»::»•* 3»

;iem

9.^M

JC^»

*:■#■

P'^:m

.,..»^«

Digitized by the Internet Archive

in 2009 with funding from

Ontario Council of University Libraries

http://www.archive.org/details/studiesinhistory03colu

STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF IDEAS

VOLUME III

STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF IDEAS

EDITED BY

THE DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY

OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

VOLUME III

v^

New York: Morningside Heights

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

1935

CopyrigM 1935

Columbia University Press Published 1935

B

61

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA GEORGE BANTA PUBLISHING COMPANY • MENASHA, WISCONSIN

CONTENTS

_^ An Empirical Survey of Empiricisms, by John Dewey 3

Greek Genius and Race Mixture, by Matthew Thomp- son McClure 25

Renaissance and Method in Philosophy, by Richard

McKeon 37

/ Cartesian Doctrine and the Animal Soul: an Inci- dent in the Formation of the Modern Philosophical Tradition, by Albert G. A. Balz 117

J The Role of Descartes in Seventeenth-Century Eng- land, by Sterling P. Lampreeht 181

Locke's Essay, by Frederick J. E. Woodbridge 243

Spinoza : Art and the Geometric Order, by Howard

Selsam 255

The Emergence of Space and Time in English Philoso- ^ phy, by John Tull Baker 273

Coleridge, by Rudolf Kagey 297

Hegel and Marx, by Sidney Hook 331

-^ Mill's Methods and Formal Logic, by Herbert W.

Schneider 407

"Impossible Numbers": a Chapter in the History of -* Modern Logic, by Ernest Nagel 429

The Pragmatic Naturalism of Chauncey Wright, by

Gail Kennedy 477

Index 505

AN EMPIRICAL SURVEY OP EMPIRICISMS

JOHN DEWEY

AN EMPIRICAL SURVEY OF EMPIRICISMS

JOHN DEWEY

There are three historic conceptions of experience. The first is that formulated in classic antiquity, which persisted well into the seventeenth century and, as far as time is concerned, is the most important and influential. The sec- ond is that characteristic of two centuries, the eighteenth and the nineteenth. Although it is more recent, it is what now generally comes to mind when the term empiricism is used. The third is the latest movement, still in process of development. In discussing them it will be well to forget about empiricists and to consider the various concepts of experience. For if we start with the "ism," there is danger of becoming involved, as most discussions of "isms" do, in a somewhat sterile dialectic; while the conceptions of ex- perience behind the different forms of empiricism and the various controversies concerning them are at least attempts to interpret a definite subject matter.

The clue to the Greek conception of the nature and limita- tions of experience may be derived most easily and directly from a present use of the word ' ' empirical, " as in the say- ing that medicine for a long time was on a purely empirical basis and that for the most part the practitioners of medi- cine were empiricists. It is well illustrated in the story that James tells in his Psycliology of the brakeman in the old-fashioned railway car. The car filled with smoke from the stove while the train was at the station, and when the passengers complained, the brakeman replied, "Well, it

4 SURVEY OF EMPIRICISMS

will stop just as soon as the train starts." The man asked why, and the brakeman said, "It always does." That is a good illustration of the meaning of experience and the em- pirical as conceived from the Greek point of view. The great mass of weather prophecies, the bulk of information upon which the arts and crafts depend, medicine to some extent, blacksmithing, carpentering, shoemaking, etc., are examples of empirical knowledge. Putting it negatively, while "ex- perience" supplied fairly dependable information, depend- able for purposes of practical utility or of action, it did not involve or depend upon any insight into the cause or reason of the occurrence. That is essentially what we have to do with when we give, in general outline, a Greek philosopher 's account of experience. It denotes the accumulated informa- tion of the past, not merely the individual's own past but the social past, transmitted through language and even more through apprenticeship in the various crafts, so far as this information was condensed in matter-of-fact generalizations about how to do certain things like building a house, mak- ing a statue, leading an army, or knowing what to expect under given circumstances.

With Plato, experience begins to get the depreciatory meaning which has clung to it all through the classic strain in philosophy. The reason for the derogatory view is, I think, fairly obvious. This kind of knowledge does stand in unfavorable contrast with knowledge that depends on in- sight as to why things happen, or on understanding the reason and the cause of things, for, on the whole, in earlier thought the terms "reason for a thing" and "cause of a thing" are largely sjaionymous. If you knew tvhy a thing happened, then you understood it, you grasped the reason for its occurrence. Consequently, experience and empirical knowledge were set in very definite contrast with science.

SURVEY OF EMPIRICISMS 5

since science meant, of course, understanding or rational comprehension. This difference was illustrated for Plato in the contrast between the knowledge a geometer built up in a systematic, rational way and the kind of generalizations a carpenter might use. Experience had all the limitations which custom has. Indeed, the whole concept of experience was closely connected with the idea of habit and custom, if not identical with it. It was a collective memory or funded deposit of the past, just like the brakeman's "The smoke will stop because it always has done so." The recurrent events of the past leave behind them a certain definite ex- pectation that things will continue in that way. Consequent- ly, experience cannot give rise to knowledge in the honorific sense of science, but only to opinion, and, although opinions may sometimes be correct, that occurs, so to speak, by accident, because there is no knowledge of why they are true.

In Aristotle we have a more systematic account of the nature of experience and the reason for giving it a low status in philosophy. It is well to recognize that for him experience is not sensation nor perception, but rather the funded, practical, organized information about things that has come by the accumulation of past experience and the sifting out of the successful elements in the past experience from the unsuccessful ones.

Aristotle has the idea — of course the idea came to him ultimately from Plato — of a stepladder in knowledge, a series of grades : first is sensation, then comes perception in- volving organization of sense qualities. Now to Aristotle there are forms even in sense, and even in perception we grasp forms rather than mere stuff or material, since we grasp characters, characteristics, features. To know a chair is to know a certain structure that defines a whole class of

6 SURVEY OF EMPIRICISMS

objects ; to perceive a thing as a chair is to grasp an element which therefore is, as far as it goes, general. Next in order comes the imagination. It preserves the formal element, the structural element, at the expense of matter. Our imagina- tion, that is, our reproductive imagination or memory, while it does not grasp the form in its purity, lays hold of it with less immersion in sense or matter than is the case in direct sense perception. Now, by a kind of subconscious psychical mechanism which, like all of Aristotle's psychology, has its biological side, the images are preserved and more or less integrated with one another, the images that are similar, re- inforcing one another. Thus we get an idea, a nonscientific idea but none the less an idea, of a kind of things, an em- pirical classification or generalization, and that is experi- ence.

First sensation, then perception, then the reproductive memory or reproductive imagination, and then the consoli- dation or organization of these images in experience. And with this generalized idea there is also a general tendency to action in a certain direction tow^ard a certain end form, in other words, a habit. As in the ease of Plato, it is as- sumed that through language, through education, the cumu- lative process goes on in the arts and crafts not simply through the individual's life-time but also through succes- sive generations. Thus experience comes to consist of stand- ardized ways of action and a standardized body of beliefs, expectations, materials, and techniques.

Experience thus in both Plato and Aristotle, more on the whole in Aristotle than in Plato, serves the useful purpose of giving us the consolidated net results of past experience in the form that makes them available for further action. But there is also the same contrast, as in the case of Plato, between experience and science, understanding, or compre-

SURVEY OF EMPIRICISMS 7

hension, which depend on reason. In fact, this contrast de- fines reason : whatever gives us forms entirely pure from matter is reason, the intellectus purus of scholastic and early modern philosophy. The chief way in which Aristotle modi- fies the Platonic concept of experience is in formulating this graded emerging of rational understanding out of experi- ence.

There are certain things, according to Aristotle, concern- ing which empirical knowledge is the only kind possible. Where there is no necessity and universality in the objects and occurrences themselves, and where the element of con- tingency enters in, empirical knowledge is the only kind we can arrive at, though it is not the demonstrative knowl- edge which constitutes science. Thus social, political and moral matters are the kind of material in which universal- ity and necessity do not exist ; and, as Aristotle was wont to say, it is the mark of an educated person not to expect more exactness in the ideas about a subject matter than the subject matter itself permits of.

I might note in passing, though it is perhaps not strictly related to my subject, that this is one great difference be- tween Plato and Aristotle, more important to my mind than many of the differences that have been emphasized. Plato was quite aware that political and social matters were not regulated by reason and did not have a rational and neces- sary form, but a large part of the problem for him was to consider under what conditions morals and polities might really become a science and lawmaking in the community be rationally regulated. Thus his Republic is an attempt at least to sketch ideally the conditions under which politics and morals might become truly rational. Aristotle had no such ambition. He was perfectly willing, I won 't say to throw morals and politics to the dogs, but he was willing to leave

f>r

8 SURVEY OF EMPIRICISMS

them to probability and opinion, to a certain amount of guesswork, especially to the intuition of the shrewd expert. Rational or scientific control is reserved for purely theoreti- cal and intellectual matters. Thus Aristotle made a sharper distinction between matters of practice — even moral and political practice — and theory than Plato had done.

This is, I think, why Aristotle is conventionally treated as more empirical than Plato. Aristotle held that, historical- ly and psychologically, reason can function only as the out- come of a series of graded steps up from sensation. For him there was no original, separate and independent ra- tional intuition. The latter had to pass through the stage of experience so that even a scientist, dealing with demon- strable and rational matters, would, as a matter of his own development and education, need the preparation of an em- pirical stage. This dependence of rational insight upon ex- perience is not in any way logical or epistemological. It is a biological and, one might say, a biographical and a peda- gogical matter. There is no logical connection between ar- riving at a certain height and climbing a ladder, yet things are so constituted that under certain conditions we cannot get to a particular place unless w^e climb a ladder.

I wish to emphasize a point which is now rarely men- tioned but is necessary to an understanding of Plato and Aristotle, namely, that the Greeks did not separate the cog- nitive or intellectual from the active in the way in which the separation has become current in modern thought largely through the influence of Immanuel Kant, who was not satis- fied until he had separated, if he possibly could, everything that belonged together. I do not mean that the Greeks at- tempted to derive one from the other, but that they always saw them in pairs, so that different stages of activity corre- sponded directly and intimately to different stages of intel- lectual cognitive grasp. It is rather elementary in Platonic

SURVEY OF EMPIRICISMS 9

and Aristotelian psychology that the connection of sense with appetite is much closer than it is with knowledge. If we begin with taste and smell, the connection with the ap- petite of hunger is obvious ; but even in sight and hearing, the higher senses, the senses as such are essentially organs of biological activity connected with the appetite. You may remember the incident in Plato where he describes from a moral point of view the appetite of a man whose sense of decency was restraining him from viewing a corpse, but who finally opened his eyes wide and said, ''There, take your fill. ' ' In other words, there was a hunger expressed through the eyes that had to be satisfied, just as there is in taste and smeU. The imagination as memory corresponded to a par- ticular line of action associated with the reproductive image of some form of experience. Custom and habit were the practical or active correspondents or correlates of empirical knowledge. And then, finally, the beholding with esthetic satisfaction of perfect forms, ideas or ideals, being pure in- tuition with Plato, or self-inclosed rational activity in the case of Aristotle, corresponded to the essentially divine ac- tivity, tJieoria, of pure reason.

The reason I am calling attention to this now is that, es- l jpecially through the influence of Aristotle, experience is i (30inmonly limited to that form of activity ordinarily called j ['practice." We say, "That is practical," "That is a prac- i tical man, ' ' and we mean the kind of activity that is adapted to securing certain rather limited utilities — utilities rather than higher values. The supreme activity is that of the pure intellect, and therefore it must be distinguished from every kind of practical doing and making. Subsequent philosophy inherited this depreciation of "experience" as being con- nected with lower and practical activity in contrast with the superior worth of purely rational activity.

Experience was thus identified with action concerned

10 SURVEY OF EMPIRICISMS

with material and limited utilities, as well as set in antithe- sis to science. Because of its limitation to "practice" in its restricted utilitarian sense, experience cannot rise above mundane things. The artisan, the typical exemplar of ex- perience, is dependent upon his tools and his materials ; his activity is therefore never wholly independent, free, lib- eral. But theoretical activity is carried on by reason within reason and thus is independent of all extraneous aids. Even moral and political activity is practical, and, since it re- quires the cooperation of others, is not self-contained as is pure thinking.

Here then are three great limitations of experience as it was conceived by classical philosophy. There is the contrast of empirical knowledge (strictly speaking, of belief and opinion rather than knowledge) with science. There is the restricted and dependent nature of practice in contrast with the free character of rational thought. And there is the metaphysical basis for these two defects of experience : the fact that sense and bodily action are confined to the realm of phenomena while reason in its inherent nature is akin to ultimate reality. The threefold contrast thus implies a metaphysical depreciation of experience, an epistemological one, and, coloring both of the others and giving them their human value, a moral one : the difference in worth between activity that is limited to the body and to physical things, originating in need and serving temporal utilities, and that which soars to ideal and eternal values.

Even when the concept of experience was greatly trans- formed in later thought, the stock criticism against the knowledge that is based on experience remained. No amount of experience can establish a universal and necessary truth. It cannot get beyond the general, i.e., the usual and custom- ary. Since reality was conceived to be immutable and eter-

SURVEY OF EMPIRICISMS 11

nal, manifested in essences that make things to be neces- sarily what they are, empirical ''knowledge" is limited to the changing and the contingent. Mathematics, for example, which is the only truly scientific element in the physical sciences themselves, is beyond its capacity. While Aristotle was content with the conclusions of experience in social morals and politics, since he regarded them as falling within the realm of the probable, with the advent of Christianity there was a demand for basing morals on absolute truth. So in this sphere also empiricism became suspect, because it could not provide universal and necessary truth.

In many respects, the account of experience given by Plato and Aristotle was, on its positive side, itself an honest empirical report. For the kind of experience which the an- cient world had, and the medieval, too, until the rise of the new experimental science, was of the kind described. There was no technique by which a rational control of empirical observation and expectation could be brought about. There was no way, so far as I can see, of anticipating the fact that such a technique would ever come into existence. There was no way of seeing how rational thought could gain a leverage within experience, so that experience could be fruitful of new truths and capable of testing the beliefs to which it gave rise. The gap between experience and a rational ideal seemed fixed and impassible. Experience might grow quan- titatively but it could not alter its quality.

In short, the account given of experience was a correct statement of the conditions of contemporary culture. The mistake involved in the philosophy of the period was in its assumption that the implications of a particular state of culture were eternal— a mistake that philosophers as well as others readily fall into. If the experience of the time had been the measure of all possible, all future, experience, I

12 SURVEY OF EMPIRICISMS

do not see how this conception of the nature of experience could be attacked. But the significant point to be borne in mind (one that philosophers of the present period have lit- tle excuse for ignoring) is that subsequent developments J show that experience is capable of incorporating rational ■J i . control within itself.

In speaking of the second typical concept of experience, I shall make a long and abrupt jump and come to the ideas enunciated by John Locke, passing by, for lack of time, the important anticipations of thinkers prior to his date. I can- not, however, refrain from noting a radical shift in evalua- tion which marked Roger as well as Francis Bacon. Classi- cal philosophy, as we have seen, identified experience with the beliefs and skills that were due to custom and consoli- dated memory, and regarded it as in consequence inevitably enslaved to the past. Thinkers began to put the shoe on the other foot. What had passed for rational truths seemed to them infected with stale repetition and blind acceptance of authority. In contrast ' ' experience ' ' suggested something fresh and personal, while "reason" signified dogmas and doctrines that owed their power to convention and tradition. It is interesting to note that this shift was accompanied by another, equally radical Classical thought had glorified the universal and regarded the individual as valid only in the degree in which it was an organ of the universal. There was a growing tendency in the centuries preceding Locke to regard what had been considered as universal and objective as a kind of dead weight imposed upon men from without, and to regard the individual as the seat of freedom and the source of all advance, intellectual and political. This double reversal of valuation is perhaps more significant as an indi- cation of the change taking place in culture than any one of the elements in the technical concept of experience.

SURVEY OF EMPIRICISMS 13

John Locke was carrying further this new spirit when he defined experience as consisting essentially of observation, a^yiew which implies that it is a direct, first-hand, personal contact with nature. Now observation proceeds through the senses. If, then, observation is made the test of the origin of valid knowledge, only ' ' ideas ' ' coming through the senses are to be trusted in physical matters. His faith in observa- tion is the source of his hostility to innate ideas. His polemic against them, if carefully read, will show that his objection is not technical. Innate ideas, according to his reading of the times, had become the great bulwark of unfounded tra- dition and arbitrarily exercised authority. By definition they are not open to criticism and test. Say that a particular "principle" is innate and you have automatically exempted it from critical examination.

Locke held that a large part of so-called innate ideas, es- pecially in the realm of morals, were in fact picked up from grandparents and nursemaids in early childhood, so early, indeed, that not being able to remember their origin we suppose they have always been in the mind, implanted in its very constitution. Locke's objection to what we now call the a priori was an objection against the imposed and the secondhand, and its motive is repeated in what he says about an undue dependence on uncritical reading of books. Its spirit is that of Montaigne and other "moderns, " Like many things in all philosophers, his emphasis on observation and sensation can be understood only when we recall against what it was directed among the tendencies contemporary with him. His emphasis is a part of that spirit we caU the Enlightenment — a movement which, manifested first in theological and then in political circles, is known as "ra- tionalism"— so great are the turns that changes in culture bring about in terms.

/■

14 SURVEY OP EMPIRICISMS

What characterizes sensation and observation, and hence experience, is, in Locke's thought, their coerciveness. They are forced upon us whether we like them or not ; if we open our eyes and ears we cannot help receiving certain * * simple ideas. ' ' This coercion of will and of opinion is the essential guarantee of their validity — at least the only guarantee our constitution permits. Compulsion is the safeguard against vagaries of fancy and accidents of conventional belief. In contrast with this inescapable force, the ideas which we con- struct and label ''rational" are our own constructions and hence suspect, unless we can check them by "experience" — that is, observation. For the latter, according to Locke, is something which nature, rather than mind, does. Hence his emphasis upon the blank tablet and passivity in recep- tion of impressions.

Locke adhered to the classical tradition in holding that experience cannot supply universal knowledge, and drew the conclusion that there is no exact science of natural phe- nomena, but only probability sufficient for the conduct of life. The candle of understanding set up in us shines bright- ly enough to guide us on our path^ On the other hand, he held that morals and mathematics may be true sciences, since, while the ideas with which they set out are derived from observation, relations between them are under our control, being made by mind, and hence do not have to agree with any external "archetype." They are their own models and originals and hence may be regulative of ex- perience, being themselves patterns instead of having to conform to some other pattern. In other words, Locke him- self was not the thoroughgoing empiricist of the sensation- alist type he is sometimes represented to be. He recognized relations as essential to truly scientific knowledge and re- garded them as the "workmanship of the understanding,"

SURVEY OF EMPIRICISMS 15

although the elements that are related come from observa- tion.

The next stage in the development of Locke's point of view was to reduce relations, as well as elements, to sen- sational form. Pleasures and pains were treated as kinds of sensation; and, according to the eighteenth-century French followers of Locke, attention, desire and volition can all be derived from suitable associations of sensation. To Locke himself, association had been a force by which objective or "natural" connections among things were sup- planted by unnatural associations — such as jingles that sometimes haunt the mind and refuse to be expelled. To /^„. those who wrought his ideas out into a comprehensive logi- cal system, association was the sole possible tie holding to- gether sensations as elements of experience.

The system thus developed was adopted whole-heartedly in Great Britain by James Mill and his disciples. The sys- tem developed was so inclusive and so warmly espoused that its vogue has led many who ought to know better to regard associational sensationalism as the sole owner of the right to the name of a philosophy of experience. Some of them, while rejecting the philosophy, seem to go to the length of regarding it as an adequate account of experience as such. Indeed, Kant himself accepted it as an adequate descrip- tion of what is empirical in experience, holding that for that very reason it had to be supplemented by a-priori fac- tors if experience was to be coherent and cognitive.

This sensational philosophy, in its general outline, passed over into psychology and for a time had the prestige of being truly ' ' scientific. ' ' It was, as Mr. Santayana has called it, a malicious psychology in its impact upon a mass of com- mon-sense beliefs. But, taking the philosophy in its rela- tion to the culture of its own day, it is necessary to see

16 SURVEY OF EMPIRICISMS

what its malice was directed against, for in its own inten- tion it was not aimed at science nor at common sense, but against various influential forms of superstitious dogmatism and arbitrary political authority. As far as science was con- cerned, it was taken for granted that science, freed from the oppression of these forces, would flourish and become the ruling principle of life. In this sense, this group of em- piricists were indeed "rationalists" and of a radical char- acter.

Their philosophy was intended to be, and was used as, an instrument of criticism for dissolving institutions then dominant, ecclesiastical and political. It used Locke's crite- rion to demand that all institutions produce the credentials of originating in experience by means of the action of nature upon us, forgetful that, according to the conclusions of their philosophy, ' ' nature ' ' had no longer any standing in court. (Jjooking back, however, it is clear that this inconsistency in uniting nature with experience as the sole guarantee of validity rendered sensational empiricism a much more pow- erful tool of criticism and disintegration than would have been the skepticism which was its logical conclusion. Its power as a weapon was increased by the fact that it com- bined the force belonging to the idea of a natural order with that of fresh, unhampered personal experience.

On the positive side this empirical philosophy was used to magnify the importance, or according to Helvetius the omnipotence, of education. In connection with the coercive quality of observation, Locke had insisted on the passive- ness, the receptiveness, of the mind. The world cannot stamp itself accurately on the mind if it does not have a blank on which to work. The French thinkers, starting from this idea of a passive, empty mind, virtually said (at least a few extremists did) that you can build up any type of

SURVEY OF EMPIRICISMS 17

mind or character you wish by controlling the impressions, sensations, observations, of that mind, especially by con- trolling associations that are formed with pleasure and pain. The worst thing about bad institutions and all laws is that they corrupt minds. They associate happiness and success with the wrong kind of thing. A proper political and so- cial order would associate sensations of pleasure with things that are socially useful, and of personal pain with things that are socially detrimental. It would be the business of education to further this action — an idea that was taken over not merely with regard to education but with regard to legislation and judicial procedures by Jeremy Bentham.

On the positive side, empiricism was thus an ideal, wheth- er realized or not, associated with the eighteenth-century concept of progress and the opening up of vistas of the in- finite perfectibility of humanity, when once the corruption that comes from bad institutions, political and ecclesiastical, had been done away with and education and rationality given a chance.

While then it had a definite intellectual basis in Locke, the typical empiricism of the eighteenth and the early nine- teenth century is explicable as a social doctrine and a doc- trine in which emphasis fell upon its use as a weapon. Therefore, because that phase is emphasized in all histories, I pass over the skeptical direction which Hume gave the earlier empirical doctrine, showing that, with the dialectic development of Locke's simple ideas, the result was com- plete skepticism as to the existence of an external world and a self. The truly empirical contribution of Hume lay in his revival of the concepts of habit and of custom and their importance. Of course the biology and the physiology of the time did not enable him to explain the importance of habit. It remained for him a simple and mysterious tie,

\^

18 SURVEY OF EMPIRICISMS

but he did introduce, even if through the back door, a prin- ciple of connection and of organization which undid the consequences of Locke's ''simple ideas." But in any case the important thing, to my mind, in this empirical move- ment was its critical, negative side. Its power as a dissolvent of tradition and doctrine was much greater than any im- petus it could give to construction. When the general cul- tural situation became such that a positive, constructive direction and impetus were required, there was the cultural opportunity for a new type of philosophy.

Thus we have the reaction of German philosophy of the nineteenth century, begiiming with Kant and going through the whole romantic and neo-romantic period of German philosophy, later taken up in the England of the 1880 's and '90 's and becoming in the universities, the former centers of empirical or modified empirical philosophy, the dominant mode of thought. There was wanted some guarantee against the destructive, dissolvent tendency of empiricism carried to extremes. And the French Revolution served as a con- venient symbol of what that philosophy would come to if it were allowed to go on unchecked,

I mention this rationalistic, spiritualistic reaction because

it influenced so strongly some of the members of the em-

I pirical school, especially John Stuart Mill. Of course he

I was brought up in the strictest sect of empiricists by his

• father, James Mill, but through personal experiences,

■ through social problems of the time, through the direct in-

j fluence especially of Coleridge and Wordsworth, he felt

the defects of historical empiricism and the need of some-

I thing that would give a more stable, constructive ground

for belief and conduct. He tried various devices to get it

without giving up essentially his empiricism. Perhaps his

most characteristic device was the invention of indissoluble

SURVEY OF EMPIRICISMS 19

associations. What troubled him first was that if associations can build up a positive action, that also can be destroyed and the person left without any guide. And so he discov- ered, I think more likely he invented, a mechanism for creating association that could not be broken and that was so solid as to serve all the practical purposes of necessary and universal principles.

More important, however, in John Stuart Mill than his psychological experimentations, which were, logically, va- garies, was his interest in logic, in transferring the center of attention regarding experience from its psychological formulation to certain problems of scientific method. It is an easily ascertainable fact that Mill's interest in logic was primarily due to his interest in social, economic and politi- cal questions. His real problem was how the method used in the natural sciences could be employed in thinking about political and economic affairs so that they would be taken out of the field of mere opinion and prejudice.

His logic itself, almost anybody would admit, is an inco- herent mixture of certain psychological premises derived from sensational association and a genuine interest in sci- entific method and scientific procedure on its own account. Indirectly rather than directly, I think it is fair to say (though I do not think the statement can be proved) that this change had a rather definite effect as an antecedent of and a stimulus to the development of the third concept of ^ experience, which brings us down into recent times and into / the present. It is a fact, or seems to be a fact, that the natu- ral sciences, at least if for the sake of simplicity we leave mathematics out of account, depend upon experience. At the same time, it is unanswerable that if experience were what a sensational-associationist said it was, it could not possibly produce science. Therefore there is a mistake some-

20 SURVEY OF EMPIRICISMS

where. Either natural sciences do not have the intimate de- pendence on experience that the enthusiasts on this subject think they have, or experience is a different sort of thing from what it had been analyzed as being either by the clas- sic conception or by the eighteenth-century conception.

Moreover, there is a feature obviously present in the natu- ral sciences which sensationalism does not explain or make possible, and this is experimentation. For all experiment involves regulated activity, directed by ideas, by thought And in the present state of, say, physics, highly elaborate, intricate schemes of thought are here involved, beyond the reach of sense or of any form of observation. Therefore it would seem that those ideas which function as theories and hypotheses in scientific experimentation and organization are not copies of sensations nor suggested by past experi- ence, by past observation, but that they have a free, imagi- native quality that no direct sensation or observation can have.

Now, following this line of thought, one would deduce at least one phase of the philosophy of William James, namely, that validity is not a matter of origin nor of antecedents, but of consequents. This statement, associated with the phi- losophy of all pragmatism, is often treated as if it were di- rected merely against previous rationalisms. Its more di- rect objective of attack is previous empiricism. Mill, for example, following the empirical tradition, had said very definitely that all proof or demonstration of validity is a matter of the antecedents out of which an idea is con- structed. And the whole point of James 's philosophy, which comes out better in some chapters of his Psychology, I think, especially in the last chapter of the second volume, than in his lectures on Pragmatism, is that the value of ideas is independent of their origin, that it is a matter of

SURVEY OF EMPIRICISMS 21

their outcome as they are used in directing new observation and new experiment. Therefore there is at least one factor in generating a new concept of experience and a new type of empiricism which cannot be understood when it is clas- sified in terms of either of the two earlier historical sys- tems. That is one difficulty with the history of philosophy. The tendency is to discourage originality, not directly, but by cultivating the temper of mind that believes every idea must be interpreted or understood in terms of some preex- isting system. It is obvious that if it is a good idea, I mean a really significant idea, it may involve a departure from any previously formulated system, and the criterion judg- ing it must be worked out both by its critics and by those who have attained that idea.

The prevalence of experimental habits, looking ahead, looking forward, and using ideas, made one fundamental transformation in the concept of experience now in the proc- ess of developing. Another factor was the breakdown of the old introvert psychology and the development of a psy- chology having an objective basis, essentially a biological basis. It is impossible to get the same concept of sensation, to take one case, if sensations are approached from the bio- logical and physiological side as was given by the old ana- lytic psychology. In many respects we are getting much nearer Aristotle's psychology on this particular point in the approach to the problem. From the physiological stand- point it is quite obvious that sensations are part of the mechanisms of behavior and have a direct connection with the motor apparatus, and that they are stimuli to the out- going patterns and remain their stimuli except when trained connections come into play, and that in that case, they be- come conscious sensations or sensory qualities. In other words, they have to do with the determination of new modes

22 SURVEY OF EMPIRICISMS

of behavior, thus setting up internal relations through the tracks that will lead to a mode of action that had not ex- isted before.

This third view of experience in the history of thought is still more or less inchoate, because it is still in process of development, but I have tried to call attention to two trends, or two motifs, that are influential in developing this newer type of interpretation of experience and therefore a new type of empiricism : namely, the practice of science, especially with reference to the use of ideas, hypotheses and experimentation, in the process of verification or validation through results; and secondly, the radically different psy- chological approach that comes from looking at things ob- jectively, from the standpoint of biology rather than of in- trospective analysis.

GREEK GENIUS AND EACE MIXTURE

MATTHEW THOMPSON MCCLURE

GREEK GENIUS AND RACE MIXTURE

MATTHEW THOMPSON MCCLTJRE

Archeological research in the regions of the -^gean basin has been in progress for sixty years. It seems to me that the time has come when the student of Greek philosophy can no longer ignore the results of these researches. It is now possible to answer with a good deal of accuracy the question, Who were the Greeks? In this paper I propose to raise the question of the probable significance of an eth- nological approach to Greek philosophy. I shall not attempt to demonstrate the thesis that the superior intellectual abil- ity and versatility of the Greeks of the classical period are due to race mixture, although I believe this to be true; but I shall rather point to certain aspects of Greek think- ing that seem to illustrate racial traits, and thus seek to indicate the possibility of race mixture as an explanatory hypothesis.

The study of the prehistory of the Greeks is beset with difficulties at every turn, but one fact stands out in undis- puted clearness, namely, that the Greeks of the classical pe- riod were not a pure Aryan or Nordic race, but were a peo- ple of mixed descent. All three of the primary breeds of the white race — the Mediterranean, the Alpine-Armenoid, and the Northern — ^were commingled in the formation of the historical Greeks. Thus the statement of Zeller that the superior ability of the Greeks was due to the inherent qual- ity of the Greek race is untenable. The Greeks were not a "race" at all.

Greek civilization emerged from an antecedent period

26 GREEK GENIUS AND RACE MIXTURE

of obscurity and confusion, "We now know that just as the culture of medieval Europe developed out of the remains of classical civilization after a dark age of upheaval, dis- integration, and shifting of peoples, so Greek culture emerged from a similar dark age and was built on the ruins of its Cretan and Mycenaean antecedents. As in the forma- tion of medieval Europe, the younger, virile, semibarbarous people of the north appropriated the superior culture of the classical past, so in the case of the Greeks, a warlike people of northern origin invaded and conquered an older and higher civilization of an entirely different ethnological constitution. There was one marked difference, however. Medieval culture developed under the authoritative influ- ence of the Christian religion. The past was appropriated in an atmosphere of humility and deference. No such con- straining influences were felt by the invading Greeks. The mingling of races and the cross-fertilization of cultures took place with savage naturalness.

It is now possible, I think, to assign racial traits to the different stocks that went into the making of the historical Greeks. The invading people from the north whom we may call Greeks, if for no other reason than that they imposed their language on the conquered people, were of Aryan or Nordic stock. They began moving into the Greek peninsula perhaps as early as 2000 B.C. By 1400 b.c. they seem to be in possession of the greater part of peninsular Greece, They were a moderately long-headed people and blond. These invaders brought with them no intellectual or artistic inheri- tance; what the original Greek possessed was a warlike spirit, a zest for adventure, and above all what Professor Oldfather has called "excessive nervous vitality." The story of their invasions and migrations is one of conquest and adventure.

GREEK GENIUS AND RACE MIXTURE 27

The civilization which the Greeks displaced was composed of two racial stocks, one the Mediterranean, a people long- headed and brunet, the other Alpine-Armenoid, broad- headed and brunet. These native stocks were in possession of a high culture, they were gifted with a high degree of artistic genius. Art has always seemed to thrive in the Medi- terranean basin. They were a peaceful people. Cnossus was a city without walls. An examination of their armor shows them to have been an unwarlike people. The Cretan, the Helladic, and the Cycladic cultures of the early and middle Bronze Age were a part of a wider Mediterranean culture that embraced the Nile Valley and the Anatolian coast. It is much nearer to the oriental than to Indo-European.

There is abundant evidence to establish the fact of race mixture. The invading Greeks intermarried with tribal peo- ples all along the route of their migratory path. The My- cenaean problem is of course the central problem in the prehistory of the Greeks. The prevailing consensus of opin- ion now is that the Mycenjean kings were Greeks. They were intruders who were installed in a foreign country. It is highly probable that the Mycensean kings intermarried with the royal families at Cnossus. It is also highly probable that the Ionic-Attic represents the earliest group of Greek dia- lects to be intruded into the ^gean world. The lonians were also the Greeks who mixed most with the native stocks. We are told by Herodotus that the lonians who first set- tled Miletus did not even take their wives with them but married native Carian women after having killed all the men. In a thesis prepared under the direction of Professor Oldf ather an examination was made of race mixtures among the Greeks, based on extant literary remains. One hundred and forty cases of race mixture falling within the histori- cal period before Alexander, were culled from documents.

28 GREEK GENIUS AND RACE MIXTURE

Among the Greeks of foreign blood are to be named Pitta- eus; Pythagoras; Melas, tyrant of Ephesus; Hipparehus; Themistocles ; Miltiades ; Cimon, the famous Athenian gen- eral; Thueydides; Pausanias, the victor of Platgea; Antis- thenes the Cynic ; and Demosthenes.

The significant thing is that in those regions where there was the greatest amount of race mixture, namely, in Attica, Ionia, and in a very small corner of northeastern Pelopon- nesus, there was the highest development of Greek genius. In the outlying regions where there was the least contact with the older culture, namely, northern and western Greece, and most of the Peloponnesus, there was no intellectual de- velopment at all. Thessaly, although Greek, contributed nothing, and in fact remained neolithic almost to classical times. Thrace, Macedonia, Illyria were invaded and in- habited by the same northern stock as Greece, but never achieved any intellectual or artistic distinction. The only area of the Peloponnesus that achieved a high culture was the northeastern corner including the cities of Argos, Corinth, and Sicyon. It is just this area where there was a considerable Ionian element in the population. The Dori- ans, the last of the invaders to enter the cradle land, pre- served much of the old Nordic spirit. In Sparta the Dorians remained almost racially pure. True to the fighting spirit of their northern antecedents, the Dorians developed a highly perfected military regime, but little in the way of philosophy or art. The Dorians developed a civilization that gave the world a few kings, the lonians a civilization that gave the world a few philosophers. Plato 's philosopher- king is a hybrid figure. The warlike spirit is Dorian and ultimately pure Greek, the philosophic nature is Ionian and ultimately conditioned by race mixture.

GREEK GENIUS AND RAGE MIXTURE 29

Let US now turn to specific instances that seem to indi- cate the influence of race mixture in Greek thinking. Peri- cles in the funeral oration says of the Athenians: "We philosophize without becoming sappy." This balance be- tween the cultivation of the mind and virility finds its best expression in the character of the "guardian" as depicted by Plato in the Republic. Plato's guardian is a mixture of a "great spirit" and a "gentle nature." Emphasis on the spirited element, its correlation with action and courage, insistence on vitality and a warlike spirit, are character- istic of that "nervous energy" which was taken to be the essential contribution of the original Greek. Emphasis on the philosophic nature, its correlation with leisure, contem- plation, and science, is the result of the civilizing influence of cultural contacts. In the "guardian," therefore, we see the union of two contradictory racial ideals. Plato recog- nizes the origin of this dual character. "Take the quality of passion or spirit ; it would be ridiculous to imagine that this quality, when found in the states, is not derived from the individuals who are supposed to possess it, e.g., the Thra- cians, Scythians, and in general the northern nations; and the same may be said of the love of knowledge, which is the special characteristic of our part of the world" (435c).

The education of the guardian in the Republic is de- signed to harmonize this dual strain in Greek character. "And as there are two principles of human nature, one the spirited and the other the philosophical, some God, as I should say, has given mankind two arts answering to them ... in order that these two principles (like the strings of an instrument) may be relaxed or drawn tight until they are duly harmonized" (412). The two arts are, of course, gymnastics and music. "And he who mingles music with

30 GREEK GENIUS AND RACE MIXTURE

gymnastics in the fairest proportion, and best attempers them to the soul, may be rightly called the true musician and harmonist" (412a).

I think it is a plausible conjecture that the Greek empha- sis on proportion and harmony as the ideals of character is due to the moral necessity of balancing two antagonistic strains in Greek personality. There would be no need of em- phasis were there not danger. It is perhaps not too extrava- gant to conjecture that the doctrine of the mean in Greek ethics rests on the dual constitution of Greek character. Plato's "two principles of human nature" express two ele- mental racial survivals either of which if given free expres- sion would lead to extremes.

There can be no doubt that musical education in the Re- public is designed to soften and to civilize the spirited ele- ment in Greek nature. A similar view is later expressed by Polybius, who attributed the humanity and piety of the Ar- cadians to the fact that musical education was written into their constitution. He says : * ' It was with a view of softening and tempering this natural ruggedness" that they intro- duced music. He then adds:

The people of Cynaetha entirely neglected these things, although they needed them more than any one else; . . . and on the contrary gave their whole minds to mutual ani- mosities and contentions. They in consequence became so brutalized that no Greek city has ever witnessed a longer series of the most atrocious crimes.

The civilizing influence of music brings up Plato's treat- ment of art. In general I believe that the Greek love of beauty and of art is essentially un-Greek and is to be ex- plained as an inheritance from Minoan times. Certainly if we examine the geographical distribution of the decorative art of nascent Hellenism it will be found that the arts ap-

GREEK GENIUS AND RACE MIXTURE 31

pear not at all in the regions dominated by Dorian and west Greek inunigration, but chiefly in Attica, Boeotia, and Argolis, areas much less dominated by the invaders. I sus- pect that Plato's impatience with art, half approving and half disapproving, represents a struggle between two op- posing racial ideals. The Minoan culture was highly artis- tic. The nearer we approach the Orient, the more we find art pursued for its own sake. The original Greeks were men of action and adventure, with little interest in art. Plato tolerated art but only in so far as it was moralistic or at most in so far as it was taken to be an embellishment of activity. I even suspect that the dualism of Plato, perhaps also the broader Greek dualism between action and con- templation, has some connection with ultimate racial differ- ences. After all disinterestedness is an oriental ideal,

J. L. Myers has shown that Greek folk memory accords in a remarkable degree with historical fact. The Athenians believed themselves to have been aboriginal and, according to Herodotus, to have become Greek by adopting the Greek language and Greek customs. At all events it is certain that there was continuity of culture between the Athenian and the pre-Hellenic worlds. There is no Athenian whose physi- cal features are better known than those of Socrates. These place him as distinctly non-Nordic. Socrates both in physi- cal appearance and in moral philosophy belongs to the Medi- terranean world. He is essentially un-Greek.

The Greek counter portrait to Socrates is seen in the char- acter of Callicles as described in the Gorgias. The picture which Plato draws is that of an old Nordic viking. Callicles is a Greek of the period of the invasions. It should be re- membered that Protagoras, the greatest of the Sophists, was geographically at least a Thracian. His philosophy is es- sentially a philosophy of action. Emphasis on individuality

32 GREEK GENIUS AND RACE MIXTURE

and aggressiveness is typically northern. Absence of the contemplative spirit and impatience with science suggest remoteness from Ionian influence. The predatory views about justice look as if they were survivals of the times when the individual was forced to look out for himself.

The ancestry of Pythagoras affords some ground for spec- ulation. The tradition arose in the Peripatetic school that Mnesarchus, the father of Pythagoras, was a Pelasgian mer- chant from Lemnos. It is now well known that the population of Lemnos was predominantly of unmixed Pelasgian blood and remained so until late historical times. If there is any basis in fact for this original Pelasgian strain in Pythagoras, it would afford some ground for the belief that the religious mysticism of Pythagoras was un-Greek. And if the case of Mnesarchus is at all typical it would seem that a consid- erable amount of non-Greek blood was coming into the islands of the southern and eastern ^gean, even during the seventh and the sixth centuries.

Nothing is known of the racial antecedents of Aristotle. Geographically he was, of course, a Macedonian. His wife, Pythias, was the sister or niece and the adopted daughter of Hermias, tyrant of Atarneus, who was said to have been a Bithynian barbarian. After the death of Plato, Aristotle spent three years at the court of Hermias. The attachment between the two men is well known. The high-minded man of the Ethics is another Nordic viking and may possibly em- body Aristotle's conception of the vitalizing influence of savage contacts. It is, I think, more likely that the high- minded man is an idealization of the character of Themisto- cles whom Thucydidcs certainly and Aristotle probably ad- mired greatly. An examination of the racial antecedents of Themistocles shows him to have been in part of foreign blood.

GREEK GENIUS AND RACE MIXTURE 33

To account for the genius of a people is an exceedingly- complicated undertaking. As yet we know almost nothing regarding the relative importance of heredity and environ- ment, of race and culture. The multiplicity of formative factors, topographical, climatic, institutional, ideational, warns one against oversimplification, I have meant here merely to isolate the ethnological factor and to ask whether it has any bearing on the interpretation of Greek genius. Every application of the thesis may be incorrect. I am con- tent if the thesis itself is worthy of consideration.

RENAISSANCE AND METHOD IN PHILOSOPHY

RICHAED MCKEON

RENAISSANCE AND METHOD IN PHILOSOPHY

KICHAED MCKEON" I

History is, of all types of narrative and exposition, the least philosophical, since its design is the recounting of specific occurrences in their specific times and places. Yet for all the particularity and objectivity involved in that design, the means which the historian has at his disposal for its ac- complishment introduce into history much the same philo- sophic problems as are to be found in the expositions of poets and scientists. Even more, when the history is of the evolution of ideas, the historian treats of the same issues as the philosopher ;/the philosopher canvassing past philoso- phers for supporting evidence and the historian grouping doctrines to trace the movements of thought are frequently indistinguishable.lMuch that has been written of the intel- lectual movements of the fourteenth and the sixteenth cen- turies, thus, in praise of the one and in blame of the other, no less than what has been written of the transition from the earlier to the later mode of thought, has been dialectic disguised as history, a debate between philosophers living some centuries apart. The historian assumes a different status from the men of whom he writes, chiefly in that he is of a later period, and the debate between him and his subjects has the peculiarity that the position of his oppo- nents enters the debate only in the restatement he makes of it. He had need to be a philosopher as well as a historian, since even the restatement of a theory literally necessitates

38 RENAISSANCE AND METHOD

abridgment, selection, omissions, particularly of arguments on which conclusions were based ; and these devices involve sometimes subtle, frequently gross, modifications of the thought and intention of the original system.

Moreover, the study of intellectual history, of scientific, literary, religious, even political movements, turns directly upon the consequences that flow from philosophic opposi- tions. To be complete, a history must, whether by conscious intention or not, be the expression of a philosophy, sug- gested sometimes by the institution or age with which the history is concerned, adapted sometimes to the person of the historian or again to any of a number of possible exigen- cies of his career or intellectual concerns. In the past the historian has frequently been conscious of the theory his narrative exemplified, and it is not difficult to state the phi- losophy expressed by most of the classical historians. But in recent years the historian has directed his efforts rather more to minimizing than to recognizing and examining ex- plicitly either the philosophic convictions which his narra- tive adumbrates or the manner in which those convictions determine the narrative itself. The tendency of modern philosophy to ape the sciences, to borrow its principles from the last fashion in science, has made it easy to become a philosopher without thinking of philosophy, for the difficul- ties have all passed into science, and philosophic solutions are accepted with scientific doctrines on the scientist's bare word. The positivistic attitude, which historians for the most part assume, requires only that they profess a tentative at- titude toward theories, that is, that they share a current enthusiasm for science in which present and possible future theories are viewed tentatively, but past theories are con- sidered incomplete or false. The consequence of the histo- rian's attempt to model his method on the method of sci-

RENAISSANCE AND METHOD 39

ence has been that, as in science, so in the line of historical developments no less than in the succession of histories, each stage seems an advance, in gross, beyond the preceding stage. Positivism in history has been philosophy disguised as objectivity and faithful adherence to facts. By it the historian is absolved from the need of an explicit examina- tion of the philosophic principles involved in the works whose evolution he is tracing. The result has been that his- torians of science and philosophy looking back at the late Middle Ages seldom find, since they profess to write as his- torians, not as philosophers, more than a historic interest in the distinctions they repeat ; yet that result has been pre- determined by the fact that in their investigations they have been on the outlook for the most part for ideas and values, discounted in the Middle Ages, which were to assume im- portance later. The task of the historian, thus conceived, is usually the restatement of one doctrine in terms proper to another ; his discovery of intellectual evolution and advance can, as frequently as not, be reduced to the discovery that it is impossible to arrive at a full or sympathetic under- standing of those earlier doctrines in the later terms which he prefers. Consequently, for writers earlier than the day before yesterday, it has been praise enough to find that they anticipated something of the modern spirit or to say that they did as well as could be expected in a time when science and learning were so meager and superstition so strong.

The historian has shared in the general advance of sci- ence, acquiring new scientific instruments in the new tech- niques of modern scholarship and in the canons of scien- tific criticism which are as much of the modern period as the techniques of the other sciences. But in intellectual his- tory he had been dogged by the paradoxes of philosophy: philosophers can adopt a new language without changing

40 RENAISSANCE AND METHOD

their doctrines ; they can continue to use the old language, even repeat the old principles, while they renovate their philosophic positions entirely ; finally there are no two philo- sophic doctrines which a philosopher, even one engaged in the writing of history, cannot show to be the same or, if his intention should chance to be the opposite, different. The shifting interpretations and the long controversies in which scholars are involved on every major question of the intel- lectual complexion of ages are at bottom forms of those paradoxes. Consequently, as history has become more sci- entific, philosophic understanding of past philosophers has been on the wane. Modern critical editions of texts of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, with their scientific scrutiny of manuscripts and their carefully planned criti- cal apparatus, frequently furnish texts worse than those of badly worked earlier editions in the important respect that the sense which was expressed clearly in the earlier edition has been missed and emended away in the later. Even more frequently, modern historical treatises, which have settled laborious problems of chronology, bibliography, authentic- ity, and which have completed the picture of the social, psy- chological and economic setting of the man and his works, distort and obscure the ideas and the distinctions expressed clearly by earlier critics who worked without the tools of modern scholarship, historiography and paleography. The problems involved in understanding and stating ideas have been lost in the increasing concern to clarify texts and to catch the spirit of times, with the result that texts have grown more obscure, and histories have come to repeat the monotonous story of widespread ignorance in all early ages contrasted always with the towering figure of some man, usually praised as the first modern man, or overthrown by some movement, usually called a renaissance. The question.

RENAISSANCE AND METHOD 41

whether a given set of ideas is to be considered the corrup- tion and disintegration of those of an earlier period, or whether it constitutes the reorganization, supplement, criti- cism by which the sounder doctrines of a later period are prepared, is one which is never far from the surface in a work which sets ideas beside ideas in a historical order. It is resolved, not by precision in working over documents, but by criteria which operate, usually surreptitiously, in the estimation of the utility and truth of ideas. Plato 's con- ception of philosophy is in contradiction with that of Aris- totle : to state the doctrine of either is a task of exposition, of philosophical history; to state their differences or their agreements is a task of pure philosophy.

If the historian is something of a philosopher, as well as a scholar, he must be disturbed by the recognition that his history is the reflection of two independent systems of ideas, his own and that of the men whose careers he is re- cording. The histories, thus, of the transition from the later Middle Ages to the Renaissance have themselves undergone an evolution in which the characteristics chosen and set down have reflected at each step the periods since the seven- teenth century in which they were written. The logical ex- treme of objectivity would, of course, be the reproduction, in all details, of the age or the movements under considera- tion. Even more, by the criteria of scientific history, it would seem that only the contemporary of William of Ockham, John Buridan and Bishop Bradwardine could hope to know the force of the problems that agitated the fourteenth cen- tury. The paradox of history and the double play of phi- losophies in history can be stated even more baldly: to achieve objectivity William of Ockham is the.bnly man who could hope to state the doctrines of Ockham, yet William of Ockham is the only man wholly unsuited to the task, for

42 RENAISSANCE AND METHOD

any historian can show that Ockham's meaning is not what Ockham thought it to be and can muster psychological, eco- nomic and social criticisms by which it can be shown per- spicuously to have been really the expression of something quite unsuspected by Ockham. The philosophic character of this debate, which is concealed in political and social his- tories, is most apparent in histories of philosophy. There, the very terms in which the history is traced have acquired modern meanings : the opposition between theology and sci- ence, between faith and reason, between realism and nomi- nalism, authority, reason and experience as they figure in our histories of the fourteenth century, were discoveries of the nineteenth, not of the fourteenth century. Either of the extremes of contrary interpretations may therefore be imposed on the period with the full support of scholarship and the social sciences. The same arguments, the same shifts of interest, the same systematic readjustments in the four- teenth century have been described as degradations and misinterpretations of the philosophic positions of the thir- teenth century, and with equal cogency as new insights into the inadequacies of the scholastic method, of the Aris- totelian logic and physics in general, of the Augustinian attempt to turn all knowledge to the glory of God; and consistently with these recognitions, those same arguments have been made the potent statement of a criticism which was preparing for science before the beginnings of science. Economic, social, psychological reasons give force to each view in turn. On the one hand, the fourteenth century was a period of political and social unrest, of controversies be- tween church and state, of the Babylonian captivity of the papacy, of heterodox popular movements in religion, of wars, and of the black plague: there were few men of

RENAISSANCE AND METHOD 43

the intellectual ability to carry on the philosophic traditions of the thirteenth century and those men had neither the patience nor the leisure to undergo the long and tedious preparation which must precede expertness in philosophic discussions. Or, on the other hand, it was an age in which the new nationalism was arising, in which learning was being secularized, in which even the political and social unrest were signs of an intellectual ferment, in which the old was being undermined, and feudalism, canon law and dogmatic theology could already read their doom in the concern of physicists with nature, moralists with man, and merchants with commercial realities.

The tendency of philosophical theories to build histori- cal facts, which, in one further step, are to be exploded as fictions, is not restricted to the histories of philosophic arguments. The interpretation of the Renaissance as a whole, its character and limits, the fact and manner of the intellectual rebirth, its differences from the Middle Ages which it named and criticized, its relation to the Ref- ormation and the events which have followed since the sixteenth century, all betray history as disguised philosophy. Middle Ages, Renaissance and Reformation tend surpris- ingly to be the same and different. By most accounts it is easy to distinguish the characteristics of the Renaissance from those of the Middle Ages, but when those distinc- tions have been made, the Reformation tends to be as- similated to the Renaissance or to a reaction back to the Middle Ages ; recently, however, the characteristics that had been taken to be marks of the Renaissance have been found earlier and earlier in the Middle Ages so that the sharpness of the distinction between the two periods has been break- ing dovm, while scholars of the Reformation have been

44 RENAISSANCE AND METHOD

finding traits in it of still greater innovations and still ear- lier traditions.^ Erasmus and Luther both rejected scholas- tic theology and scholastic philosophy for a Christian phi- losophy, salubrious, without subtlety, intelligible to all. Yet to Erasmus, Luther was an enemy of letters, who stood in the way of a true interpretation of the Bible, in which the philosophy of Christ was to be found ; to Luther the philo- logical subtleties of Erasmus were as irrelevant to the true philosophy of Christianity as had been the philosophical subtleties of the Middle Ages. Both shared in the discovery

' ' ' Like all great and complex movements, the Eenaissance is capable of interpretation in various ways and from opposite standpoints. When we think of its importance in the preparation of our modern habit of mind, we are inclined to class it with the great epochs of advance, such as the Athenian Age and the Enlightenment. But if we take the testimony of its own writers we learn that its idealswere in the past, a restoration and not a progress. Its most enlightened cham- pions appealed not to reason, but to the Eoman poets; not to nature, but to classic authority. While the glorious freedom of thought attained by many of its representatives entitles it to be regarded as an in- surgence of reason, its passionate rebellion against the rationalism of Aristotle and Aquinas forces us to consider it an artistic, emotional reaction against reason, like the Eomantic Movement of the early nine- teenth century.

"Nor is there any consensus of opinion as to the relations of the Renaissance and the Eeformation. For long they were regarded as sisters, similar in origin and analogous in result; emancipations both, in different fields and with different emphases but with a friendly alliance, so that the elder sister prepared for the younger and the younger consummated the work of the elder. But of late it has been asserted that the Eeformation was a reaction of backward minds against the Renaissance; the different points of view of the two have been stressed, and their rivalry and even hostility pointed out." Pre- served Smith, Erasmus, A Study of His Life, Ideals and Place in Ei'S- tory. New York, 1923, p. 1. Cf. E. H. Fife, "The Eenaissance in a Changing World," in The Germanic Eeview, IX, No. 2 (April, 1934), 73-95; K. Burdach, Eeformation, Eenaissance, Humanismus, Berlin, 1926; A. Philippi, Der Begriff der Eenaissance, Leipzig, 1912; for a discussion of the evolution of the concept, Eenaissance, prior to Burck- hardt, see W. Kaegi's Introduction to Burckhardt 's. Die Kultur der Eenaissance in Italien, in Jakob Burckhardt, " Gesamtausgabe, " V, xxxiii ff.

RENAISSANCE AND METHOD 45

which has been made the glory of their century, of man, nature, and letters. But naturalism had long been the pos- session of the Middle Ages^ and writers of the twelfth cen- tury or even earlier had possessed virtually the whole of Latin literature, while the philosophers of the thirteenth century had the information to discuss the philosophic posi- tions of the Greeks, even that of Plato, at least as intelli- gently from a philosophic point of view as did their suc- cessors in the sixteenth century.^ Moreover, these new dis-

"For a discussion of medieval and renaissance naturalism together with a criticism of statements of the Renaissance, see Et. Gilson, "Le Moyen age et le naturalisme antique," in Archives d'histoire doctrinale et litteraire du moyen age, VII (1933), 5-37. The traditional view, on the other hand, would find in the conceptions of nature and man peculiar discoveries of the Renaissance. Cf., e.g., Harald Hoff- ding, A History of Modern Philosophy, London, 1915, I, 9: "The meaning of the Renaissance, then, is that it denotes the period during which the limitations and one-sidedness of the mediaeval conception of life found themselves confronted with new experiences and new points of view. However different in kind may be the phenomena presented to us in the philosophy of the Renaissance, yet common to them all is a great enthusiasm for, and confidence in. Nature, and the effort to carry through a unifying conception of existence, and to assert the law-abidingness and authorization of natural human life. The Renaissance begins with the latter point — with the assertion of the rights of human nature — and afterwards leads to the development of a new conception of Nature, and to a new method of investigation. ' ' *Cf. the many illuminating pages on Plato written by Aquinas in his commentaries on Aristotle. Thus in the commentary on the De anima, his version of the relation of the Platonic and Aristotelian conceptions of the soul is one from which modern commentators might learn that it is possible to write of Aristotle's refutation of his master, without supposing that one or the other of them was guilty of childish errors. Thus Aquinas states the rationale of his interpretation in De anima, I, lect. 8, ed. by A. M. Pirotti, Turin, 1925, sect. 107, p. 42: "Posita opinione Platonis, hie Aristoteles reproiat earn. Ubi notandum est, quod plerumque quando reprobat opiniones Platonis, non reprobat eas quan- tum ad intentionem Platonis, sed quantum ad sonum verborum ejus. Quod ideo facit, quia Plato habuit malum modum docendi. Omnia enim figurate dicit, et per symbola docet: intendens aliud per verba, quam sonent ipsa verba; sicut quod dixit animam esse circulum. Et ideo ne aliquis propter ipsa verba incidat in errorem, Aristoteles disputat contra eum quantum ad id quod verba ejus sonant."

46 RENAISSANCE AND METHOD

eoveries of Luther and Erasmus were made chiefly in the pages of the Bible, of Jerome and Augustine, while their contemporaries were making similar discoveries in the writ- ings of Cicero, Seneca, the Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopa- gite, Plato and even Aristotle. The historian's judgment of the Renaissance has therefore been forced of late to greater subtleties : Gthe Middle Ages possessed the letter but not the spirit of ancient literature and philosophy ; the Renais- sance secularized the humanities?\As these distinctions are pursued, paradoxes multiply in our histories, and philo- sophic difficulties become more explicit. The freeing of learning from theology involved the affirmation of the in- dividual and the discovery of man in his own right as a psychological entity. This new intellectual freedom had a liberalizing effect on morals and religion, which in turn reach their culmination in the Reformation, in Luther who denies free will in his philosophy, deprecates the impor- tance of human works and considers the use of reason in the interpretation of the Bible or the elaboration of religion a fatal error and presumption. Moreover the new ethics and religion of the Renaissance are derived from the Bible, usually as seen through the eyes of Saint Augustine, not- withstanding that medieval morals had been derived from the same source. Again, that new ethics, although, like the old, it is directed toward salvation, is somehow part of a tradition that breaks with the supernatural theories of the past to find its foundation in the nature of man ; the new religion is somehow to prepare for a natural religion, in har- mony with the new ethical tendencies and based on the doc- trine of the immanence of the divine in the world and in humanity. These humanistic tendencies, finally, notwith- standing the indifference of the humanists to the scientific developments of their age, were the consequences of a

J

RENAISSANCE AND METHOD 47

grander conception of physical nature, which philosophy and the sciences were elaborating, and of the methods coming into use in the new sciences.

Even in a brief and extreme statement of characteristics that have emerged in the attempts to describe the activi- ties of the Renaissance, what is striking is not so much the absurdity of any statement nor again its truth, but rather the circumstance, with which the philosopher can be more complacent than the historian, that none of the statements need be regarded as inconsistent with any of the others, that one does not face the alternative of affirming or deny- ing one of two contraries, since the truth seems to be ap- proximated more closely by the statement of both than by the choice between them. It can be shown that the sense of nature and of man was as pervasive and as deep in the Middle Ages as in the Renaissance, that the doctrines which were professed in the sixteenth century concerning the place of God relative to man and the cosmos, and the place of faith relative to reason, experience and authority were not without anticipations in the preceding thousand years ; but the inference does not follow therefore that the two periods were the same in manner and in production. Eras- mus did possess the classics in a manner in which Abailard did not, for he not only had read works which were inaccessi- ble to Abailard, but he had read and interpreted differently those that they possessed in common. It is equally true, therefore, that he possessed the Bible too in a different man- ner from Abailard, for his method of interpreting is as radi- cally different from the method of Abailard in the case of the Bible as in that of any other work. But, to change the man- ner of reading Aristotle, Vergil, Moses and Paul is to change one's conception of God, nature, man, morals and religion. Moreover, where the texts are the same, distinctions between

48 RENAISSANCE AND METHOD

the doctrines derived from the text must involve dialectical controversy ; yet precise distinctions are possible if one look rather to the method by which they were arrived at than to what is new and unique in the doctrines. Fortunately exact information concerning methods of interpretation is available : Augustine, Abailard, Aquinas, Ockham, Erasmus, Luther, Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza — in general all men who have been called innovators in the history of philosophy — are at pains to state what is at fault in the methods em- ployed by their predecessors or adversaries and to indicate as clearly as they can what the method of arriving at truth should be. The conclusions which are established by diverse methods may be stated in propositions so similar that only a consideration of their grounds will make clear their meanings and remove the ambiguity. Renaissance in phi- losophy and in intellectual pursuits in general, like refuta- tion which frequently accompanies it, cannot be delineated in a series of propositions which will be recognized to be true or revolutionary; but such truth and novelty as the prop- ositions have can be seen in the orientation and methods by which men turn from doctrine that had been considered true to other aims, other emphases, other doctrines. History is bad philosophy most frequently at those points where the life, attitudes and thought of one age are conceived to have ceased. The Renaissance of the fifteenth and six- teenth centuries is only one among such transitions. How- ever, if transitions are to be viewed as the dialectic of two doctrines and of two ages, it would not be without profit for philosophy to look in the history of such transitions for distinctions in methods and for the marks of what is in- volved in philosophic refutation and construction. For the question, how a renaissance in general is possible, is a prior question philosophically to that of what the Renaissance

RENAISSANCE AND METHOD 49

believed or what truth there was in those beliefs. It is our purpose to raise that philosophic question here by translat- ing a historical sequence of ideas, such as the philosophies successively derived from some common source, into the philosophic debate that is implicit in the relations of those ideas. Such a translation will serve to indicate the philo- sophic aspects of historical interpretation.j^For the nature of history, the variety of historical interpretations and their origins and principles must be examined before questions of historical truth and accuracy can be considered profit- ably^ The task set in the present essay is only the first stage of that inquiry into the nature of history, or of verbal ex- pression in general; it is a philosophic task if only in that it prepares for the assimilation of questions of historical truth into questions of philosophic truth, but it may inci- dentally save the historian from the philosophic confusions which he has introduced into his subject matter and which he tries in vain to remove by his scientific techniques.

II

In the estimation of the writers of the period, there were middle ages within what has since been called the Middle Ages. Information concerning these dark periods is usu- ally given together with the news of the rebirth of letters or philosophy, repeated many times before the fifteenth cen- tury. Indeed it is not difficult to find in the writings of contemporaries that renaissances have seemed to be dark ages to some who shared in their novelties, and that periods of intellectual gloom have had the appearance of recrudes- cences of some ancient splendor : the history of histories of such periods has traced the succession of what is sought, what is reborn and what is dead. Apparently in any age there is an antiquity or a phase of antiquity in rebirth and

50 RENAISSANCE AND METHOD

at the same time innumerable phases desired and irrepar- ably lost. What was to happen to philosophy in particular during the Renaissance was foreshadowed by what hap- pened to philosophical discussion several times in the Mid- dle Ages.

Under Charlemagne and his successors, there had been a renaissance in philosophy: scholars who had been scat- tered over Europe were invited to the court of the Franks, Alcuin an Englishman, Paul Warnefried a Lombard, Peter of Pisa a Tuscan, Theodulf a Spaniard, Clement an Irish- man. They had apparently acquired their erudition in all the corners of the western world; the act of bringing them together in one place precipitated the renaissance in phi- losophy, for it set them to working on a common subject matter in philosophy and theologj^, a common set of prob- lems based on a common set of texts, undertaken in accord- ance with a common method. For two hundred years the problems of philosophy were discussed largely in the ordered terms derived from the study of two works attributed to Saint Augustine, the Ten Categories and the Dialectica, and from the sections on grammar, rhetoric and dialectic in the poem of Martianus Capella. The many commentaries on these works produced in the period are testimony of the central place they occupied in the scheme of education. The organization of knowledge in general and of the three arts in particular was explored by writers like Alcuin and Rha- banus Maurus, briefly, formally, dryly, by definitions of the arts and of their subdivisions ; two great theological contro- versies, on the Eucharist and on predestination, brought to- gether vast collections of citations from the Church Fathers on those subjects. From the interplay of those citations, phil- osophical and theological, a great part of them from Augus- tine, but others from almost all the Latin and Greek Fathers,

RENAISSANCE AND METHOD 51

with strong Neo-Platonic tendencies from Pseudo-Dionysius, Maximus the Confessor, and John Scotus Eriugena, and with traces throughout of Aristotelian ideas and formulae at sec- ond and third hand, the foundations of philosophical prob- lems and solutions were being laid.

Toward the end of the tenth century philosophers turned to a new renaissance, following the lead of Gerbert of Auril- lae, later Pope Sylvester II. The new tradition was based on a new series of writings, in general more ancient than those that had been studied; glosses and commentaries, more numerous than those of the preceding age, were de- voted to the Isagoge of Porphyry, the Categories and On Interpretation of Aristotle as translated by Boethius, the commentaries of Boethius on those works as well as his origi- nal writings on logic, and the Topics of Cicero. The discus- sions of the earlier commentators on Martianus and the Pseudo-Augustine were forgotten; the terms and even the problems shifted, and with the abrupt change of interest the manuscripts of the writers who preceded Gerbert were no longer copied, so that in effect the preceding period be- came a dark age, notwithstanding that we have the names of famous teachers of that period whose works have not come down to us.

When Abajiard wrote during the first half of the twelfth century he enumerated as the sources of his logical ideas precisely the works that had formed the basis of Gerbert 's new course. But even Abailard's contemporary and pupil, John of Salisbury, possessed the "new logic," that is, the translation of the whole of Aristotle's Organon, and in his lifetime the philosophic renaissance which culminated in the thirteenth century was already under way. It was to take the same general form as the earlier transformation of the subject matter and manner of philosophy ; by the beginning

52 RENAISSANCE AND METHOD

of the thirteenth century great additions had been made to the portions of Aristotle that were available in Latin and shortly after the middle of the thirteenth century the whole corpus of Aristotelian writings had been translated. It is difficult thereafter to find a trace in the writings of the phi- losophers of the second half of the thirteenth century of the distinctions and preoccupations that had dominated the dis- cussions of the twelfth century or even of the language in which the discussion was conducted. Thus, Abailard had written a Dialectic which contained a book for each book of the Organon of Aristotle, even for those which Abailard had not been able to read, and his discussions of the Pos- terior Analytics and the Topics, though they contain bad guesses if they were meant to be a reconstruction of the Aristotelian doctrine, are works of great logical acumen in which theories are propounded that were later to be ad- vanced again independently of Abailard; these are quite forgotten in the increasing discussions of logic in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and the reconstruction of Abailard 's logical doctrines is the consequence of the scholarly work of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

In general, the philosophic renaissances of the Middle Ages were constituted by the broad discussion of problems in terms of a new erudition, based on some ancient work which had been ignored in the preceding age. That ancient writers should in each case be the basis of the renaissance is doubt- less no coincidence ; nor is it strange that the new erudition should be considered a key to the secrets of nature, that the preceding age in which the key had been lost should be an age of ignorance, and that it should become with pass- ing years, since its writings are neglected in the concern with more ancient authors, its manuscripts little copied and its terminology little used, increasingly an age of slight in-

RENAISSANCE AND METHOD 53

tellectual activity and accomplishment to the historians who record the awakening. Each step, however, is an advance in the formation of a tradition ; at each step, if an apologist were necessary, justification could be found in the increased mass of knowledge and information which had entered into philosophic systematization and argumentation ; even the re- sistances and refutations, at each step, were part of the formation of the tradition, unintelligible without it and, in turn, necessary for the understanding of it. Until the four- teenth century, each transformation was accompanied by a return to some more ancient doctrine. The fourteenth cen- tury prepared in the writings of the followers of William of Ockham and of the Averroists for a transformation of philosophy which has been represented as a revolt against the whole tradition of philosophy of the Middle Ages. It does have the peculiarity that, whereas in preceding renais- sances philosophers forgot their immediate predecessors in the task of elaborating their newer formulation of philosophic problems, the philosophers of the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries expended a great deal of their energy in calumniating their predecessors. Their revolt, they said, was against the doctrines of Aristotle ; they re- turned to ancient sources, to Plato, Augustine, Jerome, and the New Testament, but that return was directed in no single channel, even in the sense of possessing a single lan- guage or a basic set of distinctions in terms of which to fash- ion the new philosophy. Instead it becomes increasingly true, as the beginnings of the modern period in philosophy are approached, that each new philosopher strains toward a new philosophic view based on new principles and couched in new terms. The conduct of philosophy in the late Mid- dle Ages had been in the hands first of philosophers who were experts in the philosophy of Aristotle, who spoke his

54 REXAISSAXCE AND METHOD

teclinical language precisely and who developed in the dia- lectic of their commentary and controversy on the problems of that philosophy a detailed criticism of it almost point by point; then the conduct of philosophy passed to the hands of philosophers who remembered and repeated these criticisms, who retained in their speech the remnants of the Aristotelian language, though they were becoming pro- gressively less and less versed in the subtleties of that phi- losophy. The earlier philosophers, for all their diversities, had a common set of problems and a language intelligible to one another ; the later set was unified only in what it criti- cized and calumniated.

This change figures eulogistieally in our histories of phi- losophy as the revolt against authority, the vindication of reason, the discovery of nature and man, which had been effected under the impulse of the spirit newly manifested in commerce, learning and the sciences, and which was to be directed toward the power and utility to be found in knowl- edge secularized to the problems of this life. For any of these descriptions — and their contraries— abundant con- firmation can be found. Their significance lies precisely in the explication of the paradoxes they generate.MThe hu- manist discovered nature and man by refusing to follow the lead of Aristotle, of scholastic theologj^ and philosophy ; he discovered man and nature in Cicero, Augustine and Plato, by reading Quintillian and the poets and orators rather than Boethius and the dialecticians^ Thereafter he vindicated reason by attacking logic ; he repudiated author- ity by citing the heretical unbiblical consequences derived from the scholastic application of dialectic to questions of faith and to the text of the Scriptures; and he found the utility of the new learning as frequently in the salvation of

RENAISSANCE AND METHOD 55

souls as in the extiriDation of mundane suffering and ignor- ance.

That revolt, moreover, if it is thought to involve the prob- lem of the effect of pagan philosophy on Christian doctrine and learning, raises once more the question of the difference of that effect in two different ages. In the twelfth century, Cicero, Quintillian, the Roman poets and orators were read and admired, as they were in the sixteenth ; in both ages learning in Greek and in Hebrew was a not impossible ac- quisition, but despite the revolutionary effect these lan- guages were thought to have on learning and religion, most writers contented themselves in both periods with a few words with which to sprinkle their works; Plato was in the eyes of many the greatest of philosophers ; and the true philosophy was dependent on a reorientation, with or with- out the aid of the secular arts, of the study of doctrines de- rived from the Bible. But though such points of similarity between the ages might be drawn out to a lengthy list, at each point the difference involved in the similarity becomes obtrusive : these are doubtless the respects in which the two periods possessed the classics, but differently — how differ- ently may be seen by examining the work of three men who are involved in those points of contrast, Abailard, Eras- mus and Luther. Their positions may be considered the cor- ners of a three-sided debate in which men who were con- temporaries might have engaged.

Peter Abailard, in the eyes of the pertinacious critic of his lifetime. Saint Bernard, is a temerious innovator who would apply dialectic to all matters of faith (falling there- by into a series of heresies and errors, almost as numerous as those which were later to be found in Erasmus's works as a consequence of his eschewal of dialectic, Arianism,

56 RENAISSANCE AND METHOD

Nestorianism, Pelagianism, Sabellianism) and "who finds in pagan writers anticipations of Christian doctrines (sweat- ing to make Plato a Christian but succeeding only in show- ing himself a pagan). To Abailard, on the other hand, those who object to his use of examples and likenesses derived from the writings of philosophers seek only a solace for their own ignorance.* Both of his great theological works, therefore, the Theologica Christiana and the Introductio ad theologiam, open with lengthy citations not only from the prophets of the Old Testament but from Greek and Latin philosophers, particularly from the philosophers of the Pla- tonic sect, in which Abailard sees Christian truths pre- figured : not only the Trinity, but the precise manner of the relation of the persons (with only a few slips of termi- nology into which Christian writers, too, fell) , the Incarna- tion, the Redemption, the immortality of the soul, its fu- ture pains and rewards. Moreover pagan philosophers lived lives in which were displayed the Christian virtues, love of truth, contemplative and austere modes of living, con- tempt of riches and even of life, love of virtue, of virginity, of chastity ; their reward moreover, Abailard w^as convinced, would be eventual salvation. In this conception of the rela- tion of pagan and Christian doctrine, he pretends to ad- vance no original discovery of his own ; on the contrary his citations from the philosophers were collected, he says, not from their own works, of which he knows but few, but from the books of the holy Fathers.^ It is Saint Augustine and Saint Jerome who contribute the chief weight of au- thority to this manner of use of the philosophers, and, as

* Theologia Christiana III, Migne's Patrologia latina (referred to here- after as PL) 178, 1214.

^Introductio ad theologiam, II, 1, PL 178, 1039; Theologia Christiana II, PL 178, 1170.

RENAISSANCE AND METHOD 57

citations from their works succeed one another, it becomes apparent that the contribution of the pagan philosophers to Christian philosophy consists chiefly in the seven arts which they perfected, particularly the art of dialectic which is essential to the understanding of Scripture. Without it one cannot understand even what it is that one is to believe, and one faith is as defensible as another, pagan as Chris- tian. Without it one has no arms to withstand the attacks of pagans, Jews and heretics, but, even apart from its great utility to faith, it is to be prized in itself as a gift of the holy Spirit, for no knowledge in itself is evil.

Whence Saint Augustine, as well as other doctors of the Church, holds that the secular arts and especially dialectic itself are absolutely necessary for the sacred Scripture. For that reason, indeed, the aforesaid doctor has dared in book II On order to commend dialectic in such wise that he seems to profess it to be the only science, since he says that it alone can make men know. He calls it ''the discipline of disci- plines, which they call dialectic. It teaches how to teach, it teaches how to learn ; in it reason itself presents itself and shows what it is, what it seeks and what it is worth. ' '*

Moreover if it gives access to truth it cannot be contrary to faith, for one truth cannot war with another.'^ The In- troduction to Theology itself, Abailard writes in the Pro- logue, was prepared at the request of students of his who had

' Introductio ad theologiam II, 1, PL 178, 1040; see Augustinus, De ordine, II, 13, PL 32, 1013.

'' Dialectica, Analytica posteriora 1, Ouvrages inedits d'Abelard ed. by Victor Cousin, Paris 1836, 434-35 : "Si vero adversus fidem militare artem concedant [aemuli mei], earn procul dubio non esse scientiam coniiteiitur. Est enim scientia veritatis rerum comprehensio, cujus species est sapientia in qua fides consistit. Haec autem est honestatis sive utiUtatis discretio: Veritas autem veritati non est adversa. Non enim sicut falsum falso vel malum malo contrarium potest reperiri, ita verum vero vel bonum bono potest adversari, sed omnia sibi bona consona sunt et convenientia. Scientia autem omnis bona est, et ea quae de malo est, quia justo deesse non potest. ' '

58 RENAISSANCE AND METHOD

read his philosophic studies and his writings on secular letters and who wanted a summa of sacred erudition from his pen as an introduction to the divine Scripture. It seems to him permissible that the faithful read the writings on the secular arts and books of the gentile philosophers in order to learn the kinds of speech and eloquence and modes of arguments and the natures of things, to be able thus to put to use whatever pertains to the understanding or ornamenta- tion of the sacred Scriptures and to the defense or construc- tion of its truth. The pupils of Abailard considered that he would be able to resolve the controversies that had arisen to disturb the simplicity of faith, precisely because of his training in the studies of philosophy, and particularly dia- lectic, which seemed the mistress of all reasons.* They wanted human and philosophic reasons, and they sought rather what could be understood than what could be said, holding that the utterance of words which the understanding could not follow is superfluous, that what is not first understood can- not be believed, and that it is ridiculous for anyone to preach to others, as some do, what neither he himself, nor those whom he teaches, can understand.^

^Introductio ad theologiam, Prologus, PL 178, 979. * " De libro Theologiae suae, et persecutione quam sustinuH a con- discipulis. Concilium contra eum. — Accidit autem mihi ut ad ipsum fidei nostras fundamentum humanae rationis similitudinibus disseren- dum primo me applicarem, et quemdam theologiae tractatum De unitate et Trinitate divina scholaribus nostris componerem, qui humanas et philosophicas rationes requirebant, et plus quae intelligi quam quae dici possent effagitabant, dicentes quidem verborum superfluam esse prolationem, quam intelligentia non sequeretur, nee credi posse aliquid nisi primitus intellectum, et ridiculosum esse aliquem aliis praedicare quod nee ipse nee illi quos doeeret intellectu capere possent. Domino ipso arguente quod 'caeei essent duces caecorum (Matth. xv, 14).' " 3is- toria calamitatum, 9, PL 178, 140-42. Cf. "Quid denique magis ridi- culosum quam si aliquis alium docere volens, cum requisitus fuerit de his quae dicit utrum intelligat, neget seipsum intelligere quae dicit vel se nescire de quibus loquitur?" Introductio ad theologiam II, 3, PL 178, 1054.

RENAISSANCE AND METHOD 59

But if the Old Testament, if Paul and the Fathers can be cited for in junctures to use the books of the Gentiles and the philosophers, cautions against vain philosophy and the wisdom of the world are no less frequent in those works. The writers of the eleventh and the twelfth centuries are divided between those who saw in reason and dialectic the source of all error and heresy, and those who saw in them the source of understanding and the one means of defense against error and heresy. The lines of the opposition may seem less sharp since even those who used dialectic and were suspected of excess in its use, could be suspicious of its use by others: Lanfranc could be accused of an excess of dia- lectic in his commentaries on Paul and could caution An- selm against dialectic ;^° Anselm could undertake to demon- strate the existence of God without the aid of Scripture and could censure the heretical dialectic of Roscelin,^^ and

"" ' ' Lanf rancus dialecticus et Canturariensis episcopus Paulum apos- tolum exposuit et ubicumque opportunitas locorum occurrit, secundum leges dialecticae proponit, assumit, concludit. " Sigebert de Gembloux, De scriptorihus eeclesiasticis 155, PL 160, 582. "De illis quidem, quae in illo opuscule dicta sunt, quae salubri sapientique consilio monetis in statera mentis solertius appendenda; et cum eruditis in sacris codicibus conferenda; et ubi ratio deficit, divinis auctoritatibus ac- cingena, hoc et post paternam amabilemque vestram admonitionem, et ante feci, quantum potui." Anselmus, Epistola 68 ad Lanfrancum, PL 158, 1139.

" ' ' Quidam f ratres saepe me studioseque precati sunt ut quaedam quae illis de meditanda Divinitatis essentia, et quibusdam aliis huic meditation! cohaerentibus, usitato sermone colloquendo protuleram, sub quodam eis meditationis exemplo describerem. Cujus scilicet scribendae meditationis magis secundum suam voluntatem, quam secundum rei f acilitatem aut meam possibilitatem, banc mihi f ormam praestituerunt : quatenus auctoritate Scripturae penitus nihil in ea persuaderetur ; sed quidquid per singulas investigationes finis assereret, id ita esse piano stylo et vulgaribus argumentis, simplicique disputatione, et rationis necessitas breviter cogeret, et veritatis claritas patenter ostenderet. ' ' Anselmus, Monologium, Praefatio, PL 158, 142-143. "Nemo ergo se temere immergat in condensa divinarum quaestionum, nisi prius in soliditate fidei, conquisita morum et sapientiae gravitate ne per multi- plicia sophismatum diverticula incauta levitate diseurrens, aliqua tenaci

60 RENAISSANCE AND METHOD

properly so, since if logic can be the source of arguments that establish the truth, it can be improperly used to serve as the basis of erroneous conclusions. It is proper, therefore, that the defenders of logic should censure it too, that Book II of the Theologia Christiana of Abailard, for example, should be concerned with the necessity of dialectic and that Book III should contain a statement of its dangers.

There was an arsenal of traditional arguments to justify the use of pagan letters and arts,^^ repeated again and again, during the period, most of them from the letters in which Jerome defended himself against the recurring charge of polluting the purity of the Church with pagan filth: the chosen people took with them the gold and vessels and rai- ment of the EgjT)tians, leaving behind, however, the idols they had fabricated; Moses, Joseph, David had profited

illaqueatur falsitate. Cumque omnes, ut cautissime ad sacrae paginae quaestiones accedant, sint commonendi; illi utique nostri temporis dialectic! (imo dialectice haeretici, qui non nisi flatum vocis putant esse universales substantias, et qui colorem non aliud queunt intelligere quam corpus, nee sapientiam hominis aliud quam ni animam) prorsus a spiritualium quaestionum disputatione sunt exsufflandi." Anselmus, Liber de fide trinitatis et de incarnatione verbi, contra blasphernias Buzelini sive Boscelini, 3, PL 158, 265. It is to be noted that the dialectic of Anselm differs from that of Abailard in the important respect that whereas Anselm undertakes to demonstrate by the necessity of reason alone, without Scriptural quotation, Abailard undertakes to demonstrate by conciliating many texts. The two projects are brought closer together however by Anselm 's further statement that none of his conclusions are inconsistent with what the holy Fathers and in particular Saint Augustine wrote, and his recommendation that the reader study Augustine's De Trinitate before following his demon- strations. In both Anselm and Abailard, the dialectic explores by reason the consequences of faith; Anselm indeed entitled his Mono- logium "An example of one meditating on the reason of faith," and his Proslogion "Faith seeking understanding," while Abailard can deduce all his philosophy from the faith in the Trinity. "Cf. J. de Ghellinck, "Dialectique et dogme aux X-XII' si^cles," in Beitrdge zur Geschichte der Philosophie des Mitteldlters, Supplement- band I, 1913, pp. 79-99.

RENAISSANCE AND METHOD 61

by the arts of the Egyptians, Babylonians, Chaldeans; in- structions are given in Deuteronomy^^ for the mode of preparing the captive woman to be taken as wife by shav- ing her hair, cutting her nails and bathing her ; David used Goliath's sword against him; Solomon at the opening of the Book of Proverbs admonishes that one know wisdom and discipline, the words of prudence, parables and the ob- scure words, sayings and enigmas of wise men ;^* Paul quotes from the pagan poets and philosophers, from Epimenides,^^ from Menander,^® Aratus.^^ In Abailard these arguments are joined to the conviction that no knowledge or science can be evil, that even the science of that which is evil is good, since it alone gives us power to avoid the evil, and power over evil is good.

If any science were evil and if it were evil to know any- thing, then not even God who knows all things could be absolved from evil. For the plenitude of knowledge is in him alone whose gift is all knowledge. For knowledge or science is the comprehension of the truth of things which are, and he discerns all things truly before whom things which are not are as things present.^*

Those who are learned in sacred letters will recognize that spiritual men grasp sacred doctrine rather through study of science than through merit of religion; the saints who be- fore their conversion had greater knowledge of the secular sciences had greater command of sacred erudition after their conversion. Paul the Apostle seems no greater in merit than Peter, nor Augustine the Confessor greater than Mar- tin; yet each of them had greater grace in doctrine after

"Deut. 21: 23 fP.

" Prov. 1 : 1-7.

'•Titus 1: 22.

"I Cor. 15: 33.

"Acts 17: 28.

»« Theologia Christiana III, PL 178, 1213.

62 RENAISSANCE AND METHOD

their conversion to the extent that they had greater knowl- edge of letters before.

But though Augustine, the greatest of the ecclesiastical doctors, and Jerome had read in the writings of philosophers and were particularly well versed in the philosophical arts, when they had turned from the Gentile philosophy to the true wisdom, which is Christ,^^ they saw none the less that the arts are not always used to proper ends^^Of the three, grammar, rhetoric and dialectic, it is grammar that Abailard finds particularly dangerous]^ indeed poetic figments, which are customarily treated in books entitled "Grammar," are interdicted to the Christians. Consequently Abailard draws up an impressive list of citations against the grammarian. Jerome, who had been quoted in approbation of dialectic, is now cited in condemnation of grammar and rhetoric, ' ' The songs of the secular poets, the science of the rhetoricians, the pomp of words are the food of the devil. "^^ " 'What communion hath light with darkness ? And what accord hath Christ with Belial ? '^^ What has Horace to do with the Psal- ter, Virgil with the Gospel, Cicero with the Apostle ?"^^ Isidore too is quoted to the same effect :

The books of the Gentiles are to be avoided for the love of the sacred writings. . . . The pretence of the art of gram- mar is not to be set above more simple letters, for common letters which are more simple and which pertain only to the humility of those who read are better, and the others are worse because they induce in men a pernicious elation of the mind. Grammarians are better than heretics. For here-

^^ Introduetio ad theologiam II, 2, PL 178, 1041-1042.

^ Introdiictio ad theoJogmm II, 2, PL 178, 1042: Hieronymus, "Epis-

tola 31, ad Damasus de duobus Filiis" 13, PL 22, 385.

"II Cor. 6: 14.

^ Introductio ad theologiam II, 2, PL 178, 1042: Hieronymus, "Epis-

tola 22, ad Eustochium, Paulae filiam" 29, PL 22, 416.

RENAISSANCE AND METHOD 63

tics administer a draught of deadly potion when they per- suade men, whereas the doctrine of grammarians can even be of aid to life, when it has been turned to better uses.^^

Decisions of a council and Augustine are quoted to the same effect, and the criticism of grammar and rhetoric is shown finally as a continuation of Plato's objections to the poets and of the censure which Boethius directs, in the person of philosophy, against the poetic muses.

In Abailard's work, however, the dialectic of citation is pursued conscientiously, and although the criticisms he has cited are of the poets, not of the liberal arts in general, quotations from Ambrose are reminders of the dangers of dialectic and philosophy. ^^ Ambrose finds that heretics derive all the force of their poisonous doctrines from dialec- tical disputations in which the doctrines of philosophers are defined, not for their power to construct, but because of zeal to destroy. Once more the Apostle Paul lends powerful support to the attack on dialectic. ^^ "Take heed lest there shall be any that maketh spoil of you through his philosophy

^Ihid. PL 178, 1043: Isidorus Sententiarum lihri tres III, 13, 2 and 10-11, PL 32, 686-88. Abailard's quotation from Isidore differs slightly from the text of Isidore; since those variations are verbal (with the possible exception of the substitution in Abailard of "utility" for "humility"), the translation above follows the original, which is clearer, rather than Abailard's version.

^Introductio ad theologiam II, 2, PL 178, 1044 ff. Abailard himself attributes the attitude of his contemporaries toward him to their judg- ment of his logic. "Odiosum me mundo reddidit logica. Aiunt enim perversi pervertentes, quorum sapientia est in perditione, me in logica praestantissimum esse, sed in Paulo non mediocriter claudicare cumque ingenii praedicent aeiem, Christianae fidei subtrahunt purilatem. Quia, ut mihi videtur, opinione potius traducuntur ad judicium, quam experientiae magistratu. Nolo sic esse philosophus, ut recalcitrem Paulo. Non sic esse Aristoteles, ut seeludat a Christo. Non envm aliud nomen est sub coelo, in quo oporteat me salvum fieri (Acts 4:12)." Confessio fidei ad Heloissam, PL 178, 375. *" Theologia Christiana III, PL 178, 1216 fl.

64 RENAISSANCE AND METHOD

and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudi- ments of the world and not after Christ. "^^ "But if any man seemeth to be contentious, we have no such custom, neither the churches of God, "^^ " Charge them in the sight of the Lord that they strive not about words, to no profit, to the subverting of them that hear.''^^ Moreover, just as Abailard repeated most of the customary arguments for borrowing from the pagans, so too there reappear in his writings most of those heretical syllogisms based on falla- cious major premisses which were the common property of his century and which dialectic was charged with import- ing from natural philosophy to the confusion of the divine knowledge : If one is a virgin, one never gives birth ; if one is blind, one never sees again; what is eternal is not tem- poral; what is invisible is not visible; what is God is not man ; what dies is not divine.

Abailard contends, however, that these citations contain arguments not against the use of dialectic, but against the sophistical and fallacious use of it. Even Aristotle, he re- peats, was aware that it could be put to such uses, since he provided arguments against sophisms.^^ Most important and recurrent of the misuses of dialectic is the application of it to what is not intelligible. The arts are indispensable to an understanding of the sacred writings ; but they cannot be applied to the understanding of the divine nature. Even more, there is a great difference between divine and human tradition, between spiritual and animal philosophers, be- tween the disciplines of sacred and secular writings. The ten categories are necessary to the understanding of the

'•Col. 2: 8.

" I Cor. 11 : 16.

=» II Tim. 2 : 14.

"Theologia Christiana III, PL 178, 1216; "Epistola 13, Invectiva in

quemdam ignarum dialectices, " PL 178, 354,

RENAISSANCE AND METHOD 65

natures of things; they do not apply to God. "Words take on a variety of meaning in the mundane sciences ; when they are transferred from creatures by similitude to God they take on a totally different meaning. For words were invented to manifest human ideas, but God, since he exceeds human understanding, is ineffable, and the things which are said of him in parabole, enigma, and likeness express rather some- thing to be suspected of that ineffable majesty than some- thing to be understood.^° It is a doctrine of Abailard's, which he learned from Plato and Boethius,^^ that words should be cognate with the things to which they are referred, and therefore when words are transferred to the singular na- ture of God they take on a particular significance and con- struction, and pass from their proper institution as their ob- ject exceeds all things. Without deserting his advocacy of the arts, therefore, Abailard can say with Gregory that he judges it extremely improper to restrict the words of the divine oracle under the rules of the grammarian Donatus. The rules of the philosophers apply to the natures of things and to their daily uses, not to the nature and will of the divine power that rules all natures. A thing is said to be possible or impossible when natures agree or disagree, but such estimations of antecedents and consequences are ac- cording to a faculty of creatures, not a measure of divine power. Those who are more learned in the arts can succeed better in sacred erudition ; but it is the pure of heart, not the learned, who attain to a knowledge of God with the aid of his revelation. The Scriptures are unintelligible un- less they are approached with the aid of the seven arts, but those arts do not apply to God.^^ It is by simple faith that we are saved, and the Christian proceeds from faith

'^Theologia Christiana III, PL 178, 1246. ^Ibid., 1245. ''lUd., 1220.

66 RENAISSANCE AND METHOD

to understanding ; he does not come to faith through under- standing, nor does he, if he cannot understand, recede from faith. But when he succeeds in attaining to understanding, he is delighted; when he is not able to, he venerates what he can not apprehend.

Against the background of this notion of the place of philosophy in relation to faith, the work of Abailard and his labors in philosophy and theolog;^- , his conception of na- ture and the function of thought, appear as integrated parts of a single philosophic prospectus. All philosophy and all action are based on a faith as on a metaphysical foundation.

We set as foundation of all good things the faith of the holy Trinity, in such wise that the beginning of all goods is derived from the very knowledge of the divine nature. Whoever, consequently, should be able to weaken that foun- dation, leaves to us nothing of those things which are built upon that foundation.^^

Attacks on that foundation no less than the defense against such attacks come from two sources, authorities (that is, literally, statements by authors) and reason. Abailard is fond of repeating a quotation which he attributes to Cicero, that all disputation and controversy is concerned either with a writing or a reason.^* The relation of the two to each other, like the relation of the arts to theology, is double: authority is prior to reason in all things, but particularly in those which pertain to God since they exceed reason,^^ but equally truly on the other hand it is only by reason that those things can be grasped, however imperfectly, and errors in them be avoided. A thing is not believed because God says it, but it is received because one is convinced that it is

=» Introductio ad theologiam II, 2, PL 178, 1040.

" Hid., 1, PL 178, 1039; Theologia Christiana 11 and III, PL 178, 1171

and 1211, etc.

»" Theologica Christiana III, PL 178, 1171.

RENAISSANCE AND METHOD 67

so.^* The philosophers were able to anticipate the funda- mental truth of the Christian philosophy, the Trinity, be- cause the marks of it were scattered about them accessible to the human intellect : their statements, no less than those of the Fathers, were attempts to indicate a common reality, and the philosophic discipline consists in a dialectical ex- amination of the forces of the reasons which they disposed. Augustine is quoted for the rationale of this conception of reason : ' ' The order of nature is such that when we say any- thing, authority precedes reason, for a reason can seem in- firm, which, once it shall have been rendered, does not there- after depend on the authority through which it was formed. ' '^^

On all the questions which he discusses, therefore, Abai- lard is careful to assemble the variety of things that have been said. It is possible to quote him as if he had nothing to advance which was not screened by the authority of Paul or Augustine or Jerome or Ambrose ; on the other hand he may be quoted as the bold critic who presumed to set forth contradictions in the Fathers, to find Anselm's analysis of the Trinity inadequate, and who was himself twice con- demned for the excessive rationalism of his alternative anal- ysis. Abailard conceived the task of philosophy to be pre- cisely to disclose the meanings of various statements he quotes, how the reasons are related, what the arguments demonstrate. This is the task of the three arts. Grammar is used for the explication of the meaning of words, by examining the variation of their significances with the varia- tion of context, speaker, auditor, time and place. The Sic et non is thus a vast grammatical exercise in which Abailard

" Introductio ad theologiam 11, 3, PL 178, 1050.

^ Ibid., 1, PL 178, 1039: Augustinus, De moribus ecclesiae Catholicae

I, 2, 3, PL 32, 1311.

68 RENAISSANCE AND METHOD

assembled some 1,800 texts ordered according to 158 ques- tions to which they rendered apparently contradictory con- clusions: in the "Prologue" to the work he furnishes the rules for the interpretation of the texts, which are precisely those that the grammarian had given for the understanding of any writing. The contradictions, however, are not irresolu- ble : most of those that are raised in the first part of the Sic et non are answered in the first parts of the Theologia Chris- tiana and the Introductio ad fheologiam,^^ of which unfor- tunately only the first portions have come down to us. There the task is dialectical : the meanings having been expounded, their agreements and disagreements are set forth, and where the arguments are fallacious they are refuted. Ehetoric falls into a subordinate place to be invoked only when figurative expressions and developments are involved. But herein lies

^ Thus Question I of the Sic et non, ''Quod iides humanis rationibus Bit adstruenda, et contra," is considered dialectically in the Introductio ad theologiam II, 3, PL 178, 1048-1051; the dependence of the argu- ment on the quotations collected in the Sic et non may be judged from the fact that of the 30 quotations brought together in Question I of that work, 12 are repeated explicitly in those pages (and 2 more within the radius of ten columns). Question 2, "Quod fides sit de non ap- parentibus tantum, et contra," is taken up in the Introductio ad theologiam, I, 2, PL 178, 984-985, where 8 of the 11 citations col- lected in the Sic et non are used; the argument is summarized in the Epitome theologiae Christiance 2 PL 178, 1696, where 3 of the citations are preserved. Or again Question 15, "Quod Deus non genuit se, vel quod etiam secundum divinitatem filius f actus sive creatus dicatur; vel quod principatu quodam sive auctoritate praeccdat pater, et con- tra," is determined in the Introductio ad theoJogiiim 1, 16, PL 178, 1009-1012 and the Theologia Christiana I, 5, PL 178, 1141-1144, in both of which 15 of the 30 citations of the Sic et non are used (3 of the remaining 15 being used elsewhere in the Introductio). Or again. Question 18, "Quod aeterna generatio filii narrari vel sciri vel intelligi possit, et non" is taken up in the Introductio ad theologiam II, 3, PL 178, 1052-1055, where 6 of the 15 citations are used. There can be no doubt of the close dependence of the discussions of the theological works upon the materials brought together in the Sic et non, not- withstanding that the portions of these works that have come down to us cover less than a quarter of the questions of the Sic et non.

RENAISSANCE AND METHOD 69

the whole task of philosophy : the examination by reason of the various theories that have been advanced concerning the nature of things. By his approach Abailard discovered greater accord among the philosophers than has been found by other approaches, for his concern is to discover that as- pect of reality which the philosopher was attempting to ex- press, and it turns out more frequently that two philosophers in disagreement are writing of two different things than that they are writing, one correctly, the other incorrectly, of the same thing. But any other approach than this, Abailard re- peatedly contends would be fallacious, sophistical or at the least irrational and unphilosophic.

Abailard cannot be taken in a detailed sense to be a pre- cise representative of his age, but in this concern to gather the significant texts of any controversy, discipline or science from philosophers. Scriptures, Fathers and decrees of coun- cils, he worked as did most of the grammarians, theologians and canon lawyers of the century. This was the time in which the collections of canons had reached the completion of their systematization in Gratian's Concordance of Discord- ant Canons which was to be known to posterity as the De- creta; it was the time when dozens of collections of Sentences were prepared as systematic resumes of the whole of theology, including the efflorescences of controversies, from those in which Augustine had engaged, to those like the discussions of the Eucharist and predestination which had disturbed the court of the Frankish kings. Even less comprehensive re- sumes, like the De sacramento corporis et sanguinis Dominici of Alger of Liege,^® or the Be sacramentis Christianae fidei of Hugo of Saint Vietor,*° run through the classical se- quences of texts. Indeed it would be no exaggeration to say

«• PL 180, 759 ff. « PL 176, 174 ff.

70 RENAISSANCE AND METHOD

that the chief lines of the discussions of the twelfth century- were laid by a collection of no more than three thousand texts which are repeated again and again in the writings of the time.

The twelfth century did a thorough piece of grammatical preparation for the dialectical developments of theology in the thirteenth century. One of the Books of Sentences pre- pared during the century by Peter Lombard (who died in 1164) was to become the basis of theological education: like the Sic et non, by which apparently Lombard was influenced, it is fundamentally a collection of quotations for the most part from the Church Fathers on important questions rang- ing from the nature of God through the work of creation, the redemption, the sacraments, the last judgment, back to heaven. By the thirteenth century the basic course in the Fac- ulty of Theology of the new universities was the explications on the Book of Sentences: from these courses resulted hun- dreds of commentaries on the Sentences of Lombard, and most of the great philosophers, Bonaventura, Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, "William of Ockham among them, were authors of such commentaries and frequently gave in them the most complete statement of their philosophic views. During the thirteenth century, Roger Bacon (who died in 1294) makes, as one of the points of his criticism of the study of theology, the statement that the expounder of the Sen- tences has taken precedence over the expounder of the Bible ; and by the fifteenth century Gerson (who died in 1429) finds that the Bible had been forgotten in the study of Peter Lombard. During this period there were men to protest against this dialectical organization of theology in the ra- tional systems of theologians and in the technical disputation of theological problems. But in the Renaissance that protest against scholastic theology, and with it scholastic philosophy,

RENAISSANCE AND METHOD 71

assumes a proportion to drown out the defenses of the last practitioners of the method. And it was in contrast to the doctrines and analyses of their predecessors that the human- ist was able to view himself constructing a new learning from the works of antiquity and the reformer to view him- self rediscovering God, and Moses and Paul in the Bible. What this discovery of man, nature and God consisted in, is involved in the answer to the question, What became of grammar, rhetoric and dialectic in the Renaissance ?

Ill

As Abailard may be taken as an extreme example of the activity of his contemporaries, collecting and sorting texts, and fitting them to the statement of a Christian doctrine, so Erasmus may be viewed as a culmination of a later tendency which had been vocal even before Petrarch complained in the fourteenth century of the eternal disputes, endless defini- tions and reasoning of dialecticians. According to Petrarch they derived their chief pleasure from the fight itself, not from the discovery of truth, and Petrarch refused, to the horror, as he paints the situation, of his Averroistic friends, to discuss on the authority of Aristotle things which could be proved neither by reason nor by experiment. Though they differed from Abailard in the relative emphases they would give the arts, Petrarch or Erasmus would not condemn the liberal arts, not even logic, since they are the necessary prep- arations, the instruments to be used to penetrate to phi- losophy. But Petrarch would grant that logic is a road which it is proper to traverse, though it does not follow that we should linger on it forever; what he condemned is not the liberal arts, but the hoary-headed children who have spent their lives in the study of them.*^ The dialecticians of the day

^'Cf. Erasmus Be ratione studU, Opera Omnia, Leyden, 1703, I, 522: "Ad haec si quis Dialecticen addendam statuet, non admodum refraga-

72 RENAISSANCE AND METHOD

are at fault, not the ancient philosophers whom they pro- fess to use, not even Aristotle, for they misconceive and re- fute even him together with Pythagoras and Plato, Cicero, Varro and Seneca. The task of the new learning was to res- cue the philosophers from the quibbles of scholastic phi- losophy as it was to rescue the Bible and the Fathers from the degradations and stultifications of scholastic theology. Both Abailard and Erasmus were concerned with a true philosophy, which they called the philosophy of Christ ; both held that its truth was such that the ancient philosophers could not entirely have ignored it ; both conceived that the works of antiquity could therefore be of some utility in preparation for and induction to that philosophy, and both, when they discuss the manner of that anticipation, bring the arts of grammar, rhetoric and dialectic prominently into the discussion. But there the similarities end: w^hen Abailard undertakes to show in what the ancients had anticipated the true doctrine, he finds traces of the doctrine of the Trinity which is for him the basis of all philosophy and action ; for Erasmus, on the other hand, the anticipations of the philoso- phers are to be found rather in the ways of life and the virtues which the philosophers could not help finding. To the humanist it seemed significant that the Platonic philosophers should have made so much of the immortality of the soul ; but of the doctrine of the Trinity few humanists could find a trace in antiquity or, for that matter, in the Bible. Any aid to knowledge, particularly the three arts, should be culti- vated by the Christian philosopher according to Abailard, for all knowledge is good. According to Erasmus, though

bor, modo ab Aristotele earn discat, non ab isto loquacissimo Sophis- tarum genere, neque rursum ibi desideat, et velut ad Scopulos (ut inquit Gellius) Sirenaeos conseneseat. "

RENAISSANCE AND METHOD 73

many things are to be found in the books of the pagans which are in agreement with the philosophy of Christ, that phi- losophy is expressed most perfectly and efficaciously by Christ. No faction of philosophy was ever so crass as to teach that money makes men happy, none so impudent as to set the end of good in vulgar honors and pleasures. Thus the Stoics saw that no one is wise except the good man; they saw that nothing is truly good or honorable except true virtue, and nothing is evil or to be avoided, except only base- ness. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle likewise taught something of the nature of virtue and of goodness; and Diogenes, Socrates, Epictetus illustrated such doctrines in their lives. But no one taught and exemplified them so fully as did Christ, and it is a great wonder therefore that men should take a lesser archetype than Christ himself or seek to learn the wisdom of Christ from the letters of men rather than from Christ himself speaking in the letters of the Evange- lists and the Apostles.*^

The locus of the philosophy of Christ has shifted sharply in Erasmus from underetanding to practice : one has learned to be a true theologian not when one has learned to twist syllogisms in accordance with art, but when one has learned to show in one's emotions, in one's countenance and eyes, in one's very life, the results of the true teaching.

This kind of philosophy is situated more truly in the emo- tions than in syllogisms, it is a life rather than a disputation, an afflatus rather than erudition, a transformation rather than reason. To be learned is the lot of only a few ; but no one is unable to be Christian, no one is unable to be pious, and I add this boldly, no one is unable to be a theologian. For that which is most of all in accordance with nature de- scends easily into the minds of all. But what else is the *^ Erasmus, Paraclesis, Opera Omnia, V, 141 F-142 E.

74 RENAISSANCE AND METHOD

philosophy of Christ, which he himself calls a rebirth, than the instauration of a well founded nature/^

That is not achieved by disputing concerning thorny and difficult perplexities of words, concerning instances, rela- tions, quiddities, formalities, but by holding to and ex- pressing what Christ taught and exhibited. It is important, first, to know what he taught ; second, to perform it.

On the authority of Augustine in his Be doctrina Chris- tiana, a work on which Abailard had relied for his argument, Erasmus is not averse to a cautious and sober use of the arts or to reading human books with judgment and delight. Thus, if anything turns up which is not in accord with the divine nature or which seems to be contrary to the doctrine of Christ, as that God should be enraged or touched with re- pentance, since the Christian faith holds it for certain that God is immune from such emotions, one should not there- fore hold the writing in contempt, but should believe rather that one does not follow the sense of what is read, or that there is a figure of speech involved in the words, or that the text is corrupt. These rules, it is to be remarked, all figure

^ Hid., 141 F. Cf . Epistola de pMlosophia evangelica, Opera VI, printed at the head of the edition of the New Testament, but without page number: "Quum Vetus Testamentum fuerit umbra ac veluti progym- nasma Philosophiae Euangelicae, quumque Euangelica doctrina sit instauratio simul et perfectio naturae, ut erat primum eondita sincere, mirum videri non debet, si Philosophis quibusdam Ethnicis datum est, naturae vi quaedam animadvertere, quae cum doctrina Christi con- sentiant, quum, teste Paulo, iisdem contigerit ex visibili mundi fabrica ea coUigere, quae non oculis, sed animo comprehenduntur, usque ad sempiternam Dei virtutem ac divinitatem; et maxime congruebat, ut nihil adferret Christus, cujus non aliqua vel umbra, vel scintilla prae- cessisset in Veteris Testamenti libris, quo propensior esset omnium fides, ad rem non omnino subitam atque expectatam. Primum igitur quicquid Christus praestitit, promissum est sacrorum Vatum oraculis, adum- bratum est figuris, et carptim etiam expressum est, veluti subinde promicantibus hinc atque hinc scintillulis aliquot, quae lucem illam, post erupturam, orbi portenderent. "

RENAISSANCE AND METHOD 75

among the grammatical devices which Abailard proposes in the Prologue of the Sic et non for the interpretation of texts. /But whereas Abailard is fearful lest one be led by grammar and rhetoric from the true understanding which dialectic alone can procure, the hope of Erasmus centers on the art of grammar, and his suspicions fall on rhetoric and, to a much greater degree, on dialectic, )

Among the human disciplines, different disciplines have different ends. With the rhetorician you are concerned to speak copiously and splendidly; with the dialectician to reason subtly and to trap your adversary. Let this be your one and only end, perform only this vow, only this one thing, that you be changed, that you be seized, that you be breathed, that you be transformed into those things which you learn. Only thus is the food of the mind useful, not if it remains in the memory or the stomach, but if it is conducted to the emotions and the very viscera of the mind. Only then should you seem to yourself to have made progress, not if you dispute more keenly, but if you perceive yourself little by little made other, less proud, less wrathful, less desirous of money, of pleasures or of life, if daily something fall away from your vices and something be added to your piety,'**

The more elegant disciplines which please Augustine in the De doctrina Christiana, Erasmus says are not displeas- ing to him. flhetoric, dialectic, arithmetic and music are use- ful precisely in the sense that the divine pages are not in- telligible unless one understands the nature of the things that are mentioned there, and the arts will help you to an understanding of the words and things. jBut dialectic alone is insufficient. If you are ignorant of the nature of the things of which you dispute, what do you divide, define, infer? Of what use is it to have constructed a syllogism

*^Batio seu methodus compendio perveniendi ad veram theologiam, Opera V, 77, B.

76 RENAISSANCE AND METHOD

in Celarent or Baroco, when disputing of crocodiles, if you do not know whether a crocodile is a kind of tree or ani- mal? This is information which is to be derived, not from Aristotle 's Physics, which is studied in the schools, but from his works On Anhnals, On Meteors, On the Soul, On the World, from the commentaries on them, and from the treat- ises of philosophers and even poets on plants, winds, gems, beasts, even on the superstitious sciences. More useful still are the treatises on the things and names in the Bible such as Eusebius had prepared and after him Jerome, in his treatise On Hehrew Names.

Rather than in dialectic and its subtleties, which even the pagans had derided in pagan philosophers and which Paul detested in a Christian, the culmination of the utility of the arts when transferred from secular letters to theology is to be found in the study of theological allegories, in which Origen had excelled, and of the commonplaces of theology in which Chrysostom had been preeminent. This is what Augustine had in mind when, in the De ordine, he sent Licentius back to his poetic muses, indicating thus that poetics is to be numbered among the liberal arts.*^ Origen 's explanation of the temptation of Abraham is cited as an in- stance in which it is difficult to tell whether he affords more pleasure or more utility to the reader, simply devel- oping the historical sense of the passage, and doing no more in the interpretation of the divine books than the gram- marian Donatus did on the comedies of Terence to make the meaning of the poet clear. There is a grammar, prac- ticed in recent years, which Erasmus thinks is lost in futile and cold questions; the grammar which he praises, how- ever, is that practiced by the old theologians, Origen, Basil, Chrysostom, Jerome. His defense is against those who su- ^Batio verae tlieologiae, Opera V, 79C-81B.

RENAISSANCE AND METHOD 77

perciliously despise grammar, rhetoric and poetics as puerile. Poetic figures and tropes are found everywhere in the writ- ings of the Prophets ; Christ used paraboles ; Paul cites the poets; innumerable theologians, among them Augustine, studied the grammatical, poetic, rhetorical schema and fig- ures of the Bible, and Augustine called his work, not Chris- tian grammar or dialectic, but On Christian Doctrine, which is no other than theology. One would look in vain, in these sources, for references to Aristotle, to first and second in- tentions, syllogistic forms, quiddities, haecceites or the scholastic method of division and subdivision. Or again, the manner of this doctrine of Christ can be both stated and illustrated in the allegory of manna in the Old Testament. For manna is the adumbration of the knowledge of the secret law ; that it was not of earthly origin but was rained from heaven indicates, as the difference between human and sacred letters, that the whole sacred Scripture was divinely inspired and the work of God, its author. The small- ness of manna figures the humility of the speech, which conceals vast mysteries in words that are almost unclean. Its whiteness indicates that there is no doctrine of mor- tals which is not soiled with some blackness of error, but only the doctrine of Christ is snowy, white, wholly pure.*^ And so one by one the characteristics of manna are seen as the signs of the character of the philosophy of Christ, and since that philosophy is involved in figures, it is proper, as preparation for it, to read in ' ' the letters of the poets and Gentile philosophers, ' ' provided one do it in passing, at the proper times of life, and not in excess. This is the admoni- tion of Basil, Augustine, Jerome, Cyprian.

Those letters form and animate the youthful spirit and prepare it marvelously for the understanding of Divine " Enchiridion militis Christiani, 2, Opera V, 6F-7A.

78 RENAISSANCE AND METHOD

Scriptures, since it is almost a kind of sacrilege to burst directly upon them with unclean feet and hands, Jerome censured the impudence of those who, trained only in secu- lar letters, dared to treat of the Divine Scriptures. But how much more impudently do they act, who dare to do it, without having tasted even of secular letters. Moreover, as the divine Scripture does not have much fruit if you remain in and adhere to the literal meaning, so too the Homeric and Vergilian poetry is very useful if you remember that it is all allegorical, a statement which no one will deny who has so much as tasted even with the tips of his lips the learning of the ancients. I would advise you, however, not to read the obscene poets at all or certainly not to examine them too closely, unless perchance you should wish to learn to be horrified more at the vices described and at the dis- cord of sinful men and to love honorable things more vehem- ently. Of the philosophers, moreover, I should prefer you to follow the Platonists, for this reason, that they approach in a great many statements as well as in the very manner of their speaking very closely to the Prophetic and Evangelical figures. Briefly, it will have been profitable to taste all pagan literature, if only it be done, as I have said, in the proper years, moderately, cautiously and with pleasure ; in the sec- ond place, quickly, in the manner of a tourist rather than an inhabitant ; finally, what is most important, if all things are referred to Christ.*^

It is not his intention, Erasmus says, to condemn the studies which are treated in the schools: they should be treated soberly and chastely, and they should not be the only studies. What he objects to is that the theologian should never dare to proceed beyond the philosophy of Aristotle but should, as preparation for theology, grow old in profane studies. As to one who drinks wormwood, all things taste of wormwood, so to one who spends the good part of his life with writers like Bartholus and Baldus,

" Ibid., 7E-8A.

RENAISSANCE AND METHOD 79

Averroes, Holcott, Bricot, and Tartaretus, in sophistical disputes and in confused little summae and collections of theology, the sacred letters do not savor as they are but of that which is brought to them. Chrysippus had been criti- cized because whole tragedies were to be found in the com- mentaries which were supposed to deal with logic; Eras- mus finds it far more reprehensible that the whole of Aristotle should be found in the commentaries of theologians, and against the reply that without such exact knowledge one cannot be a theologian, he consoles himself with the example of Chrysostom, Cyprian, Jerome, Ambrose, Au- gustine, Clement, content to be a rhetorician with them rather than a theologian with later writers who seem to them- selves to be other than men. Abailard was impressed with the good of all knowledge ; Erasmus prefers to quote Sen- eca: "Certain things it is proper to have learned not to learn. "*^ Where Abailard asks what there is in common between the poets and the Scriptures, Erasmus asks what there is in common between Aristotle and Christ.*^

Yet the materials with which the new learning worked were the same as those of scholastic theology. When Eras- mus replies to a critic who accuses him of condemning the whole of scholastic theology, of being strangely antipa- thetic to the name of Aristotle, of thinking that the whole of philosophy should be segregated from the study of the-

^ 'Ratio verae theologiae, Opera V, 83 A-P. Cf. John of Salisbury, Metalogicon, I, 24, ed. by Clement C. J. Webb, Oxford, 1929, 57: "Unde inter virtutes grammatici merito reputatum est ab antiquis, aliqua ignorare. ' '

"Abailardus (quoting Jerome), Introductio, II, 2, PL 178, 1042 D: ' ' Quid f aeit cum Psalterio Horatius, cum Evangelic Maro, cum Apos- tolo Cicero?" Erasmus, Epistola apologetica ad Martinum Dorpiv/m Theologum, Opera IX, 8: "Quaeso, quid commercii Christo et Aris- toteli? Quid sophisticis captiunculis cum aeternae sapientiae mys- teriisf" Cf. Paraclesis, Opera V, 139F-140A.

80 RENAISSANCE AND METHOD

ology, he can reply that there is really little difference be- tween them: they both think that the perfect theologian would be one who joined the liberal disciplines to an exact knowledge of the Scriptures, and there should therefore be no quarrel between them.^'' With that much in common, however, all the differences that separate the medieval method from that of the Kenaissance are still possible. The differences, none the less, are as simple to state as the simi- larity : the task that Erasmus set for himself was the inter- pretation of a document to discover precisely what Paul said, or what the evangelists said, as indication ultimately of the philosophy of Christ. That Plato or Pythagoras or even Moses, may have said something similar is irrelevant to the problem; all the devices of the arts are exploited to determine the authenticity of the document, the accu- racy of the text, the precision and sufficiency of the in- terpretation. Abailard, on the other hand, set as his task to discover truth by examining the various statements that had been made on a given problem. Having set the problem, as, ' ' whether God the Father alone is unborn, " it is not only relevant but important to gather together what the Greek and Roman philosophers, the Hebrew prophets, the Evan- gelists, the Apostles and the Church Fathers have said on the subject. For all of them, with their varying data and abilities, were attempting to resolve the same problem, and Abailard 's method is to seek, behind the statements of many writers, the identical truth which they all faced, some stat- ing it more adequately than others, some misstating it; but truth will reinforce and lead to further true proposi-

" Eesponsio ad Alhertum Pkm, Opera IX, 1168 : " Si quid tale delatum fuisset e lucubrationes meis, quantopere clamasset me dotrahere Scrip- turis, in quibus, ut ipse docuit alibi, nullus apiculus vaeat mysterio. Colligit tamen perfectum Theologum fore, qui liberales disciplinas cum exacta Scriptuarum eognitione conjunxerit. Idem ergo prior docui. Cur ergo mecum litigat?"

RENAISSANCE AND METHOD Ol

tions and the error of erroneous statements is made clear by the true statement.

The difference between the method of Erasmus and that of Abailard may therefore be stated as that between a use of the three arts oriented to an understanding of a passage (that is, the three arts arranged in accordance with the needs of grammar) and the use of the three arts oriented to a comparative estimation of a variety of arguments (that is, the three arts arranged under the dominance of dialectic). For the first, dialectic affords slight utility but great danger by the intrusion of needless subtleties ; for the second, gram- mar is useful for the dialectician in determining the mean- ing of what had been said, but it presents the dangers to systematic, true and useful thought that philosophers have so frequently seen in the desertion of literal, unequivocal meanings for concern with the figures and analogies of poets. Abailard 's pupils had hoped to clear away the con- troversies of theology by the aid of a dialectician ; Erasmus thought of the theologian as possessed not with points of doctrine, but with a way and habits of life — if a controversy arose concerning an important text, the one recourse was to emend the text or perhaps correct the translation. Even Augustine is quoted as having sent an adversary, Cres- conius, to the Greek text to correct the absurdity of a quota- tion from Ecclesiasticus, and the great fruits of Augustine's interpretation of the Old Testament of the Septuagint would have been greater still if he had known Hebrew. But of all the Fathers it is Jerome who is the surest guide, ac- cording to Erasmus, for he saw the need of Greek and Hebrew studies for the theologian; he refuted Augustine, Hilary and Ambrose, who thought that the Septuagint trans- lation was good enough ;^^ he finally was least tempted to

** Batio verae theologiae, Opera V, 78A-79C.

82 RENAISSANCE AND METHOD

leave off the solid work of the theologian for philosophic subtleties.

The change in the relation of the three arts, particularly of grammar and dialectic, to one another, has the curious result of transforming the natures of the arts as they are conceived from the two points of view and consequently changing the significance of works that are read in either of the two ways. For Abailard, grammar is the art of ex- ploring the meanings of texts, in need, however, of the aid of dialectic whenever difficulties are found; for Eras- mus, too, grammar is the art of exploring the meanings of texts, but no difficulty can arise for the solution of which, if it is soluble, grammar is not sufficient, since grammar can resort, in the one direction, to the criticism of manu- scripts and translations, in the other, to figurative usages.^^

^Erasmus, like Abailard, distinguishes between tlie function of the scholar interpreting a text and that of the sage or the prophet under- standing divine things. Only pure faith and the Holy Spirit can aid the latter, but for the former the liberal arts are necessary, and here Erasmus differs from Abailard in his reliance on grammar rather than dialectic. Consequently he prefers the Annotations on the New Testa- ment of Laurentius Valla to the theological conimentaries of Nicholas of Lyra. Epistola 182 to Christopher Fisher; Allen I, 410: "An dicent non idem esse iuris Vallae grammatico quod Nicolao theologo? Ut ne respondeam interim Laurentium a magnis viris inter philosophos quoque ac theologos referri, Lyra quum vocem excutit, num theologi ac non magis grammatici vices agit? imo totum hoc, diuinas vertere scrip- turas, grammatici videlicet partes sunt. Neque vero absurdum si quibusdam in rebus plus sapit lethro quam Moyses. Ac ne ipsa quidem, opinor, disciplinarum omnium regina theologia ducet indignum admoueri sibi manus, ac debitum exhiberi obsequium a pedissequa grammatica; quae tametsi nonnullis est dignitate posterior, nullius certe opera magis necessaria. In minimis versatur, sed sine quibus nemo euasit maximus ; nugas agitat, sed quae seria ducant. Quod si reclament maiorem esse theologiam quam ut grammaticae legibus teneatur, totum interpretandi negociura de sacri Spiritus aflBatu pendere, noua vero theologorum dignitas, si solis illis licet barbare loqui. Sed expediant interim quid sibi velit, quod Desyderio suo scribit Hieronymus, Aliud est, inquiens, esse vatem et aliud interpretem. Ibi Spiritus ventura praedicit; hie eruditio et verborum copia quae inteUigit transfert."

RENAISSANCE AND METHOD 83

There is a third form that grammar is to take in the hands of rhetoricians who submit grammar and dialectic to the needs of their art: for them, grammar means what it has come to mean most commonly today ; it consists only in the rules of correct speech,^^ for the task of the rhetorician is to state his doctrine so clearly and persuasively that there is no need of a further grammatical art to make his mean- ing clear. Abailard and Erasmus can therefore both cite the Be doctrina Christiana of Augustine in support of their positions. For Abailard it is a defense of the disciplines pre- pared by the pagan philosophers and particularly the chief of them, dialectic, which Augustine had called the art of arts; what is important is science and that Abailard con- ceives in its systematic, formal, logical sense. For Erasmus the same work is a defense of sciences, but to Erasmus, the sciences were bodies of information, to be culled as they are useful ; dialectic is one among them, the art of arts, to be sure, but of slight utility in the discovery of truth and worse than useless in the interpretation of Scripture. The formal structure of science, whatever its utility to one engaged in disputation, may be ignored by one who seeks a guide to action. Parallel with this extension of the scope of grammar, dialectic underwent a restriction. Medieval philosophers had brought together the two meanings which the term had had in antiquity. According to Plato, dialec- tic consisted in the pursuit of reality by the use of reason alone, independent of all sensuous information, until by an act of pure intelligence the true nature of the good had

See also Erasmus's preface to Valla's Annotations and E. F. H. Capey's Erasmus, London 1905, pp. 104-6. Luther becomes the pure grammarian by assimilating the two pursuits to one and putting his whole confidence in the Holy Spirit alone. ^ See the treatment of grammar by Nizolius, below, page 107.

84 RENAISSANCE AND METHOD

been grasped;^* the mark of the dialectician was the abil- ity to survey a subject as a whole.^^ According to Aristotle, dialectic was one of the three kinds of reasoning or syllo- gism : unlike the demonstrative syllogism, which depends on primary and true premises, and the eristic or sophistic syl- logism, which depends on premises which seem to be prob- able but are not, or which seem to depend on premises which are or seem to be probable, the dialectical syllogism is con- cluded from premises which are probable, that is, such as are accepted by all or by most men or by the wise.^^ Dur-

« BepuiUc VII, 532.

^^Ibid., 537. Among the Platonists dialectic became connected insep- arably with the dialogue form of discourse. Cf. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers III, 48, trans. E. D. Hicks, New York, 1925, p. 319: "Dialectic is the art of discourse by which we either refute or establish some proposition by means of question and answer on the part of the interlocutors. ' '

" Topics, I. 1, 100a 25-lOOb 26: "Etrxi bn avWoyianbi \6yos h <5 TeQ'tvTosv TLvQv erepop tl twp Keifxhcov k^ avayKr]S (TVulSaLfeL 6td tQv KeLfikvuv- dTToSei^ts IJiev oup earip, orap e^ a.\r)6Qip Kai TrpuiTWP 6 crvWoyiafMOi §> V ^k TOtovTuv a 5td tipojp irpwToiP /cat a.\r)diip rrjs irtpl avra ypoiatuis rriv apxvf et\r]<t>ev- SiaXe/crt/cos 8e avWoyicriids 6 k^ knSo^up avWoyi^o^ePos. iari 8e aXijOrj nkv Kol Trpdra to. fii] 5t' hrkpuv dXXd 5t' olvtQip tx°vTa r-qp wlaTiv oh &d yap a' Tttls iwLtFT-qpLOPLKals 6.pxo.h kTri^i}Telcrdai to 5id ri, dXX' kKd<TTr)P twp apx^ip avT-qp Kad' kavrrip elpai Triarnp. tpdo^a 5i to. doKOvpra iracrip ^ toZs TrXeio-rots rj rols O-O0OIJ, Kal TOVTOis rj Trdaip^ roh wXdcTTOLS ij rols /idXtora yvojpLnoi^ /cai ipSo^oii. kpiariKOS d'tari (jvWoyi(rp.bs 6 kK <l>aiPOtiaioiv tpdo^uiv, p.r] 6ptu]P 8k, Kal 6 e$ ei>86^o)v t) (t>aivofj.ev(jop kp86^ccp <l>aLp6fj.€P0s .

Cf. Topics I, 10, 104a3-104al5: "First, then, what a dialectical propo- sition is and what a dialectical problem is, must be defined, for it must not be thought that every proposition or every problem is dialec- tical. For no one in his senses would state as a proposition something which no one accepts or set as a problem what is manifest to all or to most people, for the latter admits of no doubt, and the former no one would concede. But a dialectical proposition is an interrogation which is probable to all or to most men or to the wise, and of the wise, either to all or to most or to the most famous, provided it is not contrary to common opinion; for any one would admit easily what is held by the wise, so long as it is not contrary to the opinions of most men. Dialectical propositions are likewise those which are similar to probable propositions; also propositions which contradict the con- traries to those which seem to be probable, and also whatever opinions there are concerning the discovered arts."

RENAISSANCE AND METHOD 85

ing the early Middle Ages, however, both conceptions of dialectic were known only at secondhand, for of all Plato's dialogues only a portion of the Timaeus had been trans- lated and of Aristotle only the first two books of the Or- ganon. Until the twelfth century, therefore, dialectic and logic were interchangeable names applied to the third of the three arts, and when Abailard wrote a work on logic and borrowed the titles for its parts from the divisions of Aristotle's logical work, that work was entitled Dialec- tica.^'^ In it there is no treatment of probable arguments as such : the Topics is concerned with hypothetical proposi- tions and is followed by the Posterior Analytics in which hypothetical syllogisms are treated. Yet within Abailard 's lifetime the Aristotelian distinction of demonstrative, dialec-

"Cf. Abailardus, "Glossae super Porphyrium, " edited by Dr. B. Geyer in Beitrdge zur Geschichte der PhilosopMe des Mitteldlters, XXI, 2: "In scribendo autem logicam hie ordo necessarius est, ut quoniam argumentationes ex propositionibus iunguntur, propositiones (ex) dictionibus, eum qui logicam perfecte scribit, primum de sim- plicibus sermonibus, deinde de propositionibus necesse est scribere, tandem in argumentationibus finem logicae consummare, sicut et prin- ceps noster Aristoteles fecit, qui ad sermonum doctrinam Praedica- menta perscripsit, ad propositionum Peri ermeueias, ad argumenta- tionum Topica et Analytica. Iste autem Porphyrins sicut ipsa inscrip- tio tituli docet, hanc introductionem ad Praedicamenta Aristotelis praeparat, quam tamen ipse ad totam artem necessariam posterius demonstrat. Cuius intentio, materia, modus tractandi, utilitas aut cui dialecticae parti supponatur praesens scientia, breviter distinguatur subtilius. " Also 3-4: "Quidam tamen hanc scientiam nee non praedica- mentorum aut divisionum seu definitionum vel etiam propositionum omnino ab inventione et iudicio separant nee ullo modo in partibus logicae recipiunt, cum tamen eas ad totam logicam necessarias iudicent. Quibus quidem tarn auctoritas quam (ratio) contraria videtur. Boethius namque super Topica Ciceronis duplicem divisionem dialecticae ponit, quarum utraque ita alteram vicissim includit, ut singulae totam dia- lecticam comprehendant. Prima quidem est per scientiam inveniendi et iudicandi, secunda per scientiam dividendi, definiendi, colUgendi. " Cf. Glossae super praedicamenta Aristotelis, ibid. 114: "Omnis namque logica duas habet partes intergrales nee alias habere invenitur, scientiam scilicet inveniendi argumenta et diiudicandi, id est compro- bandi, inventa. "

86 RENAISSANCE AND METHOD

tical and sophistical syllogisms was once more made, though dialectic continued to be used loosely as the synonym of logic.^^ Indeed in the twelfth century "dialectician" seems to have been used as the synonym not only for "logician" in the Aristotelian sense but for "peripatetic" in general.^*

"Thus John of Salisbury, Metalogicon II, 3, ed. by Clement C. J. Webb, Oxford, 1929, 64-65 : ' ' Qui vero sine logica philosophiam doceri putat, idem a aapientie cultu omnium rerum exterminet rationes, quoniam eis logica presidet. Ut diuertamus ad fabulas, Fronesim sororem Alicie, nee sterilem reputauit antiquitas, sed eggregiam eius sobolem castis Mercurii iunxit amplexibus; est enim soror ueritatis prudentia, et amorem rationis et scientie per eloquentiam fecundat et illustrat. Siquidem hoe est Philologiam Mercurio copulari; pro eo namque logica dicta est, quod rationalis, id est rationum mlnistratoria et examinatrix est. Diuisit eam Plato in dialecticam et rethoricam; Bed qui efficaciam eius altius metiuntur, ei plura attribuunt. Siquidem ei demonstratiua, probabilis, et sophistica subiciuntur, sed demonstratiua a disciplinalibus uiget principiis et ad eorum consecutiua progreditur, necessitate gaudet, et quid cui uideatur, dum tamen ita esse oporteat, non multum attendit. Decet hoe philosophicam recte docentium maies- tatem, que suo citra auditorum assensum roboratur arbitrio. Probabilis autem uersatur in his que uidentur omnibus aut pluribus aut sapientibus; et his uel omnibus uel pluribus uel maxime notis et probabilibus aut conseeutiuis eorum. Hec quidem dialectecticam et rethoricam continet; quoniam dialecticus et orator persuadere nitentes, alter aduersario, alter iudici, non multum referre arbitrantur, uera an falsa sint argumenta eorum, dummodo ueri similitudinem teneant." Also II, 5, 68: "Philosophus autem, demonstrativa utens, negotiatur ad veritatem; dialecticus ad opinionem, siquidem probabilitate con- tentus est. Sophiste autem sufficit, si vel videatur esse probabile. " Thus the Summulae logicnles of Peter of Spain, one of the first of the textbooks on logic to contain a resume of the whole Aristotelian analy- sis, refers to the subject throughout as dialectic, and opens indeed with a definition of dialectic which traces its ancestry at least back to the Pseudo-Augustine. "Dialectica est ars artium, scientia scien- tiarum ad omnium methodorum prineipia viam habens. " Erasmus had studied logic in that book, which he calls the Dialectic of Peter of Spain. "Nam et satis erant grammatici et Petri Hispani Dialecti- cam magne ex parte didicerant. ' ' Epistola 447 to Lambertus Grunnius, Allen II, 295.

=« Abailardus, Theologia Christiana III, PL 178, 1213: "Scimua quidem a Peripateticis, quos nunc dialecticos appellamus. " John of Salisbury, Metalogicon II, 20, 116: "sed ei qui Peripateticorum libros aggreditur, magis Aristotelis sententia sequenda est; forte non quia verier, sed plane quia his disciplinis magis accommoda est. ' '

RENAISSANCE AND METHOD 87

When Erasmus, more than three hundred and fifty years later, attacks dialectic and logic, his criticism is directed against the study and search for syllogisms, and the attack on syllogisms is equivalent to an attack on disputation. Dialectic had indeed been defined, in the Aristotelian tradi- tion, as the science of disputing well,^° but in that tradi- tion dialectic was not the whole of logic, nor indeed the most important part, for it did not consider the demonstra- tive arguments of science. In Erasmus's refutation, there- fore, logic in the broad sense is reduced to dialectic in the narrow sense. This is equivalent to treating all arguments as probable arguments and to looking for the cogency of science not in the principles on which the propositions of science depend and the demonstration by which they are derived from those principles, but rather in the adequacy of its mirroring of nature, which in turn is to be judged by its utility and by the consequences of using it as a guide to action. When the peripatetic method of scholasticism has been thus refuted, what is left of dialectic and argumenta- tion is in the Platonic mode; Erasmus used the dialogue form effectively in the Colloquies and in the Ciceronianus and even contemplated the use of it in interpretation of the Scriptures.*^

That shift in the emphasis in the three arts, that subver- sion of dialectic to grammar, is in itself sufficient to ac- count for the changes which the Kenaissance is reputed to have made. Ancient letters are rediscovered : Erasmus talks constantly of the bond between theology and good letters, honae literae, and of the opposition of theologians to the introduction and study of good letters, since that would

•"Pseudo-Augustine, De dialectica, I, PL 32, 1409: "Dialectica est

bene disputandi scientia." Cf. John of Salislsury, Metalogicon II, 4,

65.

" Cf . A. Humbert, Les Origines de la theologie moderne, Paris 1911,

I, 190 ff.

88 RENAISSANCE AND METHOD

reveal the ignorance of theologians. He labored to facilitate the study of the reconstituted complete texts of Church Fathers and of pagans, whereas the medieval philosopher had dealt with the doctrines of past philosophers in brief passages or texts grouped according to the subjects they treated. Man is rediscovered, both the man of antiquity who wrote and the present-day man who reads, for, on the one hand, in the constitution and criticism of texts, questions of authenticity, of the personal traits of authors and of their differences one from the other, assume an importance which they never had for the medieval philosopher (since for him an argument, once understood, had the same weight what- ever its origin) and, on the other hand, the perception and mind of the reader, similarly individualized, activated as the spirit moves, is the concern of the theologian rather than impersonal arguments which are valid though most of mankind be insensible to them. The concern of the philos- opher has become practical: according to Erasmus, unlike the philosophies which sought difficult problems on which to exercise their disciplines, the philosophy of Christ deals in precepts intelligible to all, of which the Holy Spirit is the Doctor, and simple and pure faith the only requisite ; it accommodates itself to all, it is not absent from the lowest, it is still admirable to the highest; it passes by no age, no sex, no fortune, no condition; not even the sun is more common and exposed to all than the doctrine of Christ.*^

^^ Paraclesis, Opera V, 139 F-140 C: "Praesertim cum hoe sapientiae genus, tam eximium, ut semel stultam reddiderit universam hujus mundi sapientiam, ex paucis hisce libris, velut e limpidissimis f ontibus, haurire liceat, longe minore negotio, quam ex tot voluminibus spinosis, ex tam immensis, iisque inter se pugnantibus Interpretum commen- tariis, Aristotelicam doctrinam, ut ne addam, quanto majore cum fructu. Nihil enim hie necesse est, ut tot anxiis disciplinis instruetus accedas. Simplex & cuivis paratum est viaticum, tantum fac adferas pium ac promptum animum, & inprimis simplici puraque praeditum

RENAISSANCE AND METHOD 89

Finally, nature is discovered, for the term nature has taken on a new meaning and consequent importance: the sciences, theology, philosophy and the others, had been ordered in terms of what is most intelligible; with the dis- repute of logic, the tendency grows to orient practice in terms of what is natural. The wise man is no longer the arbiter of theolog}'' ; on the contrary, the doctrines of theol- ogy are those within the scope of all, those which are most natural. Man, nature and intellectual freedom are what the historian has seen of the grammatical side of the de- bate of the grammarian with the dialectician.

This fight for "the cause of languages and good letters," which brought him criticism at each step for having cor-

fide. Tantum esto docilis, & multum in hac Philosophia promovisti. Ipsa suppeditat doctorem Spiritum, qui nuUi sese lubentius impertit, quam simplicibus aniniis. Illorum disciplinae, praeterquam quod falsam promittunt felicitatem, multorum ingenia submovent, ipsa, videlicet, praeceptorum difficultate. Haec omnibus ex aequo sese aceommodat, submittit se parvulis, ad illorum modulum sese attemperat, laete illos alens, ferens, confovens, sustinens, omnia faciens, donee grandescamus in Christo. At rursum ita non deest infimis, ut summis etiam sit ad- mirabilis. Imo quo longius in hujus opes progressus fueris, hoc longius illius majestate submoveris. Parvis pusilla est, magnis plus quam maxima. NuUam haec aetatem, nullum sexum, nullam fortunam, nul- 1am rejicit conditionem. Sol hie non perinde communis & expositus est omnibus atque Christi doctrina. Non arcet omnino quemquam, nisi quis semet arceat, ipse sibi invidens. Vehementer enim ab istis dis- sentio, qui nolint ab idiotis legi Divinas litteras, in vulgi linguam transfusas, sive quasi Christus tam involuta docuerit, ut vix a pauculis Theologis posint intelligi, sive quasi Eeligionis Christianae praesidium in hoc situm sit, si nesciatur. Regum mvsteria celare fortasse satius est: At Christus sua mysteria quam maxime cupit evulgari. Optarem ut omnes mulierculae legant Euangelium, legant Paulinas Epistolas." Cf. Enchiridon militis Christiani 2, Opera V, 8 F: "Neque vero hoc dixerim, quod neotericos contemnam, sed quod utiliora praeferam tuoque proposito conducibiliora. Habet autem Spiritus ille Divinus suam quamdam linguam suasque figuras, quae tibi sunt in primis diligenti observatione cognoscendae. Balbutit nobis Divina sapientia, et veluti mater quaepiam officiosa, ad nostram infantiam voces aceommodat. ' '

90 RENAISSANCE AND METHOD

rupted the simple style of Jerome with rhetorical adorn- ments, for having ventured to retranslate the New Testa- ment, to correct the Magnificat, to tamper with the Lord's Prayer, to change the Gospel of John, is inseparable from the theology of Erasmus,*^^ for the only task of the phi- losophy of Christ is to make the words of Christ intelligible to all, that his precepts may be followed by all. No treatise on technical philosophy would have been in place in the program Erasmus set for initiation in the true theology, but the sequence of his scholarly labors is the perfect state- ment of his contribution to philosophy: the publication of texts of the New Testament and the Fathers. He edited the Greek New Testament, made a new translation of it in- to Latin, prepared paraphrases and notes for it and wrote commentaries on ten of the Psalms ; he prepared an edition of Jerome with notes (in nine folio volumes), editions of Cyprian, Arnobius, Irenaeus, Ambrose, Augustine (in ten folio volumes), treatises by Lactantius, Chrysostom, Alger of Liege, the commentary of Haymo of Halberstadt on the

'^"Epistle 1805 to John Maldonatus, " Opus cpistolarum Des. Erasmi Eoterodami, ed. P. S. Allen and H. M. Allen, Oxford 1928, vol. VII, 15 : Nee taraen in aliud f aui litteris humanioribus nisi ut f amularentur grauioribus diseiplinis, et in his precipue theologiae, quod viderem ex harum neglectu natam miserabilem omnium disciplinarum cor- ruptionem, autorum probatissimorum vel interitum vel deprauationem, vix ipsis reparabilem qui scripserunt. . . . Ubi prodissent opera diui Hieronymi, persuaserunt nonnullis etiam principibus me simplieem Hieronymi stilum ornasse fucis rhetoricis. Ubi Nouum Testamentum exisset in lucem, turn vero lympliatorum ritu publicitus ad lapidandum Eiasmum prouocabant imperitam multitudinem : hominem temerarium qui corrigeret canticum Magnificat, qui castigaret Praecationem Do- minicam, qui mutaret Euangelium loannis. Et tamen huiusmodi clamoribus tam stolidis magis suam in(s)citiam cum pari malitia coniunctam traduxerunt quam meam existimationem laeserunt. " The Epistola apologetica ad Martinum Borpiurn Tlieologum, Opera IX, 2 ff, was written as a reply to a critic who, though approving of Erasmus's edition of Jerome, was horrified by his Praise of Folly and his edition of the New Testament.

RENAISSANCE AND METHOD 91

Psalms ; at the time of his death he was at work on a Latin edition of Origen. His scholarly labors among the pagan classics were no less extensive, though less laboriously con- ceived, since they were incidental to his work as a theologi- cal scholar: Greek editions of Aristotle and Demosthenes, Latin editions of Seneca, Quintus Curtius, Suetonius, Pliny the Elder, Livy, Terence; treatises by Cicero, translations from Plutarch, Galen and Xenophon. Besides these must be reckoned his own works and his multitudinous letters, many of which are devoted to making clear his stand with respect to scholastic and the true theology. It is in this light that his correspondent. Urban Regius, views him as ' ' the first author of the renaissance of theology in our times, ' '^^ the first to call theologians back from the turbid lacunae of scholasticism to the fount of sacred letters.

First of all you urged us to the ancient theologians, from which rivulets you then led us to the canonical Scriptures, the most limpid fountain, finally you brought it about by your most learned vigils alone that almost no kind of studies now proceeds on a better footing than does sacrosanct the- ology. We see a thing truly admirable, that human and sacred letters are so connected that studies which had been more than enemies before the machinations of unlearned men may now be learned together without disturbance. All this we owe to your lucubrations who have moved every stone that the celestial philosophy of the cross might at last be learned in the schools of theologians in the place of inane philosophy. Rejoice and triumph, Erasmus ; it has begun to be known not only among the learned in letters, but among the lay, who have been persuaded by your Paraclesis, that sacred letters are the property of all Christians. A short while ago I heard a matron expatiate concerning the Law and the Gospel from the Epistle of Paul to the Romans much more learnedly than those great Masters of ours could

®* ' ' Epistle 1253 from Urban Eegius, ' ' Opus epistolarum, Allen V, 2.

92 RENAISSANCE AND METHOD

have done formerly. Thus you have aroused as by a trumpet all the world to the philosophy of Christ.

The new philosophy was to be based on and cheeked against the careful study of the text of the New Testament, for it consisted in the methodical discovery of the literal meaning and then of figurative meanings of that document. It was not a philosophy in the sense of a mass or system of doctrines which can be attributed to Erasmus or to the ultimate author to whom he ascribed it, Christ. The truth or falsity of such theological doctrines does not even con- cern Erasmus : he is struck rather by their inf ecundity and their inelegance, the subtleties, sophisms and syllogisms that go on endlessly, the meaningless questions that are pro- pounded.^^ The medieval theologian had tried to organize

°° In his notes on the New Testament, Erasmus finds the opportunity in commenting on the word " vaniloquim, " "vain talking," in Paul's Epistle to Timothy, I: 6, "But the end of the charge is love out of a pure heart and a good conscience and faith unfeigned: from -which things some having swerved have turned aside unto vain talking," to draw up an imposing list of the insoluble problems that have occupied theologians, interrupted only by the statement of the contrast be- tween the true theology and this caviling theology. Opera VI, 926 D-E: "Proinde nobis quoque cavendum est, ne sic sectemur Theolo- giam, ut in mataeologiam incidamus de frivolis nugis sine fine digladiantes. Ea potius tractemus, quae nos transforment in Christum, & coelo dignos reddant. Quorsum enim attinet decertare, quotmodis accipiatur peccatum, privatio duntaxat sit, an macula inhaerens animae? Hoc potius agat Theologus, ut omnes horreant oderintque peccatum. Totis seculis disputamus, an gratia, qua Deus nos diligit ae trahit, & qua nos ilium vicissim diligimus, eadem sit gratia, & an sit aliquid creatum an increatum. Illud potius agamus, puris precibus, innocentia vitae, piis factis, ut eo munere nos dignetur Deus. Digladiamur sine fine, quid distinguat Patrem a Filio, & utrumque a Spiritu sancto, res, an relatio, & qui consistat, tres dici, quorum nullus sit qui alius, cum sint una essentia." Again, ibid., 927E-28: "Et tamen hujusmodi quaestiunculis serio occupantur quorumdam Theologorum Scholae. His aetas rerum omnium fugacis- sima conteritur, cum pleraque sint ejus generis, ut doctius nesciantur quam sciantur, ut ridicule quaerantur, temere definiantur. Breve tempus est, & arduum est negotium agere vere Christianum. Quia

RENAISSANCE AND METHOD 93

a body of doctrine, point by point, based on a body of texts derived from Scriptures and Church Fathers; the new theologian returned to the text of the Scripture itself and its direct interpretation. The new emphasis, therefore, was upon the document and the writer, rather than upon the doc- trine and the tradition. The approach was to be direct and

igitur omissis rebus supervacaneis, ea potissimum spectamus, quae Christus nos scire voluit, quae prodiderunt Apostoli, quae proprie ad charitatem faciunt, de corde puro, & conscientia bona, & fide non ficta, quam unam Paulus appellat finem & perfectionem totius Legis. Tot jam annis cavillamur in Scholis, quibus verbis sit loquendum de Christo. . . . Et in hac Theologia tam non simplici vitam oninem con- sumunt, qui simplicem & Apostolicam profitentur. Et qui ipso etiam cognomine summam modestiam profitentur, hujusmodi philosopliiae professione tollunt cristas. Qui congruit Apostolicae vitae professio cum Ethnicae philosophiae tanto tamque curioso studio? Os con- secratum est Evangelic, & nihil crepat nisi Averroem & Aristotelem. Horretur pecuniae contactus, & in blasphemi Philosophi libris tota ducitur aetas. Veteres, qui in Paganismo aut per aetatis inscitiam talia didicerant, ex his quaedam decerpebant ad eruditionem Chris- tianam. Nunc qui Christi simplicitatem profitentur & aluntur praedi- cando Evangelic, talia coguntur perdiscere. Novi quemdam Theologum, qui negabat annos novem sufScere ad intelligenda quae Scotus scripsit tantum in praefationem Petri Lombardi. Audivi rursus alium, qui praedicabat fieri non posse, ut quis intelligeret unam propositionem in toto Seoto, nisi metaphysicam ipsius universam teneret memoria. Hujusmodi labyrinthis Basilides, Valentinus, & Marcion captabant animos simplicium. Denique fingamus haec esse frugifera, quanta hie occurrit opinionum pugna? Fingamus rursus omnia convenire, quam multa frustra quaeruntur, quam multa temere dcfiniuntur? Et praetexunt has argutias ad revincendos Ethnicos & Haereticos esse necessarias: quum ilia nusquam sint usui, nisi inter ejusdem Scliolae sodales. Non haec eo spectant, ut suadeam esse damnandam Dialec- ticam ac Philosophiam, quae traduntur in Scholis, immodicum in frivolis studium improbo. " Cf. the similar diatribe against the abuses of scholastic philosophy contained in the note to Matthew 11 : 30, ' ' For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light. ' ' Hid., 63-64 : ' ' Vera blandum est jugum Christi, & levis farcina, si praeter id, quod ille nobis imposuit, nihil impoueretur ab humanis constitutiumculis. Praeter mutuam charitatem nihil ille praecipit: neque quicquam tam amarum est, quod non condiat condulcetque charitas. Facile toleratur, quicquid est secundum naturam. Nihil autem magis congruit cum hominis natura, quam Christi philosophia, quae pene nihil aliud agit,

94 RENAISSANCE AND METHOD

dependent on perception, rather than argumentative and de- pendent on reason; between interpreter and writer no hu- man intermediary was needed.^'' The Bible, consequently,

quam ut naturam coUapsam suae restituat innocentiae sinceritatique. Sed quemadmodum apud Judaeos legem per se molestam aggravabant hominum constitutiones, ita cavendum est etiam atque etiam, jie Christi legem per se blandam ac levem, gravem & asperam reddant humanarum eonstitutionum ac dogmatum aecessiones. . . . Sunt qui nectant nobis frigidum syllogismum, & ex loco parum intellecto, aut ex hominis constitutiuncula pariunt Articulum fidei. Atque ex his Christiani aut non Christiani censemur, quae ne tantulum quidem Christianam attinent pietatem. Jam quam popularis, quam expedita est doctrina Christi, Apostolica, & Patrum Apostolicorum, quam nunc impedita, spinosa, ne dicam tenebricosa facta, partim admixtu legum ac disciplinarum humanarum, partim somuiis & inventiunculis am- bitiosorum hominum, posteaquam sacrae Theologiae professio scenica quaedam ac theatrica res esse coepit. Tota hominis aetas non sufficit quaestiunculis & inutilium argutiarum labyrinthis. " «« The Praise of Folly, translated by J. Wilson, Oxford 1925, 117-118: "And these most subtile subtilties are rendred yet more subtile by the several Methods of so many Schoolmen, that one might sooner wind himself out of a Labyrinth than the entanglements of the Eealists, Nominalists, Thomists, Albertists, Oceamists, Scotists. Nor have I nam'd all the several Sects, but onely some of the chief; in all which there is so much Doctrine and so much difficultie, that I may well conceive the Apostles, had they been to deal with these new kind of Divines, had needed to have pray'd in aid of some other Spirit. Paul knew what Faith was, and yet when he saith, 'Faith is the Sub- stance of things hop'd for, and the Evidence of things not seen,' he did not define it Doctor-like. And as he understood Charity well him- self, so he did as Illogically divide and define it to otliers in his first Epistle to the Corinthians, Cliapter the thirteenth. And devoutly, no doubt, did the Apostles consecrate the Eucharist; yet, had they been askt the question touching the 'Terminus a quo' and the 'Ter- minus ad quem ' of Transubstantiation ; of the manner how the same body can be in several places at one and the same time; of the dif- ference the body of Christ has in Heaven from that of the Cross, or this in the Sacrament; in what punct of time Transubstantiation is, whereas Prayer, by means of which it is, as being a discrete quan- tity, is transient; they would not, I conceive, have answer 'd with the same subtility as the Scotists Dispute and Define it. They knew the Mother of Jesus; but which of them has so Philosophically demon- strated how she was preserv'd from Original sin, as have done our Divines?"

RENAISSANCE AND METHOD 95

which had presented a homogeneous doctrine, continuous indeed with pagans before and theologians later, was seen now as the work of a succession of writers; the character- istics and marks of each could be detected and their relative importance estimated, and among them outstanding per- sonalities were to emerge — Moses, Isaiah, John, Paul. The Book of Genesis which had been a physics and a metaphysics was to become a poem ; the Epistles of Paul which had been the source of a dogmatic theology were to be read for rules of life and action. Some intermediary was still needed, to be sure, for the understanding of the document, to supply as it were the rules of the grammar ; Erasmus chose Jerome ; Luther, Augustine; Keuchlin, the Caballists; Lefevre d'Etaple, the Pseudo-Dionysius ; and so each of the figures of the new learning approached nature and religion with the aid of some ancient writer. But what was sought was light rather than doctrine, love rather than knowledge, let- ter rather than principle. The new learning was concerned with good letters, and reformers, tired of the syllogisms of centuries of philosophers, became scliolars to study earlier documents and to appreciate them as histories, poems and examples.

IV Controversies, however, did not go out of the world with the growing enthusiasm for the new learning and contempt for dialectic. What had been a difference of reasons and arguments became a difference of men and temperaments: when syllogisms were abandoned for simple faith, it was difficult, as Abailard had seen, to weigh the faith of one man against that of another. So Luther was at one with Erasmus in his opposition to scholastic philosophy with its infiltration of dialectic, of human philosophy and human law, but ulti- mately to Erasmus, Luther was an enemy of good letters,

96 RENAISSANCE AND METHOD

and to Luther, Erasmus was ignorant of the fundamental truths of the Bible. Like Erasmus, Luther was dismayed at the neglect into which the study of the Bible had fallen. When he was a monk he had found that the Bible was de- spised: no one understood the Psalms and it was thought that the Epistle of Paul to the Romans was to be considered in terms of Paul's times, but was of no use to the current century. Instead, Scotus, Thomas and Aristotle were read.^^ Luther speaks of Aristotle as a rancid philosopher** and is convinced that his doctrines are in contradiction to the Catholic truth.*^ When Paul cautions us against ' ' philosophy and vain deceit, ' ' Luther is confident the warning must be interpreted to apply to scholastic philosophy, and the specifi- cation that it is "after the traditions of men and after the rudiments of the world, "^° is specification of the law of bulls and canons.^^ Scholastic theology is nothing but an ignorance of truth and a scandal set upon the Scriptures.'^ The common enemy is scholastic philosophy based on com- mentaries on the Book of Sentences and contaminated by dialectic. Luther's relations to his former teachers, Isen- nach and Usingen, and his criticism of the courses they offered and of their works, indicate the bitterness of his resentment of the errors of dialecticians no less than their amazement at his position. He wrote to John Lang, Prior of the Augustinian Hermits at Erfurt, in 1517:

I am sending you this letter of mine to the excellent Mas- ter Jodocus Isennach, full of questions against logic, philos- ophy and theology, that is, of blasphemies and maledictions

" O. Scheel, DoTcxLinente zu Luthers Entwickhmg , 2nd ed., Tubingen,

1929. Text 433, p. 158.

•^ Scheel, Text 561, p. 221.

•» Scheel, Text 556, p. 220.

">Col. 2:8.

" Scheel, Text 41, p. 19.

« Scheel, Text 39, p. 18.

RENAISSANCE AND METHOD 97

against Aristotle, Porphyry and the Sententiaries [the com- mentators on the Book of Sentences of Peter Lombard], the accursed studies of our age. For so it will be interpreted by those who have vowed, not for five years like the Pythag- oreans, but perpetually and eternally to keep silent as the dead, to believe all things, to listen always, and never, not even in jest, to skirmish or to grumble against Aristotle or the Sentences, For why should not they, who have faith in Aristotle, believe to be true those things which he himself, the most calumnious of calumniators, attributes and imposes on others, so absurd that an ass or a stone could not hold their peace at them? . . . But the greatest sorrow to me is that I am obliged to see the best genius of our brother monks, suited to be applied to good studies, spend its life and lose its work on such tales ; nor do the Universities cease to burn and condemn good books, and then dictate or rather dream bad ones. I wish that Master Usingen together with Isen- naeh, would abstain, or rather contain himself, for a w^hilc from these labors. ]\Iy closets are all filled with writings against their publications, which I am convinced are worse than useless ; and all others would see this, if they were not, as I have said, restrained under a perpetual oath of silence.'^

When another correspondent asks him to show in what places logic is necessary to theology, his answer^^ is that he does not think dialectic is necessary to theology in any place, since Christ has no need of human figments, defending his position with scriptural quotations : the science of man and the wisdom of this world are made foolishness with God f^ take heed lest there shall be anyone that maketh sport of you through his vain deceit;^® all sophistry is hateful to God." Not that he would extinguish dialectic entirely, but

" ' ' Brief 34, Luther an Joh. Lang in Erfurt, ' ' D. Martin, Luthers

Werke, Brief wecTcsel I, Weimar, 1930, 88-89.

" ' ' Brief 59, Luther an Spalatin, ' ' Briefwechsel I, 143.

"I Cor. 3:19.

™Col. 2:8.

" Ecclesiasticus 37 :23.

98 RENAISSANCE AND METHOD

that the dialectical books set up superfluous commotions and where one book would suffice for knowing dialectic there are ten. Again,

You ask how far I think dialectic is useful to the theo- logian. I absolutely do not see how dialectic can be other than a poison to a true theologian. Grant that it may be useful as a game or an exercise for youthful minds, still in sacred letters, where pure faith and divine illumination are expected, the whole matter of the syllogism must be left without, just as Abraham, when about to sacrifice, left the boys with the asses. This, John Reuchlin in the second book of his Caballa affirms sufficiently. For if an^' dialectic is necessary, that natural inborn dialectic is sufficient, by which a man is led to compare beliefs with other beliefs and so conclude the truth. I have often discussed with friends what utility seemed to us to be gained from this so sedu- lous study of philosophy and dialectic, and truly with one consent, having marvelled at, or rather bewailed, the calam- ity of our minds, we found no utility, but rather a whole sea of hindrance. Finally, I have written to Master Isen- nach, the prince of the dialecticians of our age (as it seems), concerning the same thing, insisting most strongly on this, which cannot be denied, that dialectic can not help theology but rather hinders it, for this reason, that theology uses the same grammatical terms entirely differently from dia- lectic. How then, I say, can dialectic be of any use, since, after I have come to theology I am compelled to reject that meaning of the word which it had in dialectic and take an- other meaning of it? .. . . The man was very much dis- pleased and asserted that my sophistical reasons could not be accredited even by myself. But these men are the bonds- men of Aristotle and Porphyry, nor do they consider what those two say, but that they say it. Hence it comes about that they are not able to grasp the meaning of one single chapter of Scripture much less convey that meaning to another. If therefore you credit my judgment, of whatever use dialectic be to you in any subject in which it can have use, it will only do harm in theology. I myself have observed the doc-

RENAISSANCE AND METHOD 99

trines and rules of scholastic theology, and I have purpose- fully tried to treat the sacred writings and those of the Church fathers in accordance with them, but (may God condemn me if I lie) I was horrified by the confusion greater than that of Tartarus. I have seen then of what use studies of this sort should be. But I will try the same thing some- time with you when we shall be together and I shall have you experience what you now hear.'^

Luther is not unaware that by refusing a place to logic in the sacred science, he renders his position impregnable to logical argumentation. He reports that Doctor Isennach as a sign of his disapproval of Luther's theology, which was, Luther writes, death twice recooked to the Erfurtians, marked his theses with a black theta and argued that he was an ignoramus not only in dialectic but in theology.

I had however [he goes on] a private conversation with Doctor Isennach, and if I accomplished nothing more, I at least made him understand that he could not prove his posi- tion, nor confute mine ; indeed that their opinions were that beast which it is said would devour itself. But the fable is told in vain to a deaf man. They stick obstinately to their little distinctions, even if they confess that the distinctions are established on no authority, except what they call the dictate of natural reason, which to us who preach no other light than Jesus Christ, the true and only light, is a chaos of darkness. With Doctor Usingen I strove much more than with all the others to persuade him (for he w^as my com- panion in the carriage ) , but I do not know whether I made any progress. I left him in thought and wonderment. So great a thing is it to have grown old in evil opinions. But the minds of all the young perceive diametrically differently from these, and my hope is great that as Christ turned to the Gentiles when he had been rejected by the Jews, so now his true theology, which these opinionative old men reject, may transfer itself to the young.^^

""Brief 61, Luther an Spalatin," Brief wechsel I, 149-50. ""Brief 75, Luther an Spalatin," Brief wechsel 1, 173-74.

100 RENAISSANCE AND METHOD

A little more than a year later he affixes as postscript to a letter to the same correspondent the news of Isennach's death.

This very hour I heard from my friend Lucas [Cranach] the painter that Master Doctor Judocus Isennach of Erfurt has passed from among the living. I fear that I was the cause of the acceleration of his death, so great was the sick- ness of his soul caused by my, as he said, profanations and temerities, by which he grieved incredibly that I should have despised scholastic theology.*"

The ignorance of the scholastic theologian, however, not only prevents him from understanding the Bible ; he is un- able to understand even Aristotle. Luther, writing to a friend to urge him not to fear to appear ignorant, not to be impressed by titles, doctors, universities, masters, assures him that there is almost no scholastic theologian who under- stands a single chapter of the Gospels or the Bible, nor in- deed a single chapter of the philosopher Aristotle.*^ Or again when on one occasion he had been trapped into a dispute with a little master of Thomistic philosophy, Magisterculus Thomaster cuius, concerning the trifles of Aristotle and Thomas, he showed that neither Thomas nor any of the Thomists understood a single chapter in Aristotle and, to deflate the pride of this Thomist in the power of Thomistic erudition, asked him to define for him what it is to fulfill the commandments of God, a question which he knew no Thomist could answer.*^ Again, in 1518, advising with John Gunkel, Rector of the university, Luther effected a change in the course of studies : the course in Thomist physics was dropped and in its place was substituted a literal reading

«> "Brief 181, Luther an Spalatin," Brief wechsel I, 407.

*• ' ' Brief 65, Luther an Joh. Sylvius Egranus in Zwickam, ' ' Brief -

wechsel I, 158.

^ "Brief 135, Luther an Spalatin," Brief wechsel I, 301-2.

RENAISSANCE AND METHOD 101

of Aristotle 's physics to be conducted by the Rector himself, and for the course in Thomist logic was substit\ited a course on the Metamorphoses of Ovid, a change in the direction of humane letters. The Scotist philosophy and logic, together with the textual study of physics and logic, they think will suffice, until such time as the equally useless disputes of that sect fall into disrepute, and pure philosophy and theology and all the disciplines are sought again in their original fountains.*^

Thomas and his method is the subject of Luther's con- stant satire; even the beatification of Thomas is subject for doubts on Luther's part;^* and Scotus with his figments is insane.*^ Even Augustine, who is the true disputator of the Church, who is the greatest theologian who wrote after the Apostles, whom the monks should read instead of Scotus,^^ who disputes better and more truly on felicity than that weaver of fables, Aristotle, and all his frivolous com- mentators,^'^ even he like the other Fathers who are to be numbered as the greatest theologians, falls into errors, dis- putes, defines nothing, disagrees with the other Fathers, twists the sense of the Scriptures.^* Yet it is eventually with Augustine that Luther goes in his theology and separates himself from Erasmus from whom he had learned so much. He states his difference from Erasmus in terms of the rela- tive importance to be given to the works of Jerome and Augustine, to the literal and figurative interpretation of the Scriptures : as much as Luther holds that Augustine is to be preferred to Jerome in the interpretation of Scriptures,

^" Brief 117, Luther an Spalatin," Briefwechsel I, 262.

**Scheel, Texts 40, 45, 234, pp. 18, 20, 90.

*^ Scheel, Text 179, p. 69.

^' Scheel, Text 434, p. 158.

" Scheel, Text 553, p. 219.

<« Scheel, Text 91, p. 37, n. 1.

102 RENAISSANCE AND METHOD

SO much Erasmus holds that Jerome is to be preferred to Augustine in all things. Jerome is dedicated to a literal in- terpretation, which is a death of understanding, but of which almost all commentaries since Augustine have been full.®^ Not that the Scriptures should be read for allegories : Luther writes that he too had been an artificer of allegories when he was a monk, until he had come in the Epistle of Paul to the Romans on some understanding of Christ. There he saw that allegories are not what Christ signified, but what Christ was. Up to that time he had allegorized all things, even cloaca ; thereafter he thought only of histories, sought not allegories but spirit and faith. Among the sins of Origen and Jerome was that they had led men to seek only alle- gories : in the whole of Origen there is not one word concern- ing Christ.^" Erasmus had protested against the scholastic theology that Christ had intended all men for salvation, not only the learned man or the philosopher. Luther, in turn, finds that the Christian doctrine is even simpler than Erasmus had thought : Erasmus relies still too much on hu- man judgment, too little on grace ; he forgets that all men are to be saved, not only the philologian.

I read our Erasmus, and my good will toward him grows less day by day, for it pleases him to censure, no less con- stantly than learnedly, and to condemn monks as well as priests for this inveterate and lethargic ignorance, but I fear that he is not concerned sufficiently with Christ and the grace of God, in which he is much more ignorant than Lefevre d'Etaples: human learning prevails more in him than divine. Although I judge him reluctantly, none the less I go so far as to warn you not to read all things, but particularly not to accept without judgment. For the times are perilous today, and I consider that one is not a truly

"•"Brief 27, Luther an Spalatin," Brief wechsel I, 70. »« Scheel, Text 251, p. 98.

RENAISSANCE AND METHOD 103

wise Christian simply because one knows Greek and Hebrew, since even Saint Jerome with his five languages did not equal the monogloss of Augustine, although to Erasmus the ease has seemed altogether different. But the opinion of one who attributes something to the judgment of man is dif- ferent from that of one who knows nothing but the grace of God."

These opinions of his concerning Erasmus he urges his correspondent to divulge to no one, for he has nothing but praise for Erasmus's labors in the interest of good letters and against those who are ignorant of them or hate them, and there are many who would seize on any occasion to calumniate good letters. Speaking as a grammarian, Luther acknowledges no one more erudite and ingenious than Eras- mus, not even Jerome himself, the object of so much of Erasmus's praise; but as a theologian he finds many things in Erasmus completely alien to the knowledge of Christ.^^

Between these two foes of dialectic, these two grammar- ians of the word of Christ, there is a sharp difference con- cerning the nature of grammar, which assumes in the eyes of Luther the aspects not of a dialectical controversy but rather of a historical recrudescence of the differences agi- tated in the letters of Jerome the translator and Augustine the commentator, between the erudite doctor and the doctor of grace. Abailard had handled this situation repeatedly: his method was to take two texts from the two Fathers, examine their meanings and most usually show that they were in agreement, or sometimes that one was correct, the other wrong. Erasmus had thrown in his lot with the method of Jerome : all important controversies can be determined by reference to the text of the Bible, and its meaning can be made clear only by the devices of the grammarian and

" ' ' Brief 35, Luther an Joh. Lang in Erfurt, ' ' Briefwechsel I, 90. ^ ' ' Brief 57, Luther an Spalatin, ' ' Briefweohsel I, 133.

104 RENAISSANCE AND METHOD

the philologian. But what is the alternative method to that of Erasmus which Luther derives from the inspiration of Augustine ? Like Erasmus, he is concerned to penetrate the meaning of a text, but aided not by human devices but by the grace of God.

If however you wrest from me my plan of study, I shall, of course, as is most friendly, conceal nothing from you, provided only that you follow me not without judgment. First, this is most certain, that sacred letters cannot be apprehended by study or genius. Therefore the first duty is to begin with a prayer, such, that is, that you pray, if it pleases God that something be done through you for His glory, not for yours nor for that of any other man, that he concede to you most mercifully the true understanding of His words. For there is no master of divine words except the Author himself of his word. As he says, "And they shall all be taught of God."^^ It is necessary therefore that you despair entirely of your study no less than of your ability, and that you have confidence only in the true influx of the spirit. Then, having established this humble desperation, read the Bible in order from the beginning to the end, that you may seize in memory the simple history (which how- ever I believe you have already long since done). To this Saint Jerome will be of great assistance as well in his let- ters as in his commentaries. But to the knowledge of Christ and of the grace of God (that is, to the more secret under- standing of the spirit). Saint Augustine and Saint Ambrose seem to me to be far better conductors, especially since Saint Jerome seems to Origenize (that is Allegorize) too much. I say these things however notwithstanding the opinion of Erasmus, since you asked my opinion, not the opinion of Erasmus.®^

Here the extreme of value is put upon uncertainty. This humble despair of all human powers is behind Luther's strictures against the scholastics for their too great con-

»'John 6:45.

^ ' ' Brief 57, Luther an Spalatin, ' ' Brief wechsel I, 133-34.

RENAISSANCE AND METHOD 105

fidence in reason : no reason of man can be taken as certain, for the wisdom of the world is made stupid by God: no action can be taken as certainly good, for even too great aspiration to purity defeats itself, since Christ resides only in sinners.^^ For Abailard's confidence in knowledge and the sciences, which since they are the greatest gifts of God cannot be evil or useless in the inquisition of truth, is sub- stituted the spirit of God by the influx of which the in- dividual man alone in the face of God can interpret the text of God. The arts of words have been reduced to their mini- mum, but new virtues have been evolved; the value of in- dividual insight, the tentative entertainment of any doc- trine, the stripping of the structure of theory from the exigencies of practice have crowded out reason, demonstra- tion and system.

V

The picture of the transformation which knowledge and action have undergone as a result of the shifting places of grammar, rhetoric and dialectic is not complete with the statement of the uses to which the dialectician has put gram- mar and rhetoric and the changes which the grammarian has introduced by submitting dialectic and rhetoric to his art. The rhetorician had long been at work, too, since the times of Isocrates and Quintillian, and by his approach grammar and dialectic are the tools of rhetoric, with result- ing profound mutation of both arts and a particular deg- radation of dialectic. There are Ciceronians in the Renais- sance to confound Erasmus, not for his sins against the Holy Spirit but for his sins against the divine Cicero.^*^ The ra-

»'" Brief 11, Luther an Georg Spenlein," Briefwechsel 1, 35-36. ** Of . Marius Nizolius's letter to Antonius Majoragius in Marquardi Guddi et Clavdii Sarravu senatoris parisiensis epistolae, Leyden, 1711, pp. 132, 137.

106 RENAISSANCE AND METHOD

tionale of the rhetorical position is stated emphatically by Nizolius, one of the most ferocious critics of the absurdities of the Middle Ages, whose criticisms, somewhat tempered by notes, Leibniz thought it worthwhile to preserve by a new edition of the Antiharharus. He writes to reproach Majora- gius, who had been a good Ciceronian, for his temerity in criticizing the Paradoxes of Cicero.

Now listen to what follows: Cicero, you say, is far in- ferior to Aristotle and the Peripatetics in his method of discourse [in disserendi ratione]. But tell me why: is it because no argument of his in the Paradoxes is correctly concluded, as you say? But I will reply to you more co- piously later in explanation of the Paradoxes; now how- ever I say that you do not understand the strength of Cicero's arguments, and you think that they have no value because they are not concluded in the manner of the dialec- ticians, that is barbarously and ignorantly. You do not un- derstand what a proposition of a single one of the Paradoxes is or of what sort it is; you do not know reasons; you do not see to what they are referred ; and finally you do not seem to me to perceive sufficiently well the conclusions themselves, but I will treat of this later, as I have said ; now I wish to learn from you what dialecticians and philoso- phers have, by which they discourse better or could dis- course better than orators. Is it argumentations? But orators teach and use ten kinds of argumentation, all of which Georgius Trapezuntius treats most fully in the third book of his Rhetoric. The dialecticians, however, knew only four, that is, syllogism, induction, enthymeme and example, of which they retain the first two for themselves, but leave the remaining last two for the orators, athough the orators notwithstanding do not recognize them as argumentations, but as arguments.®^

The rhetorician is inferior to the dialectician neither in argumentations nor in the use of argumentations : the pre-

■" Ibid., pp. 134-35.

RENAISSANCE AND METHOD 107

cepts of rhetoric are much the clearer and more intelligible ; those of dialectic are harder, more thorny, obscurer, to such an extent that those who treat of them often do not seem to understand them. In the propounding of questions, in their dividing, in the thinking out of reasons and in the add- ing of confirmations to reasons, and finally in inferring with enthememes, which logicians call imperfect syllogisms, but rhetoricians call expositions, in all these questions the rhe- toricians have extremely fine and useful precepts, whereas the dialectician has none or extremely few and those stony and useless. For all these reasons Nizolius is convinced that the system of discourse of the rhetorician far from being inferior to that of the dialectician and philosopher is far superior. As a final blow to his adversary, Nizolius lists his errors in grammar, and since that science has changed in the hands of the rhetoricians from the science of the exposi- tion of texts, which it had been for the medieval dialectician, to the treatment of rules of the parts of speech, the errors consist in the use of words that cannot be found in Cicero, of prepositions used instead of conjunctions, or finally, in the use of the word "metaphysics" which should be four Greek words, not one Latin word.^^

VI

The history of the sciences of words, since it must be writ- ten in words, exemplifies its theme while it states it: the historian when he writes the debate of the grammarian, the rhetorician and the dialectician must himself be partisan of one of the disciplines whose protagonists he expounds. That linguistic character of the historian's task extends,

* Hid. The innovations of Peter Ramus in grammar, rhetoric and dia- lectic contribute to the systematization of a similar conception of gram- mar.

108 RENAISSANCE AND METHOD

moreover, beyond the limits of histories of the trivium or of philosophy. The historian of military campaigns, of geo- graphical explorations, or courtly intrigues must similarly be the grammarian, the rhetorician or the dialectician as he considers his materials and constructs his narrative. The history of the transition from the Middle Ages to modem times has been written frequently by grammarians, how frequently may be judged from the importance of the place usually given to Erasmus and Luther in the determination of modern ideas. It has been written by rhetoricians, but in recent years such histories have been composed with less gusto than the contemporary of Nizolius would have mus- tered : they have been literary histories and their great fig- ures have been advanced to a distinction which has not been made to depend on the search for truth or on anything which might make letters seem a rival of science or of re- ligion. The present restatement of that transition has been kept on a grammatical level ; it is a collection of texts rele- vant to some few problems from writers of different periods chosen in the manner of the grammarian, as Abailard set down the contradictory propositions of his Sic et non. It was no accident that the history of the dispute of the gram- marian, the rhetorician and the dialectician was chosen as the subject of this grammatical exercise, since it is not diffi- cult with the aid of the materials so collected to show how any historical work involves an attitude toward and a solu- tion of that dispute. By design, therefore, little more than a paraphrase of contradictory propositions has been given ; there has been very little rhetorical expansion and no dia- lectical resolution. For the purpose of this essay, like the purpose Abailard confessed to in the "Prologue" to the Sic et non, is to raise rather than resolve a problem, to ini- tiate an inquiry by suggesting a doubt, since the key to wis-

RENAISSANCE AND METHOD 109

dom is, according to Abailard, frequent and assiduous inter- rogation.^^

By the nature of discourse the completion of the gram- matical task is not the end of the problem. Nor, again, is the path through further problems cleared, once an as- semblage of texts, such as that set down in this essay, has been made. It has been pointed out that grammar differs as it is used by the grammarian, the rhetorician and the dia- lectician. The grammatical collection of data relative to the progress of philosophy from Abailard to the Kenaissance assembled here has been limited to questions of theology and the shifting interpretations of the Bible. The same task could have been performed for the more secular part of philosophy and science. The present task differs from that task, how- ever, in that the text which the theologian interpreted, at least during the period under consideration, remained the same, and the differences between the grammarian and the dialectician were differences in the interpretation of a single text on different models and according to different rules. In the history of metaphysics the text changed as well as the mode of interpretation : part of the history can be written in terms of Aristotle treated dialectically, rhetorically and grammatically, but at no time was Aristotle's text of un- questioned authority and for a time it was to fall into com- plete disrepute. It is easier consequently for a change of interpretation and theory to seem to be the discovery of new facts and the invocation of new experience in the history of metaphysics and physics than it is in the history of the- ology. But besides the grammar which deals in interpreta- tions which go back ultimately to a single authoritative text, and the grammar of interpretations of different texts none of which is primary and authoritative, there is a third gram-

" Sic et non, ''Prologus," PL 178, 1349,

110 RENAISSANCE AND METHOD

mar (practiced more frequently than the other two by his- torians of philosophy in their collections of quotations from philosophers) which is concerned with propositions purport- ing to be interpretations of no text whatever, but rather to be true propositions concerning nature or the cosmos or the state of things. For the understanding of the grammati- cal intentions of the present essay, it is important to bear in mind that it is limited to grammar in the first sense. None the less it is equally important to realize while that re- striction is being emphasized, that it is grammar of the third sort which is of chief interest to the scientist, the philosopher or indeed the theologian. For the present it is sufficient to suggest that that latter grammar is grammar as it is used by the dialectician, related to the grammar of interpreta- tions as Abailard's use of the texts of the Fathers in his theological works was shown to be related to the grammar of texts which he prepared in his Sic et non. But the man- ner in which discoveries of nature, God and man depend on grammar, rhetoric and dialectic has been shown suffi- ciently to make obvious the necessity of distinctions at each step. It is the intention of the author to continue this gram- matical inquiry and to prepare at some later date similar collections of texts from the history of science to illustrate the latter two manners of grammar: when the distinctions which have been employed in this essay have been fortified by those further materials, it will be time to consider dia- lectical resolutions, the problems of philosophy and their evolution and finally the character of philosophic truth. What has been set forth is on one level the resolution of the problems invoked: but it is a resolution in the sense that Abailard, Erasmus, Luther, Nizolius each resolved their problems, and that after each resolution there was always another to come. That very succession of resolutions is the

RENAISSANCE AND METHOD 111

statement of the problem of ultimate interest to the philos- opher.

The difficulty of the historian writing the debate of gram- marian, rhetorician and dialectician proceeds from the na- ture of that debate : it is a debate in which the principals did not meet the arguments of their opponents, but instead argued on different levels, and each, therefore, found the position of his opponents trifling and useless and his op- ponents themselves ignorant and stupid. To determine the case argued by Abailard, Erasmus and Luther, it is useless to appeal to the supposition that the latest step approached more nearly to the truth, that the judgments of later ages, whether the age of Erasmus or the age of the present his- torian, should therefore silence Abailard, or again to the sup- position that the truth can be discovered by going back to the Bible or Augustine or Jerome to whom they all ap- pealed. Yet history cannot be written without some deter- mination of that case, for when the historian comes to set down the careers of Abailard, Erasmus and Luther, he can find at least as many of them as they found Bibles and Augustines and Jeromes. In the long line of Abailards that parade through the history of histories in the guise of his- torical controversies, the successive persons that have been Abailard take their complexions from the grammarians, the rhetoricians and the occasional dialecticians who have writ- ten about them, and the controversies are persistent since no fact can dislodge the historian from any of the three posi- tions, if he understands it properly.

None the less, though each interpretation is impregnable within its own limits, when brought into controversy the debate is ultimately dialectical. Yet the paradox is that the dialectician is little esteemed as historian. We are familiar today with the arguments against excessive musterings of

112 RENAISSANCE AND METHOD

arguments both in the arranging of the facts of history and in the practice of the philosophical arts. In general it is, as illustrated in the examples of Erasmus and Luther, the grammarian who turns against the dialectician the discovery of man and nature, who asks for scientific authorities and, in turn, makes reason look like authority ; it is the rhetori- cian, as illustrated by the case of Nizolius, who reiterates the grammarian's discovery of the sterility of logic, and sub- stitutes for it an examination of thinking as men think, by which one may hope to arrive at a richer suggestiveness in thought, a greater utility in action and a closer approxima- tion to the nature of things as they are. The grammarian, however, must be content, if he is consistent with himself, to be suspicious of all knowledge; the rhetorician must be content to make utility his test ; but when the question is of knowledge, even knowledge of utility, if theory is permitted to enter, dialectic has slipped into place at the top of the three arts. The whole history of the evolution of thought may be stated formally in these terms. Any position, any theory can be taken in grammatical terms, the task being only to understand it ; if one is to adhere to it, that must be done unquestioningly ; if another does not follow the doctrine, for him that is the end of it until such time as he may happen to undergo a change of heart; so far as dia- lectic is involved in this view, it is a dialectic of the various possible meanings of the theorj\ But the development of that theory, when it comes, must be the result of another technique: the rhetorician can show the consequences and can even undertake to spread the theory and persuade others to accept itTWhen, however, two theories are set one against the other, when the question of the truth of one of them is raised, the technique of the dialectician is needed. So long as there is no two- voiced controversy, the question may remain

RENAISSANCE AND METHOD 113

on the grammatical or on the rhetorical level. But the equilibrium of the arts under the dominance of dialectic is unstable : the great philosopher produces as followers gram- marians more frequently than philosophers, and the dis- covery of a philosophic truth may be lost even in the repeti- tion of it. Philosophy may be lost to an age by too careful adherence to the conclusions of philosophers, while on the other hand, philosophy may be born to an age by the care- ful examination of simple statements which were made with no philosophical intention.

The design which motivated the above collection of state- ments was in this sense philosophical rather than historical. Its accomplishment turned upon the trick of restating a historical sequence of views in terms simply of the ideas they expressed and in thus translating history into a philsophic debate. An understanding of this entry of philosophy into history is important to the understanding of the nature of history. For viewed otherwise than as a philosopher might view them, such debates between historians might seem only illustration of the truism that events may be narrated and interpreted variously, or that it is the nature of history to follow such fashions of narration as affect all literature. Once that philosophic view has been established, however, it may not be impossible to show that there are canons of criticism for history according to which one manner of in- terpretation is preferable to another. But preliminary to the statement of such canons and to the criticism of the meth- ods of recent historians, it is necessary to have shown the nature of history in explanation of those modern methods. It was hoped that the nature of history might be shown in a collection of statements that have been made ; but more im- portant, it was hoped that in segregating the philosophic problems involved in history, the character of philosophic

114 RENAISSANCE AND METHOD

problems themselves might be shown more clearly, for the examination of what is involved in the making of state- ments leads not only to the problems of history and to the problems of philosophy that are concealed in history, but to the question of what constitutes the advances in philosophy, the rediscoveries of reason, of God and of nature, so fre- quently made and so frequently reported in histories. Final- 1}^, the essay as a whole, itself an example of the theme it expounds, a grammatical exercise to which the arguments of each of the protagonists with w^hich it deals might be applied, is itself illustration once more of Abailard's fa- vorite quotation from Cicero, that all controversies are concerned with writings or reasons, but ultimately the con- troversies concerning writings are controversies about rea- sons.

CARTESIAN DOCTRINE AND THE ANIMAL

SOUL: AN INCIDENT IN THE FORMATION

OF THE MODERN PHILOSOPHICAL

TRADITION

ALBERT G. A. BALZ

CARTESIAN DOCTRINE AND THE ANIMAL

SOUL: AN INCIDENT IN THE FORMATION

OF THE MODERN PHILOSOPHICAL

TRADITION^

ALBERT G. A. BALZ

I

The Significance of the Problem The Cartesian philosophy made the distinction between man and the animals a philosophical problem. By this state- ment is meant no more than that the question was one with

' The primary sources used for this study are the following :

(1) Essai philosophique sur I'dme des betes, oil I 'on trait e de son existence ^~ de sa nature et ou I'on mele par occasion Diverses Be- flexions sur la nature de la Liberie, sur celle de nos Sensations, sur I'undon de I'ame 4" ^'^ Corps, sur I'immortalite de I'dme, ^-c. Et ou I'on refute diverses objections de Mr. Bayle. A Amsterdam, Chez Francois Chanouion, MDCCXXVIII. The author's name is not given, but this seems without doubt to be the work attributed to a certain BouUier. The historian of Cartesianism, Francisque Bouillier (Hist, de la phil. cartesienne, 3d ed., Paris, 1868, p. 162, n. 1) refers to Essai philosophique sur I'dme des betes, by Boullier, 2d ed., Amst. 1737, 2 vols, in 12. In this paper I shall assume that the work before me is that referred to in this History of Cartesianism. The book con- tains an ' ' Avertissement, " a " Discours preliminaire, ' ' and two parts. The first bears the general title: "Ou Ton preuve qu'il doit y avoir dans les Betes un principe immateriel." The second part bears the title: "Ou I'on recherche quelle est la nature de I'Ame des Betes." The author evidently knew many of the writings of the period on the subject. He mentions Dilly, Cudworth, Bayle, Henry More, Locke, Cordemoy, Bardies, Daniel, Eegis, La Forge, Fontenelle, Willis, Digby, Shaftesbury, and Leibnitz.

(2) Dilly (Dillyiel) Trait e de I'ame et de la connoissance des betes, etc., Amst.," MDCLXXXXI. Bouillier (cited above) refers to a book of the same title by Dilly as printed at Lyon, 1678.

(3) Sigismond Gerdil, Eeceuil de dissertations sur quelques prin- cipes de pMlosophie et de religion, Paris, MDCCLX. The third dis-

118 CARTESIANISM AND THE ANIMAL SOUL

which philosophers were concerned and with which they felt it necessary to deal. Moreover, agreement with the doc-

sertation bears the title: "Essai sur les caracteres distinctifs do I'homme & des animaux brutes, ou I'on prouve la spiritualite de I'ame humaine par la nature de son intelligence. ' '

(4) The Dictionnaire of Bayle. References are to the translation by Bernard, Birch, Lockman and others, London, MDCCXXXIX. The articles on Pereira, Rorarius, and Sennert, especially, have been utilized.

(5) Daniel, Voyage du monde de Descartes, Nouvelle edition, revue 4' aiigmentee d'une cinquieme partie, ajoutee aux quatre precedents. Par le P. G. Daniel, de la Compagnie de Jesus. A Paris, chez Nicolas Pepie. MDCCII. Also, Daniel, Nouvelle difficultes proposees a I 'auteur du Voyage du monde de Descartes; Paris, MDCCLXXXX (The Privi- lege du Roy is dated 1693).

(6) Amusement philosopliique sur le Language des Bestes, attributed to one Bougeant ; Paris, MDCCXXXIX.

(7) De la Chambre, Traite de la connoissance des animaux, oH tout ce qui a este dit Pour, 4' Centre le raisonnement des hestes, est ex- amine. Paris, MDCLXIV. I have discussed La Chambre 's mixture of Cartesian and scholastic ideas in a paper in the Phil. Eeview.

(8) Eistoire Critique de I'ame des "betes, contenant Les Sentimens des Philosophes Anciens, 4' ceux des Modernes sii/r cette matiere, Par M. Guer, avoeat. A Amsterdam, Chez F. Changuion, MDCCXLIX, 2 vols, in one.

(9) J. B. DuHamel, De corpore animato, Lihri quatuor, seu pro- motae per experimenta philosophiae, specimen alterum. Paris, MDCLXXIII. Also loan. Bapt. Du Hamel, De consensu veteris et novae philosophiae, Lihri duo, Paris, 1663.

Other relevant documents of the period will be referred to as needed. For an interesting compilation of the old and the new meanings of terms, the following is of great value: Chauvin, Lexicon, rationale sive thesaurus philosophicus ordine alphahetico digestus, in quo vo- caiula omnia philosophica, variasque illorum acceptiones, juxta cum veterum, turn recentiorum placita, explicare ; 4~ universe quae lumine naturali sciri possunt, non tarn concludere quam recludere conatur. Rotterdam, MDCXCII.

In