290 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Between Aristotle and the thirteenth century the metaphysical 

 evolution was slow, and the stages few and short. The idea of God 

 as an independent existence received its first elaboration in the con- 

 troversies of the Greek Fathers about the Trinity ; was perhaps first 

 sharply discriminated by Anselm ; and was raised to the highest pitch 

 of sublimation by the Deistic debates of the seventeenth century, with 

 which the " return of the curve " begins. The idea of Nature, isolated 

 alike from God and Man, emerged from the Italian pantheistic schools 

 of the fifteenth century, to be decisively established with the founda- 

 tion of Natural Philosophy. The idea of the Soul, with which we are 

 here concerned, was the first of the three elements latent in the primi- 

 tive homogeneous Cosmos to be completely *' difi*erentiated." Whether 

 there was any intrinsic necessity in its earlier evolution ; whether it 

 was earlier developed because humanity itself and not merely the 

 metaphysicians contributed to it ; ^ or whether it was solely the result 

 of the working of the statical factor in the history of Psychology — the 

 necessities of Theology ; its first clear, though not complete, extrica- 

 tion may plausibly be placed as high up as the thirteenth century. As 

 with the other two constitutive ideas, its emergence was the issue of 

 a prolonged debate. No mediaeval controversy made more noise while 

 it lasted than the fierce war between the Averroists and the School- 

 men de imitate intellectus (concerning the oneness of the intellect). 

 Averroes himself, the Arabian Hobbes, had been dead for half a cen- 

 tury, but his doctrines had excited an extraordinary ferment among 

 the younger and more speculative minds, and they reached the climax 

 of their popularity just when the Scholastic Philosophy attained in 

 Thomas Aquinas the culminating point in its history. East and West, 

 Semitism and Aryanisra, pantheistic absorption and political individ- 

 ualism, in the guise of Aristotle Arabized and Aristotle Christianized, 

 met in final conflict, and the overthrow was, for the time at least, de- 

 cisive. The theory of Averroes about the Soul was an imposing and 

 picturesque development of the cosmical Psychology of Aristotle. 

 The Nous of Aristotle was only temporarily localized in the body, 

 and, after the death of the matter which it informed, returned to the 

 grand region of Form, the Celestial Body. Averroes first severed the 

 Nous from the Cosmos, unified it in humanity which it actualized, and 

 made it eternal there. But it was only the common possession of the 

 race through all time, and not particular to the individual ; there were 

 no souls, but only a single vast Soul, of which each generation was 

 the perishable embodiment, but itself imperishable. Simple-minded., 

 undoubting Thomas, with his eternal " Aristoteles dicit," " Aristoteles 

 respondet," " Aristoteles habet " (Aristotle says, replies, has this), as 

 if the question were to be thus settled, had no difficulty in showing 

 that this was not, what the Averroists felt obliged to maintain, the 

 doctrine of Aristotle.'* But it was an advance upon that doctrine 



1 See Michelet, *' Histoire de France," book iv., ch. vi. 



2 « ])(» Unitate Intellectus," passim. 



