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

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