These claims had been acknowledged; and, unfortunately, from the intellectual condition of the times, with no due apprehension of the necessary ministry of Observation, and Reason dealing with observation, by which alone such a system can be embodied. It was held without any regulating principle, that the philosophy which had been bequeathed to the world by the great geniuses of heathen antiquity, and the Philosophy which was deduced from, and implied by, the Revelations made by God to man, must be identical; and, therefore, that Theology is the only true philosophy. Indeed, the Neoplatonists had already arrived, by other roads, at the same conviction. John Scot Erigena, in the reign of Alfred, and consequently before the existence of the Scholastic Philosophy, properly so called, had reasserted this doctrine.[63] Anselm, in the eleventh century, again brought it forward;[64] and Bernard de Chartres, in the thirteenth.[65]
[63] Deg. iv. 351.
[64] Ib. iv. 388.
[65] Ib. iv. 418.
This view was confirmed by the opinion which prevailed, concerning the nature of philosophical truth; a view supported by the theory [230] of Plato, the practice of Aristotle, and the general propensities of the human mind: I mean the opinion that all science may be obtained by the use of reasoning alone;—that by analysing and combining the notions which common language brings before us, we may learn all that we can know. Thus Logic came to include the whole of Science; and accordingly this Abelard expressly maintained.[66] I have [already] explained, in some measure, the fallacy of this belief, which consists, as has been well said,[67] “in mistaking the universality of the theory of language for the generalization of facts.” But on all accounts this opinion is readily accepted; and it led at once to the conclusion, that the Theological Philosophy which we have described, is complete as well as true.
[66] Deg. iv. 407.
[67] Enc. Met. 807.
Thus a Universal Science was established, with the authority of a Religious Creed. Its universality rested on erroneous views of the relation of words and truths; its pretensions as a science were admitted by the servile temper of men’s intellects; and its religious authority was assigned it, by making all truth part of religion. And as Religion claimed assent within her own jurisdiction under the most solemn and imperative sanctions, Philosophy shared in her imperial power, and dissent from their doctrines was no longer blameless or allowable. Error became wicked, dissent became heresy; to reject the received human doctrines, was nearly the same as to doubt the Divine declarations. The Scholastic Philosophy claimed the assent of all believers.
The external form, the details, and the text of this philosophy, were taken, in a great measure, from Aristotle; though, in the spirit, the general notions, and the style of interpretation, Plato and the Platonists had no inconsiderable share. Various causes contributed to the elevation of Aristotle to this distinction. His Logic had early been adopted as an instrument of theological disputation; and his spirit of systematization, of subtle distinction, and of analysis of words, as well as his disposition to argumentation, afforded the most natural and grateful employment to the commentating propensities. Those principles which we before noted as the leading points of his physical philosophy, were selected and adopted; and these, presented in a most technical form, and applied in a systematic manner, constitute a large portion of the philosophy of which we now speak, so far as it pretends to deal with physics.
2. Scholastic Dogmas.—But before the complete ascendancy of Aristotle was thus established, when something of an intellectual waking [231] took place after the darkness and sleep of the ninth and tenth centuries, the Platonic doctrines seem to have had, at first, a strong attraction for men’s minds, as better falling in with the mystical speculations and contemplative piety which belonged to the times. John Scot Erigena[68] may be looked upon as the reviver of the New Platonism in the tenth century. Towards the end of the eleventh, Peter Damien,[69] in Italy, reproduced, involved in a theological discussion, some Neoplatonic ideas. Godefroy[70] also, censor of St. Victor, has left a treatise, entitled Microcosmus; this is founded on a mystical analogy, often afterwards again brought forward, between Man and the Universe. “Philosophers and theologians,” says the writer, “agree in considering man as a little world; and as the world is composed of four elements, man is endowed with four faculties, the senses, the imagination, reason, and understanding.” Bernard of Chartres,[71] in his Megascosmus and Microcosmus, took up the same notions. Hugo, abbot of St. Victor, made a contemplative life the main point and crown of his philosophy; and is said to have been the first of the scholastic writers who made psychology his special study.[72] He says the faculties of the mind are “the senses, the imagination, the reason, the memory, the understanding, and the intelligence.”