Rams holds a most honorable place in the list of intellectual reformers. His assault on scholasticism as a method of thinking is vigorous, and, on the whole, well directed; his exposure of its puerile and useless subtleties is thorough, and entirely in accordance with later criticism. In his contempt for the illiterate worship of Aristotle, in his admi ration of Plato and of the ancient orators and historians, he ranks (though late) with the scholars of the renaissance; but in his assertion of " reason" as the supreme criterion of truth, he must be regarded as the forerunner of Descartes and the modern world. His system of logic, by which perhaps his name is best known, is marked by its lucid defi nitions, its natural divisions, and its simplification of the rules of the syllogism; but (like every pre-Baconian system) it fails to realize the supreme importance of the inductive method. What strikes one most, however, in Remus is not so much his par ticular achievements as his universal intellectual activity. He was the first mathema tician of his age in France, and wrote treatises on arithmetic, geometry, and algebra, which were text-books for 100 years; he was among the earliest adherents of the "Copernican" system of astronomy, and in natural philosophy avowed himself an enemy to hypothesis and abstractions: rhetoric, morals, theology,,all engaged his pen, and he seldom handled a subject which he did not to sonic degree elucidate. His
followers were a widespread and for long a powerful body of thinkers and teachers. France, England, the Low Countries, Germany, Switzerland, Denmark, and even Spain. had their Rzmiats, as they were called, and they have disappeared chiefly because their tendencies are embraced in the broader and more critical methods of modern scientific inquiry. A list of his writings is given in the Nouvelle Biographie iveralle, article "Ramus."—See Waddington's Ramos, sa Vie, ses serifs. et ses Opinions (Paris, 1855);- E. Saisset's Les Precurseurs de Descartes (Paris, 1862); and C. Desmaze's P. Remus, Professor ColMge de Prance, sa Vie, ses sa itort (Paris,' 1864).