22 THE SCIENCE OF LOGIC 



Furthermore, exclusive preoccupation with the true, exclusive attention 

 to the relation of things to the intellect alone, may disturb the harmony that 

 ought to regulate the development of our faculties. The Scholastic method in 

 terprets reality by referring the latter to intellect alone. Avowedly, and on 

 principle, the standpoint of its research is above and beyond the domain of 

 emotion and will ; it brings into action the intellect alone. Now, no one may, 

 with impunity, submit himself exclusively to any such purely intellectual 

 regime. 1 It perfects and develops one side only of our being, the side that 

 is fundamental and essential, no doubt, but which, nevertheless, is not the 

 whole man. The mind that is excessively given to such a discipline develops 

 an unduly abstract and speculative turn, and loses very largely all just ap 

 preciation of the great complexity of concrete, actual things. 2 All exclusive 

 preoccupation with a special order of truths entails, of necessity, the incon 

 venience just referred to. All specialists are prone to contract a peculiar sort 

 of &quot; mentality &quot; that tends to make them narrow, and suspicious of truths out 

 side their own chosen circle. 



Finally, there is hardly any need to point out that the excessive use 

 that is, the abuse of the Scholastic method, may make one insensible to form, 

 to elegance of expression. A literary culture alone will counterbalance this 

 danger of an exclusively abstract, logical, and &quot; intellectualist &quot; mental dis 

 cipline. 



MERCIER, Logique, pp. 271, 294-96, 371-84. WELTON, Logic, vol. ii., 

 bk. vi. MELLONE, Introd. Text-Book of Logic, pp. 291, 383 sqq. DE WULF, 

 History of Medieval Philosophy, pp. 137, 254 sqq.; Scholasticism Old and 

 New, pp. 19-31. ZIGLIARA, Logica, (44), (45), (46). 



propter bonitatem intellectus judicantis, et rationis inquirentis ; dummodo non qua- 

 ratur certitude in his, in quibus certitude esse non potest. ST. THOMAS, In II. 

 Metaph., Lect. 5. Cf. supra, 203. 



1 Cf. RICHARD, Revue Thomiste, Nov.-Dec., p. 564. 



a Compare what Newman says in his Grammar of Assent about Inference, and 

 about what he calls the Illative Sense; also Pascal s striking passage (Pensees, 

 section i, p. 318. Brunsch. edit.) on the esprit geometrique and the esprit de finesse : 

 &quot; The reason why certain practically shrewd people (csprits fins) are not great geo 

 metricians is because they are utterly unable to give their minds to the principles of 

 geometry. But the reason why geometricians are not shrewd (fins) is because they do 

 not see what is under their eyes ; accustomed to the clear truths of geometry, and to 

 reasoning from well-grasped, tangible principles, they get lost in small things (chases 

 de finesse) where the principles are not at all tangible. Here the principles are hardly 

 seen at all, but rather felt ; they can only with the greatest difficulty be impressed 

 on those who do not happen to feel them themselves ; and things of this sort are 

 so delicate and so numerous that it requires an exceedingly keen and delicate faculty 

 to feel them, and to judge them rightly according to this feeling, when, as happens 

 oftenest, we cannot demonstrate them in geometrical order, seeing that we have not 

 their principles in that way, and that it would be undertaking infinite labour to try 

 to get at them so. We must, as it were, see the thing at a glance rather than by 

 progressive reasoning, at least in a certain measure. And hence it is rarely we find 

 shrewd geometricians . . . because they wish to treat complex things (chases fins) 

 geometrically, and make themselves ridiculous by commencing with definitions and 

 principles : which is not the way in that sort of reasoning. It is not that the mind 

 does not reason ; it does, but tacitly, naturally, without art, in a way which none 

 may mechanically express, and with which few indeed are adequately endowed.&quot; 



