|
“As, forced from wind-guns, lead itself can fly, And pond’rous slugs cut swiftly through the sky.” |
Perhaps, by Chærilus, the juvenile satirist designated Flecknoe, or Shadwell, who had received their immortality of dulness from his master, catholic in poetry and opinions, Dryden.
Some may be curious to have these monkish terms defined. Causes are distinguished by Aristotle into four kinds:—The material cause, ex qua, out of which things are made; the formal cause, per quam, by which a thing is that which it is, and nothing else; the efficient cause, a qua, by the agency of which anything is produced; and the final cause, propter quam, the end for which it is produced. Such are his notions in his Phys. 1. ii. c. iii., referred to by Brucker and Formey in their Histories of Philosophy. Of the Scholastic Metaphysics, Sprat, the historian of the Royal Society, observes, “that the lovers of that cloudy knowledge boast that it is an excellent instrument to refine and make subtle the minds of men. But there may be a greater excess in the subtlety of men’s wits than in their thickness; as we see those threads, which are of too fine a spinning, are found to be more useless than those which are homespun and gross.”—History of the Royal Society, p. 326.
In the history of human folly, often so closely connected with that of human knowledge, some of the schoolmen (the commentators on Aquinas and others) prided themselves, and were even admired for their impenetrable obscurity! One of them, and our countryman, is singularly commended by Cardan, for that “only one of his arguments was enough to puzzle all posterity; and that, when he had grown old, he wept because he could not understand his own books.” Baker, in his Reflections upon Learning, who had examined this schoolman, declares that his obscurity is such, as if he never meant to be understood. The extravagances of the schoolmen are, however, not always those of Aristotle. Pope, and the wits of that day, like these early members of the Royal Society, decried Aristotle, who did not probably fall in the way of their studies. His great imperfections are in natural philosophy; but he still preserves his eminence for his noble treatises of Ethics, and Politics, and Poetics, notwithstanding the imperfect state in which these have reached us. Dr. Copleston and Dr. Gillies have given an energetic testimony to their perpetual value. Pope, in satirising the University as a nest of dunces, considered the followers of Aristotle as so many stalled oxen, “fat bulls of Basan.”
|
“A hundred head of Aristotle’s friends.” Dunciad. |
Swift has drawn an allegorical personage of Aristotle, by which he describes the nature of his works. “He stooped much, and made use of a staff; his visage was meagre, his hair lank and thin, and his voice hollow;” descriptive of his abrupt conciseness, his harsh style, the obscurities of his dilapidated text, and the deficiency of feeling, which his studied compression, his deep sagacity, and his analytical genius, so frequently exhibit.
Sprat makes an ingenious observation on the notion of those who declared that “the most learned ages are still the most atheistical, and the ignorant the most devout.” He says this had become almost proverbial, but he shows that piety is little beholden to those who make this distinction. “The Jewish law forbids us to offer up to God a sacrifice that has a blemish; but these men bestow the most excellent of men on the devil, and only assign to religion those men and those times which have the greatest blemish of human nature, even a defect in their knowledge and understanding.”—History of the Royal Society, p. 356.