[140] Fuller’s Church History.
Its style. 80. The style of this translation is in general so enthusiastically praised, that no one is permitted either to qualify or even explain the grounds of his approbation. It is held to be the perfection of our English language. I shall not dispute this proposition; but one remark as to a matter of fact cannot reasonably be censured, that, in consequence of the principle of adherence to the original versions which had been kept up ever since the time of Henry VIII., it is not the language of the reign of James I. It may, in the eyes of many, be a better English, but it is not the English of Daniel, or Raleigh, or Bacon, as any one may easily perceive. It abounds, in fact, especially in the Old Testament, with obsolete phraseology, and with single words long since abandoned, or retained only in provincial use. On the more important question, whether this translation is entirely, or with very trifling exceptions, conformable to the original text, it seems unfit to enter. It is one which is seldom discussed with all the temper and freedom from oblique views which the subject demands, and upon which, for this reason, it is not safe for those who have not had leisure or means to examine it for themselves, to take upon trust the testimony of the learned. A translation of the Old Testament was published at Douay in 1609, for the use of the English Catholics.
CHAPTER XX.
HISTORY OF SPECULATIVE PHILOSOPHY FROM 1600 TO 1650.
Sect. I.
Aristotelian Logic—Campanella—Theosophists—Lord Herbert of Cherbury—Gassendi’s Remarks upon him.
Subjects of this chapter. 1. In the two preceding volumes, we have had occasion to excuse the heterogeneous character of the chapters that bear this title. The present is fully as much open to verbal criticism; and perhaps it is rather by excluding both moral and mathematical philosophy, that we give it some sort of unity, than from any close connexion in all the books that will come under our notice in the ensuing pages. But any tabular arrangement of literature, such as has often been attempted with no very satisfactory result, would be absolutely inappropriate to such a work as the present, which has already to labour with the inconvenience of more subdivisions than can be pleasing to the reader, and would interfere too continually with that general regard to chronology, without which the name of history seems incongruous. Hence the metaphysical inquiries that are conversant with the human mind, or with natural theology, the general principles of investigating truth, the comprehensive speculations of theoretical physics, subjects very distinct and not easily confounded by the most thoughtless, must fall, with no more special distribution, within the contents of this chapter. But since during the period which it embraces, men arose, who have laid the foundations of a new philosophy, and thus have rendered it a great epoch in the intellectual history of mankind, we shall not very strictly, though without much deviation, follow a chronological order, and after reviewing some of the less important labourers in speculative philosophy, come to the names of three who have most influenced posterity—Bacon, Descartes, and Hobbes.
Aristotelians and Ramists. 2. We have seen in a former chapter how little progress had been made in this kind of philosophy during the sixteenth century. At its close the schools of logic were divided, though by no means in equal proportion, between the Aristotelians and the Ramists; the one sustained by ancient renown, by civil, or at least academical power, and by the common prejudice against innovation; the other deriving some strength from the love of novelty, and the prejudice against established authority, which the first age of the reformation had generated, and which continued, perhaps, to preserve a certain influence in the second. But neither from one nor the other had philosophy, whether in material or intellectual physics, much to hope; the disputations of the schools might be technically correct; but so little regard was paid to objective truth, or at least so little pains taken to ascertain it, that no advance in real knowledge signalised either of these parties of dialecticians. According, indeed, to a writer of this age, strongly attached to the Aristotelian party, Ramus had turned all physical science into the domain of logic, and argued from words to things still more than his opponents.[141] Lord Bacon, in the bitterest language, casts on him a similar reproach.[142] It seems that he caused this branch of philosophy to retrograde rather than advance.
[141] Keckermann, Præcognita Logica, p. 129. This writer charges Ramus with plagiarism from Ludovicus Vives, placing the passages in apposition, so as to prove his case. Ramus, he says, never alludes to Vives. He praises the former, however, for having attacked the scholastic party, being himself a genuine Aristotelian.
[142] Ne vero, fili, cum hanc contra Aristotelem sententiam fero, me cum rebelli ejus quodam neoterico Petro Ramo conspirasse augurare. Nullum mihi commercium cum hoc ignorantiæ latibulo, perniciosissima literarum tinea, compendiorum patre, qui cum methodi suæ et compendii vinclis res torqueat et premat, res quidem, si qua fuit, elabitur protinus et exsilit; ipse vero aridas et desertissimas nugas stringit. Atque Aquinas quindam cum Scoto et sociis etiam in non rebus rerum varietatem effinxit, hic vero etiam in rebus non rerum solitudinem æquavit. Atque hoc hominis cum sit, humanos tamen usus in ore habet impudens, ut mihi etiam pro [præ?] sophistis prævaricari videatur Bacon de Interpretatione Naturæ.