[d] Crevier and Villaret, passim.
[e] Brucker, Hist. Crit. Philosophiæ, t. iii. p. 678.
[f] Id. Ibid. Tiraboschi conceives that the translations of Aristotle made by command of Frederic II. were directly from the Greek, t. iv. p. 145; and censures Brucker for the contrary opinion. Buhle, however (Hist. de la Philosophie Moderne, t. i. p. 696), appears to agree with Brucker. It is almost certain that versions were made from the Arabic Aristotle: which itself was not immediately taken from the Greek, but from a Syriac medium. Ginguené, Hist. Litt. de l'Italie, t. i. p. 212 (on the authority of M. Langlés).
It was not only a knowledge of Aristotle that the scholastics of Europe derived from the Arabic language. His writings had produced in the flourishing Mohammedan kingdoms a vast number of commentators, and of metaphysicians trained in the same school. Of these Averroes, a native of Cordova, who died early in the thirteenth century, was the most eminent. It would be curious to examine more minutely than has hitherto been done the original writings of these famous men, which no doubt have suffered in translation. A passage from Al Gazel, which Mr. Turner has rendered from the Latin, with all the disadvantage of a double remove from the author's words, appears to state the argument in favour of that class of Nominalists, called Conceptualists, with more clearness and precision than any thing I have seen from the schoolmen. Al Gazel died in 1126, and consequently might have suggested this theory to Abelard, which however is not probable. Turner's Hist. of Engl. vol. i. p. 513.
[g] Brucker, Hist. Crit Philosophiæ, t. iii. I have found no better guide than Brucker. But he confesses himself not to have read the original writings of the scholastics; an admission which every reader will perceive to be quite necessary. Consequently, he gives us rather a verbose declamation against their philosophy than any clear view of its character. Of the valuable works lately published in Germany on the history of philosophy, I have only seen that of Buhle, which did not fall into my hands till I had nearly written these pages. Tiedemann and Tennemann are I believe, still untranslated.
[h] Buhle, Hist. de la Philos. Moderne, t. i. p. 723. This author raises upon the whole a favourable notion of Anselm and Aquinas; but he hardly notices any other.
[] Mr. Turner has with his characteristic spirit of enterprise examined some of the writings of our chief English schoolmen, Duns Scotus and Ockham (Hist of Eng. vol. i.), and even given us some extracts from them. They seem to me very frivolous, so far as I can collect their meaning. Ockham in particular falls very short of what I had expected; and his nominalism is strangely different from that of Berkeley. We can hardly reckon a man in the right, who is so by accident, and through sophistical reasoning. However, a well-known article in the Edinburgh Review, No. liii. p. 204, gives, from Tennemann, a more favourable account of Ockham.
Perhaps I may have imagined the scholastics to be more forgotten than they really are. Within a short time I have met with four living English writers who have read parts of Thomas Aquinas; Mr. Turner, Mr. Berington, Mr. Coleridge, and the Edinburgh Reviewer. Still I cannot bring myself to think that there are four more in this country who can say the same. Certain portions, however, of his writings are still read in the course of instruction of some Catholic universities.
[I leave this passage as it was written about 1814. But it must be owned with regard to the schoolmen, as well as the jurists, that I at that time underrated, or at least did not anticipate, the attention which their works have attracted in modern Europe, and that the passage in the text is more applicable to the philosophy of the eighteenth century than of the present. For several years past the metaphysicians of Germany and France have brushed the dust from the scholastic volumes; Tennemann and Buhle, Degerando, but more than all Cousin and Rémusat, in their excellent labours on Abelard, have restored the mediæval philosophy to a place in transcendental metaphysics, which, during the prevalence of the Cartesian school, and those derived from it, had been refused. 1848.]
[k] Roger Bacon, by far the truest philosopher of the middle ages, complains of the ignorance of Aristotle's translators. Every translator, he observes, ought to understand his author's subject, and the two languages from which and into which he is to render the work. But none hitherto, except Boethius, have sufficiently known the languages; nor has one, except Robert Grostete (the famous bishop of Lincoln), had a competent acquaintance with science. The rest make egregious errors in both respects. And there is so much misapprehension and obscurity in the Aristotelian writings as thus translated, that no one understands them. Opus Majus, p. 45.