792 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



were in possession of far more, and more trustworthy, information with 

 respect to the nature and order of things in the theological world than 

 they had in regard to the nature and order of things in the sensible 

 world. And, if the two sources of information came into conflict, so 

 much the worse for the sensible world, which, after all, was more or 

 less under the dominion of Satan. Let us suppose that a telescope 

 powerful enough to show us what is going on in the nebula of the 

 sword of Orion, should reveal a world in which stones fell upward, par- 

 allel lines met, and the fourth dimensions of space was quite obvious. 

 Men of science would have only two alternatives before them. Either 

 the terrestrial and the nebular facts must be brought into harmony by 

 such feats of subtile sophistry as the human mind is always capable 

 of performing when driven into a corner, or Science must throw down 

 its arms in despair, and commit suicide either by the admission that 

 the universe is, after all, irrational, inasmuch as that which is truth in 

 one corner of it is absurdity in another, or by a declaration of incom- 

 petency. 



In the middle ages, the labors of those great men who endeavored 

 to reconcile the system of thought which started from the data of pure 

 reason with that which started from the data of Roman theology pro- 

 duced the system of thought which is known as scholastic philosophv; 

 the alternative of surrender and suicide is exemplified by Avicenna 

 and his followers when they declared that that which is true in theol- 

 ogy may be false in philosophy, and vice versa; and by Sanchez in his 

 famous defense of the thesis "Quod nil scitur" (That nothing is 

 known). 



To those who deny the validity of one of the primary assumptions 

 of the disputants — who decline, on the ground of the utter insufficiency 

 of the evidence, to put faith in the reality of that other world, the 

 geography and the inhabitants of which are so confidently described in 

 the so-called * Christianity of Catholicism — the long and bitter contest 

 which engaged the best intellects for so many centuries may seem a 

 terrible illustration of the wasteful way in which the struggle for exist- 

 ence is carried on in the world of thought, no less than in that of mat- 

 ter. But there is a more cheerful mode of looking at the history of 

 scholasticism. It ground and sharpened the dialectic implements of 

 our race as perhaps nothing but discussions, in the result of which men 

 thought their eternal no less than their temporal interests were at stake, 

 could have done. When a logical blunder may insure combustion, 

 not only in the next world but in this, the construction of syllogisms 

 acquires a peculiar interest. Moreover, the schools kept the thinking 

 faculty alive and active, when the disturbed state of civil life, the 

 mephitic atmosphere engendered by the dominant ecclesiasticism, and 



*I say " so-called," not by way of offense, but as a protest against the monstrous 

 assumption that Catholic Christianity is explicitly or implicitly contained in any trust- 

 worthy record of the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth. 



