SCIENCE VERSUS SCHOLASTICISM.
Modern philosophers, notable in European lands (outside of Spain) were numbered by hundreds, and the young Gamarra did nought but glean in so abundant a field. Galileo and Harvey! What brilliant and suitable examples men of great talent furnish! Harvey, in his study, with a frog in his hand. As parallels and comparisons are most useful in understanding a subject, as a recognized rule of law says that placing two opposing views face to face both are more clearly known, I venture to add—after Gamarra’s fashion—a parallel between Harvey and Domingo Soto. A frog! here I have a thing apparently vile and despicable; the Epistles of Saint Paul, here I have a thing infinitely sublime. A film to which the intestines of a frog are attached; what thing meaner? The science of theology; what thing so grand? To soil one’s hands with the blood and secretions of an animal; occupation, to all appearance, vile; to take the pen for explaining the Holy Scriptures; occupation, sacred and sublime. And yet, Domingo Soto with his scholastic commentaries on the Epistle of Saint Paul to the Romans was of no use to humanity; and Harvey, presenting himself in the great theater of the scientific world, with a frog in his hand, discovering the circulation of the blood, rendered an immense service to mankind. Domingo Soto was a Catholic, and one of the Fathers of the Council of Trent, and Harvey was a Protestant—and yet, without doubt, the Catholic Church does not esteem the commentaries of its son Soto, and, in the Vatican’s council, has sounded the praises of the discovery of the Protestant Harvey.
PHILOSOPHY IN NEW SPAIN.
COROLLARIES.
1. Studies never flourished under the Colonial regime.
2. Spain in the seventeenth century and in the first and second thirds of the eighteenth century was poor and backward in philosophy, and New Spain during the same period was in the same predicament.
3. That New Spain was backward in philosophy at that time because such was the philosophy of the epoch, is false.
4. The ideas and impulse in the modern philosophical sciences, which New Spain received during the last years of the eighteenth and the early years of the nineteenth century, did not come mainly from Spain, but from the other principal nations of Europe.
5. It follows, from Spain and New Spain having been backward in philosophy, that they were also backward in theology, jurisprudence, medicine, and in all the sciences, because philosophy is the basis of all.
6. The expression, “Spain taught us what she herself knew,” is not a good excuse or exoneration.
7. The scholastic philosophy is useful; the pseudo-scholastic is prejudicial.