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a Scholastic. The industry of Scholasticism is directed to a vindication of the doctrine of the Church, and philosophy is used for this purpose. But philosophy is the maid of theology, the Hagar who may be banished into the wilderness if need be, whose work is ancillary ever. Show, if possible, the harmony of faith and reason, but if there be any parallax, philosophy must step aside.

Now the work of Duns Scotus was mainly philosophic. He fixed his attention upon the system of vindication rather than the doctrine itself. The philosophic forms which had gathered around theology, properly so called, gave scope for his criticism and a wide field for his subtilty, making him appear, as Wadding says, like a new Edipus. He philosophized upon the scholastic philosophy rather than upon the scholastic theology. Erdmann and others have called attention to this. Albert and Thomas reflected on doctrine; Duns reflects upon this reflection, sifts the reasoning of his predecessors, and drives a coach and four through their lacunæ. In Thomas, scholasticism reached its consummate flower, the ideal which Albert never attained. Scotus summons scholasticism to see what she has done, and picks out the artificial petals of the lily of the Angelic Doctor. The chasm then between theology and philosophy still yawned before Scotus, for the substructions of the bridge which St. Thomas had constructed were not laid in the nature of things. Scotus, then, forms the transition between. the old and the new, between mediævalism and modern thought. He builded wiser than he knew, for from him has started the better philosophy, whose hour struck with Descartes. Walter Burleigh and William of Occam were without doubt among his hearers. Occam is the watershed from which begins the flow of modern philosophy. He is the outcome of Scotus, of the same Franciscan Order. Besides, the Formalists, as they were called who were of the school of Scotus, by natural and easy transition passed into the Nominalists, of whom Occa was chief. William was no such extravagant Nominalist as Roscellin, to whom Universals were words, and nothing more, but stands quite on the platform of that sober nominalism which marks modern philosophy. Roscellin was a Nominalist of the school of Hobbes and Bain, while Occam has great affinities with Leibnitz and Lotze. To see the full outcome of

Scotus we need often to pass down to Occam, and even to Nicholas of Cusa and Bruno.

The actual result of Scotus' work is in most respects nearer the truth than that of Aquinas. He really breaks with scholasticism, and yet hesitates to draw the ultimate consequences. IIe stands on the brink of a great discovery, and yet shrinks back from the promulgation. Hence the contradictions to be found in his system. No exposition of scholastic doctrine is complete which stops with St. Thomas. It must also present the view of Scotus. Generally, when the latter takes issue with the former he is right, enlarging the scope of mediæval doctrine and emancipating thought. Scotus' errors lie close to his grandest thoughts. He is the knight-errant of freedom in both God and man. There has never been a more uncompromising statement of freedom than Scotus makes, and yet the modern advocates of the doctrine seem strangely ignorant of his work. But in this field lie also his errors. In almost every case his deficiencies grow out of a one-sided apprehension of divine and human freedom.

Let us now pass on to special applications of Scotus' doctrine, whereby may be seen the truth of these general assertions:

1. Consider the transformations undergone by the scholastic doctrine of matter and form under the hand of Scotus. The scholastics inherited the traditions of Aristotle. All their thinking was concerned with the charmed rubrics of form and matter, of actuality and potentiality. The lowest stage of being, or first matter, was considered as wholly destitute of form, and the highest, or God, was destitute of matter, for he was purus actus. All between these extremes was compounded of matter and form. But really matter without form cannot exist, for Thomas says: "First matter does not exist in the nature of things by itself, since it is not being actually but potentially." So also, true to the peripatetic thought, he says, "Form is that by which the agent acts."

Not so Scotus. He denies that matter is a mere potence, which, apart from form, has no actual being. Rather must we ascribe to it a being apart from form. Though always in juxtaposition with form, it has its being as matter not from form, but from the divine creation. Matter, even as the principle of

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passivity in an essence, must be something actual, else it could not be distinguished from form, and no composite could arise. may be indefinite, but it is a divine creation without form and before form. In fine, he declares that matter has the entitative act in itself, and not in form. We may scout this whole mode of argumentation, but on the plane of scholasticism it was an advance to something better. At all events it was a break with the system thus shaken to its base.

Again, Thomas had declared that matter in the heavens and on the earth is not the same. In the sublunary region, change rules, or generation and corruption; but these are excluded from the realm of the heavenly bodies.

This again Scotus denied. Matter is the same every-where, and it may be studied in the light of the same laws throughout the universe. Matter, said he, may be predicated of all created things univoce. According to his graphic picture, "the world is a beautiful tree, whose root and germ is first matter, whose leaves are accidents, whose boughs and branches are corruptible creatures, whose flower is the rational soul, and whose fruits are the angels." In another form Sc tus represents matter as the common root from which go forth two boughs, the spiritual and the corporeal creature, each again splitting into various twigs, the spiritual into angels and human souls, the corporeal into corruptible and incorruptible bodies. To assert, with Thomas, that the matter of the heavenly bodies is diverse from that on earth, was in the spirit of the Ptolemaic system of astronomy: to assert the identity of matter every-where is to bring it under the sway of universal laws, is to anticipate Nicholas of Cusa, who asserted the motion of the earth before Copernicus.

Once more, Thomas declares that the soul is the form of the body. It stands related to it as form to matter, as actuality to potentiality. Independent validity is denied to the body, whose activity seems to come wholly from the soul. Such, at least, is the trend of the Thomist doctrine. Now Scotus brings in something entirely new. There is a substantial form of the body as such, a form by which the body exists as organic body. This Scotus calls the form of corporeity or the form mixed. Thus the organic body is conditione than the soul. Thus body and soul

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thorough interpenetration which they had in the scholastic thought, and assume a sort of independence of each other. It did not take long for this separation in thought to make way for a new science and to disentangle physiology from psychology, which absorbed all before. In fact, all these distinctions regarding matter, giving it a validity apart from form, indicate the passage of metaphysics from the idea of substantial forms to that of force, which is the modern notion. The Possest of Nicholas of Cusa and the Monad of Bruno are but stages in the progress from Scotus to Leibnitz.

Turn now to the position of Duns Scotus upon the question of Universals. It has been said by Haureau, in his "History of Scholastic Philosophy," that Scotus was more of a realist than Thomas. Haureau represents him, in fine, as adding to the scholastic refinements and realizing vastly more abstractions than had ever been done before. Erdmann tells us that there was no difference, on the question of universals or general ideas, between Thomas and Scotus, save that the latter declared them to exist formally in things. Still he does not seem to weigh this distinction properly, for the formalities of Scotus play a significant rôle in his system. To the question, Are Universals real or only abstractions from things? is, for instance, humanity a reality or only an abstraction from existent men? Albert and Thomas and Scotus all were agreed. Their answer was, Humanity exists as an archetype in the divine mind, as they said, before things-as the quiddity or essence in things-as an abstraction from them in our thought, after things. Thus, as Erdmann says, Scotus has left the e tention between Realist and Nominalist behind him. The exact distinction between Thomas and Scotus, or the Realists Formalists, was this. The Realists held to a twofold d the real distinction and the mental. In this latter the further distinction, namely, purely mental and virtual without foundation in the thing, and with foundati thing. Universals, then, ther

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actuality there are not only things but formalities. According to Scotus, "nature itself is of itself indifferent to universal and individual being." The individual is a unity which is incommunicable, but the universal is a unity which may be participated in by many individuals.

The comparative insignificance of the question of Universals to Scotus is seen in the fact that he devotes to it only seven or eight pages of his twelve folio volumes. That he is not an extreme Realist, as Hauncau asserts, is evident from his own words. Thus he says, "The universal, in so far as universal, is nothing in existence;" and again, "Universality or the not this, attaches to nothing except in the intellect." All his commentators, from Lychetus to Wadding, assert as his view that "the universal does not exist on the part of the thing." Besides, the Scotists generally had a warm side toward the Nominalists. It is true Mayronis pushed the realist doctrine to an extreme, but Peter Aureolus, of his school, immediately after found the way to nominalism.

The doctrine of formalities, then, played an important part in the system of Scotus. The exigency of the Trinitarian doctrine first called it forth. The persons of the Trinity, he said, were formalities, thinking thus to save the dogma of the Church. But it is evident that this whole doctrine of formalities is an utter break with scholasticism, which ever clung to matter and form as exhaustive of reality. Here was a new entity placed in the bosom of things. It needed only Occam to come into the tangled scholastic forest, and, with his hatchet of parsimony, to cut away all unnecessary entities.

Scotus may not be consistent with himself, but his utterances may be made harmonious with the essential truth of realism, which is this. Universals give us in outline the norm of the Divine procedure in creation. As Agassiz states it in reference to the animal kingdom, "in tracing (the natural system) the human mind is only translating into human language the Divine thoughts expressed in nature in living realities."

3. Let us pass now to the central question of Scotus, the principle of Individuation. Which is the truly real, the universal or the singular, the genus or the individual? The main question of realism lay behind Scotus, as we have seen; but how does he explain the individual? The question of In

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