The Press. — London, England, 1856-12-06 00:00:00

MO ground, by assuming that his reader can dis pense with links in the chain of reasoning, and also by an apparent dislike of the em ployment of foriuul, which, however dry, are indispensable to the comprehension of logic. Abelard's theological heresy sprang directly from his theory of dialectics and this fact alone should suffice to show that the medieval logic was not that sapless, lifeless, heap of verbiage which it is vulgularly supposed to be. Was not the Trinity in Unity and the Unity in Trinity only another exhibition of the fundamental doctrine of Realism? This seems to have been the doubt by which Abelard's mind was tormented. The idea of one divine nature which existed equally and essentially in all three Persons of the God- head was repugnant to the position ho had assumed in his controversy with William of Champeaux. This, at least, is what we collect from Mr. Maurice's statement, which here again might well he rendered fuller and clearer. The end of it was that Abelard's book on the Trinity was burnt before his eyes at the Council of Soissons, and the innovator retired to his monastery crushed and The first of the schoolmen who formally enunciated any doctrine resembling that of conceptualism, as at present understood, was John of Salisbury. So far he wa s in advance of his teachers; but he was also a staunch chain. pion of the deductive method of inquiry, and adopted the " Quadrivium " of Boethius as the only " true Mathi-Isis." After John, the next name of any note is that of Albertus Magnus (born A.D. 1205), celebrated in his day for his knowledge of physical philosophy. By his time theology had in great measure got the upper hand of logic, and Albertus headed a reaction in favour of Aristotle. But the great hero of the schoolmen was yet to appear, the Angelical Doctor, Thomas of Aquino. Aquinas seems rather to have gathered together and cemented the work of preceding generations, than to have brought any original tribute to the treasury of philosophy. The character of his mind was disputative, and thus the reader is always sure of finding the opposite argument given in its integrity. A good specimen of his method is given by Mr. Maurice in an extract from the " Quodlibeta," one of Aquinas's earlier works. One of the questions there discussed is, " whether those " things which are impossible to Nature are " possible to God." Aquinas brings forward nine reasons on the negative and eight on the affirmative side, arid, after all, appears to arrive at no very definite conclusion. But the value of the argument consists in its minute and conscientious investigation of every shade of opinion. Persons who have not sufficient power of continuous thought to follow a long and subtle train of reasoning may call this elaborate analysis trifling. Mr. Maurice, how ever, does justice to Aquinas's intellect ; and the' value of his labours, though we think it might have been accorded with a less timid hand, is fully acknowledged. The great work of Aquinas was his " Summa Theologice," from which, in pursuance of our plan of tracing the progress of logical inquiry, we extract the following remarks upon ideas :- " What is called Idea in Greek, is called Form in Latin. Wherefore by ideas are understood the forms of certain things over and above the things themselves. Now the form of anything existing over and above the thing itself, may be either the exemplar of that thing, or the principle of the knowledge of it in the mind of the knower. It is necessary to assume ideal in both senses. For in all things that are not generated by chance, the Form is the end of the generation. lint an agent does not act on account of the form, except in so far as the similitude of it is in him. The similitude exists naturally in those agents that act by nature, as man generates man, and fire fire. The similitude exists intellectually in those agents which act by intellect. Thus the similitude of a house pre-exists in the mind of a builder, and this may be called the idea of the house, because the artificer intends to assimilate the house to this form. Seeing, therefore, that the world is not made by chance, but is made by God acting through intellect, it is necessary there should be in the Divine mind a Form after the similitude of which the world has been made." Then, in disposing of some of the objections to the existence of Ideas, he says that " God does not understand things according to an idea existing without Him," and therefore that Aristotle was right in denouncing the opinion of Plato concerning ideas, inasmuch as he made them self-existing, not existing in the intellect. The great doctors of the Franciscan order were Bonaveatura and Duns Scotus, who up- THE PRESS. held Platonism respectively under its theolo gical and scholastic aspect. Bonaventura's treatise on "Illumination " is thoroughly Pla tonic ; but the account of it here given is far too long to enable us to convey any idea of it by an extract. Duns Scotus, though a Pla ' tonist by profession, was, according to Mr. Maurice, an Aristotelian by instinct. Ho was surnamed the Subtle Doctor; and certainly the specimen of his reasoning supplied by Mr. Maurice fully justifies the title. The birthplace of Duns Scotus has been a subject of much controversy—England, Scotland, and Ireland each putting in a claim to the honour The evidence, however, preponderates in favour of the last mentioned ; and it is re corded by his biographer, Wadding, as an incontestable proof of the fact, that he paid St. Patrick the somewhat doubtful compliment, as Mr. Maurice says, of making him an Ens Logicum, a place usually occupied by Socrates, who is the John Styles or Richard Roe of phi losophy. Of the two last names in the present work, Roger Bacon and Raymond Lully, Mr. Mau rice says comparatively little. The history of both is chiefly remarkable as an indication that the tide had begun to turn, and that the Church, which had hitherto represented the intellectual element in the world, was now growing jealous of the freedom of intellect. Bacon was prosecuted as a magician. He was thrown into prison by the Superior of the Franciscans, afterwards Nicholas 111., and being after some years liberated by the inter cession of an English nobleman, returned to Oxford, and died there about the year 1292, or 1294. Lully was born in the Island of Majorca, in the year 1235. The island had lately been conquered from 'the Mahometans, and Ray mond's father had been rewarded with a large grant of land for his services in the field. Being thus brought into close contact with Mahometan ideas, his first thought, on turn ing to a religious life, was of their conversion. He laboured long and zealously in this work, making two voyages to Tunis, and exhorting, but vainly, successive popes to organise a great Christian mission for the purpose. He him self was a martyr in the literal sense of the terra, for on his second visit to Tunis he was stoned to death by the inhabitants. Mr. Maurice closes his sketch of mediaeval philosophy at this epoch, as he looks upon the age of Dante, " coeval as it is with the " great ,judgment of the Papacy under Boni " face, with the practical termination of the " religious wars, and with the rise of a native "literature, not only in the south but in the " north, as a better epoch from which to corn " mence the new age of European thought "than the German Reformation of the six " teenth century." We have necessarily given a most imperfect sketch of the contents of this volume, but have said enough, we hope. to show its value as a history of philosophic inquiry in days when the intellectual universe afforded to men of thoughtful genius the same field for exploration that the material universe presents to philosophers of the pre • sent time. If the subtle disquisitions of the former answered no other end, they at least tended, in an age of brute force, to lead men to considerations above themselves, and also, by proving the boundaries beyond which the human intellect cannot reach, to teach them to acquiesce in uncertainty which they cannot dissipate, and to shrink from dogmatism which can rest on no solid basis. Walden; or, Life in the Woods. By Henry D. Thoreau. London: Trubner and Co. Tuts is a quiet, drowsy, pleasant style of book, of which we can only read a very little at a time, but to which we recur with a feeling of subdued satisfac• tion. A mild religious sentimentalism, avoiding the extreme of either silliness or hypocrisy, pervades the whole, and there is at times an exhibition of primi tive innocence, such aq we cannot bring ourselves to believe assumed, which would have well become the Vicar of Wakefield. "I see young men," says the author, " whose misfortune it is to have inherited " farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools ; for " these are more easily acquired than got rid of. The portionless, who struggle " with no such unnecessary inherited encumbrances, " find it labour enough to subdue and cultivate a " few cubit feet of flesh." The simplicity of this complaint will be wonderfully striking to that SATURDAY, immense majority of men whose experience of acqui sition and consumption is exactly the reverse of Mr.. Thoreau's. The great theory of this gentleman is, that we have no right to live better than the savages, unless we are better men; and that, in proportion as we subdue our passions, and cultivate our intellects and morals, we are to exchange a cave for a wigwam, a wigwam for a log hut, and the hut for a brick house. There is a sort of rough moral arithmetic about this assertion which the world would be the better for recognising, however impossible to act completely up to it. Mr. Thoreau's idea of a house for a young man just beginning the world is certainly curious : Formerly, when how to get my living honestly, with freedom left for my proper pursuits, was a question which vexed me even more than it does now, for unfortunately I am become somewhat callous, I used to see a large box by the railroad, six feet long by three wide, in which the labourers locked up their tools at night, and it suggested to me that every man who was hard pushed might get such a one for a dollar, and, having bored a few auger holes in it, to admit the air at least, get into it when it rained and at night, and hook down the lid, and so have freedom in his love, and in his soul be free. This did not appear the worst, nor by any means a despicable alternative. You could sit up as late as you pleased, and. whenever you got up, go abroad without any landlord or house-lord dogging you for rent. Many a man is harassed to death to pay the rent of a larger and more luxurious box who would not have frozen to death in such a box as this. With all his eccentricities,: however, Mr. Thoreau writes like a scholar and a thinker, and l►is work contains some wholesome correctives to the luxurious materialism of the age. Arthur Vaughan. By the Ben T. Williams, M.A. London : Kent and Co. " ARTHUR VAUGHAN " is simply the biography of a young dissenting minister, for what purpose written, or oy whom likely to be read, is beyond our under standing. We can discern no purpose whatever in the book, and there is no story that deserves the name. It is made up of one half cant, one quarter nonsense, and one quarter coarseness. We subjoin a specimen of the latter:— At. Dyfftin, Mrs. Vaughan had for one of her house. maids, a pretty, buxom girl of nineteen, whose name was Lucy. She had auburn hair, clear bright eyes, regular teeth, and a Grecian nose, was of the mid.dle height, but rather broad and round about the shoul.lers, which, according to our hero, was the only fault in her external appearance. Now, Arthur's kind attention to Lucy was more than could be desired from a young man towards a pretty girl in his mother's service. Her light and merry disposition, in truth, afforded him much pleasure in his frequent conversations with her. When dressed for the evening, with her face of health and happiness, with het hair done up nicely, and with her clean servant's cap, she came in with tea, Arthur would follow her round with his eyes; and when she went behind Mrs. Vaughan's chair and looked so wickedly, and slightly winked at him, he used to feel such a thrill of joyous pleasure as he thought for the time unsurpassable. After tea, he would go out to the kitchen,—" Lucy, what a naughty girl you are ?" " No, no, sir; you were looking so serious that I could not help it." `You little devil, Lucy; give me a kiss my dear girl. By Jove, I cannot keep away from you, Lucy." " Don't then, sir." Poor Lucy, pretty, buxom girl of nineteen ! Poor Arthur, impulsive and amorous young student ! What was Socratic morality or Spartan denial to them ? Irre sistible passions drew them to each other, and they were willing to be led. This is pretty well for a serious religious fiction. A Boy's :Voyage Round the World on Board a Man-of-War. London : Addey and Co. THE general nature of this little work is sufficiently proclaimed by its title. But it possesses some value at the present moment over and above that of being an entertaining book for children, as being the work of an American, and containing an independent expression of opinion by an American sailor. The author served as a powder-boy on board an American seventy-four, seems to have undergone no particular hardships and to have encountered no special tyranny, yet he continued in the service without enthusiasm, and quitted it without regret. If this is at all a fair sample of the feeling that prevails in America with regard to the navy, we can very well understand why the Yankees do not increase their fleet, and trust so much to privateenng in case of war. The author moreover gives it as his opinion that a sailor's life affords but little real opportunities of seeing the world ; and there is altogether a want of heartiness in speaking of nautical matters which we should hardly have expected from a countryman of Feni more Cooper. PERIODICAL LITERATURE. Blackwood this month contains a more than usual number of substantial articles. " Our Indian an pin)" is a curiously complete account. The nature of the land tenure; the system of British administra-