The living force in the spiritual life of the Roman empire was, after all, not philosophy, but religion, and specifically Chris tianity. With the extension of Christianity to the Gentile world, it at length became necessary for it to orientate itself towards what was best in Greek culture. There is a Stoic element in the ethic of the Pauline epistles, but the theological affinity that the Johannine gospel with its background of philosophic ideas, ex hibits to Platonic and Neoplatonist teaching caused the effort at absorption to be directed rather in that direction. Neoplatonism had accepted the Aristotelian logic with its sharper definition than anything handed down from Plato, and except the logic of the Sceptics, there was no longer any rival discipline of the like prestige. The logic of the Stoics had been discredited by the sceptical onset, but in any case there was no organon of a fitness even comparable to Aristotle's for the task of drawing out the implications of dogmatic premises. Aristotelian logic secured the imprimatur of the revived Platonism, and it was primarily be cause of this that it passed into the service of Christian theology. The contact of the Church with Platonism was on the mystical side. Orthodoxy needed to counter heretical logic not with mys ticism, itself the fruitful mother of heresies, but with argument. Aristotelianism approved itself as the controversial instrument, and in due course held the field alone. The upshot is what is called Scholasticism. Scholasticism is the Aristotelianism of medi aeval orthodoxy as taught in the "schools" or universities of West ern Europe. It takes form as a body of doctrine drawing its pre mises from authority, sometimes in secular matters from that of Aristotle, but normally from that of the documents and tradi tions of systematic theology, while its method it draws from Aristotle, as known in the Latin versions, mainly by Boethius, of some few treatises of the Organon together with the Isagoge of Porphyry. It dominates the centres of intellectual life in the West, because, despite its claim to finality in its principles or premises, and to universality for its method, it represents the only culture of a philosophic kind available to the adolescent peoples of the Western nations just becoming conscious of their ignorance. Christianity was the one organizing principle that pulsed with spiritual life. The vocation of the student could find fulfilment only in the religious orders. Scholasticism embodied what the Christian community had saved from the wreckage of Greek dialectic. Yet with all its effective manipulation of the formal technique of its translated and mutilated Aristotle, Scholas ticism would have gone under long before it did through the weakness intrinsic to its divorce of the form and the matter of knowledge, but for two reasons. The first is the filtering through of some science and some new Aristotelian learning from the Arabs. The second is the spread of Greek scholarship and Greek manuscripts westwards, which was consequent on the Latin occu pation of Constantinople in 1204. It was respited by the oppor tunity which was afforded it of fresh draughts from the Aristotle of a less partial and purer tradition, and we have, accordingly, a golden age of revived Scholasticism beginning in the 13th cen tury, admitting now within itself more differences than before. It is to the schoolmen of the two centuries preceding the Turkish capture of Constantinople that controversial refinements usually associated with the name of Scholasticism are attributable. The Analytics of Aristotle now entered quite definitely into the logical thought of Scholasticism and we have the contrast of a logica vetus and logica nova. The respite, however,' was short. The flight of Byzantine scholarship westward in the 15th century re vealed, and finally, that the philosophic content of the Scholastic teaching was as alien from Aristotle as from the spirit of the contemporary revolt of science, with its cry for a new medicine, a new nautical astronomy anci the like. The doom of the Scholas tic Aristotle was nevertheless not the rehabilitation of the Greek Aristotle. Between him and the tide of feeling at the Renaissance lay the whole achievement of Arab science. That impatience of authority to which we owe the Renaissance, the Reformation and the birth of Nationalism, is not stilled by the downfall of Aristotle as the nomen appellativum of the schools. The appeal is to ex perience, somewhat vaguely defined, as against all authority, to the book of nature and no other. At last the world undertakes to enlarge the circle of its ideas.
Accordingly what is in one sense the revival of classical learn ing is in another a recourse to what inspired that learning, and so is a new beginning. There is no place for a reformed Aristotelian
logic, though the genius of Zabarella was there to attempt it. Nor for revivals of the competing systems, though all have their advocates. Scientific discovery was in the air. The tradition of the old world was too heavily weighted with the Ptolemaic astron omy and the like to be regarded as other than a bar to progress. But from the new point of view its method was inadequate, too, its contentment with an induction that merely leaves an opponent silent when experiment and the application of a calculus were within the possibilities. The transformation of logic lay with the man of science, hindered though he might be by the en thusiasm of some of the philosophers of nature. Henceforth the Aristotelian logic, the genuine no less than the traditional, was to lie on the other side of the Copernican change.
The demand is for a new organon, a scientific method which shall face the facts of experience and justify itself by its achieve ment in the reduction of them to control. It is a notable feature of the new movement, that except verbally, in a certain licence of nominalist expression, due to the swing of the pendulum away from the realist doctrine of universals, there is little that we can characterize as Empiricism. Facts are opposed to abstract uni versals. Yes. Particulars to controlling formulae. No. Experience is appealed to as fruitful where the formal employment of syl logism is barren. But it is not mere induction, with its "un analysed concretes taken as ultimate" that is set up as the sub stitute for deduction. Rather a scientific process, which as ex periential may be called inductive, but which is in other regards deductive as syllogism, is set up in contrast to syllogism and enumeration alike. This is to be seen in Zabarella, in Galilei, and in Bacon. The reformed Aristotelian logic of the first-named with its inductio demonstrative, the mathematico-physical analysis followed by synthesis of the second, the exclusiva, or method of exclusions of the last, agree at least in this, that the method of science is one and indivisible, while containing both an inductive and a deductive moment. That what, e.g., Bacon says of his method may run counter to this is an accident of the tradition of the quarrel with realism. So, too, with the scholastic universals. Aristotle's form had been correlated, though inadequately, with the idea of function. Divorced from this they are fairly stig matized as mental figments or branded as ghostly entities that can but block the path. But consider Bacon's own doctrine of forms. Or watch the mathematical physicist with his formulae. The faith of science looks outward as in the dawn of Greek philosophy, and subjectivism such as Hume's has as yet no hold. Bacon summing up the movement so far as he understood it, in a rather belated way, has no theory of knowledge beyond the metaphor of the mirror held up to nature. Yet he offers an ambitious logic of science, and the case is typical.
Galilei.—The science of the Renaissance differs from that of the false dawn in Greek times in the fact of fruitfulness. It had the achievement of the Old World in the field of mathematics upon which to build. It was in reaction against a dialectic and not immediately to be again entrapped. In scientific method, then, it could but advance, provided physics and mathematics did not again fail of accord. Kepler and Galilei secured it against that disaster. The ubi materia, ibi geometria of the one is the battle-cry of the mathematico-physical advance. The scientific instrument of the other, with its moments of analysis and con struction, metodo risolutivo and metodo compositivo, engineers the road for the advance. The new method of physics is verifi able by its fruitfulness, and so free of any immediate danger from dialectic. Its germinal thought may not have been new, but if not new, it had at least needed rediscovery from the be ginning. For it was to be at once certain and experiential. A mathematico-physical calculus that would work was in question. The epistemological problem as such was out of the purview. The relation of physical laws to the mind that thought them was for the time a negligible constant. When Descartes, having faithfully and successfully followed the mathematico-physical inquiry of his more strictly scientific predecessors, found himself compelled to raise the question how it was possible for him to know what in truth he seemed to know so certainly, the problem entered on a new phase. The scientific movement had happily been content for the time with a half which, then and there at least, was more than the whole.