich they, the schoolmen, have not anticipated and dissected with the calmness of scientiric anatomists V" (Brewer, Letters mid Papers in the Rcvjh of Ilenrt/ VllI, vol. iii, p. ccccxiii. Comp. Proudhon, CreiUion de VOrdre dans VHuinanite, III, iii, § 203).
I. Orif/in of the Term Scholasticism. — The word "scho- lastic" ((T;^o\aTr((c 'ic) does not occur in classic Greek in the sense so familiar from its customary application to the philosophers of the Middle Ages. Bayle (s. v. "Aristotle") says that it was not used in Aristotle's time to "signify a scholar, a student, or a schoolman." It occurs four times in Aristotle himself, always with the meaning of idle or disengaged — once in distinct opposi- tion to practical. No distinct instance of its medi;eval usage is discoverable in Stephens's Thesaurus. The ear-
liest approximation to it presents itself in Posidonius (Athen. Deipnos. V, xlviii) ; but it still clings to its pri- mary meaning of unemployed, leisurely. It must be re- membered that "school" had originally the same import, and that its Latin name was ludus (play). Gradually "scholastic" came to mean "characteristic of the school," particularly a school of rhetoric — the master of such a school, a teacher of rhetoric, an advocate in the courts of law.- It is employed in this last sense in a rescript of the emperor Constantius II {Cud. Theod. viii, x, 11). It is sometimes with reference to a forensic vocation, sometimes with reference to elegant culture (which the word afterwards denoted), sometimes with reference to rhetorical instruction, that the Eastern Greeks spoke of Eulogius scholasticus, Leontius scholasticus, Sozomen scholasticus, Evagrius scholasticus, etc. The term, how- ever, gradually lapsed into new significations, so that in the amusing account which Anna Comnena in the r2th century gives of John Italus {Alexiud, Y,\'ni), it is put in contrast with polite, rhetorical accomplishment, and sig- nifies a dialectician. The word is translated "umbrati- lis," by Possinus, in his version of Anna, in accordance with its classical sense; and this rendering is not changed in the revision of this version by Schopen in the Bonn edition. It is impossible, however, to ignore its indica- tion of logical pursuits. It probably received this signif- icance by importation from the contemporaneous usage in the schools of the West. The fortune of the word in the Latin language was similar to its experiences in the Greek; but there is greater facility in tracing the mu- tations of its meaning. It does not occur in Cicero. The younger Pliny gives umbraticus as its equivalent (ix, Ep. ii). In Quintilian, in the Dialofpie on Orators, and in Aulus (iellius, it denotes "appertaining to rhetor- ical schools." In Petronius it designates the pupils of such a school. In the 4th century it was used for ele- gant, cultivated, refined ("scholasticus, ad GriBcas mun- ditias eruditus" [Capitolin.Maximin. Jr. c. iii]). In the 5th century it meant eloquent (" scholastici ac diserti" [Salvian, De Guh. Dei, proef.]). Several of the meanings were, no doubt, concurrent. The predominant meaning, under the empire of Rome in the West, was a person accomplished in the studies of a school of rhetoric, whether as disciple, teacher, or graduate. Rhetorical education, as the preparation of Cicero and the Institutes of Quintilian abundantly attest, had early become uni- versal or encyclopicdical instruction. As rhetorical pursuits declined and as other studies waned, while log- ic gradually acquired a notable preponderance in the Church and in the ecclesiastical schools, as afterwards in the rising universities of Western Europe, scholasti- cism became identified with logic. Logic, however, em- braced, or assumed to embrace, all subjects in its rigid grasp, as is shown by the commentaries of the greaPer schoolmen on all the works of Aristotle, and by their violent application of the logic of the schools to all de- partments of knowledge and action. But the universal range claimed by rhetoric in the Roman schools of rhetoric was never renounced by those who retained the name of scholastics while substituting logic for rhetoric. The process of the transmigration of meanings is easily discernible. School study is the pursuit of those who have leisure and therefore opportunity for learning. Rhetoric became the predominant and exclusive object of school instruction, bin comprehended all knowledge. Logic supplanted rhetoric. Analysis and demonstra- tion took the place of rhetorical elegance of expression, and aspired to the dominion of all knowledge. The new teachers and pupils retained the established name; and thus the scholastic of the Jliddle Ages emerged out of the idler of classical antiquity, 'i'lie name is early applied to the masters of the cathedral schools.