180 Contemporary Evolution. 



bringing down the peripatetic philosophy to the present 

 day. Others may exclaim, this is stagnation, or even 

 reaction. But there is of course no real danger of either ; 

 the laws of evolution in general render it absurd to 

 suppose that stagnation, or a really reactionary reversal of 

 development, can ever be possible. All that is possible is 

 that speculation may revert to a temporarily abandoned 

 line of inquiry, experience having demonstrated that all 

 other possible lines end blindly. 



Many persons may be surprised to read the assertion 

 that such a continuous and traditional school of phil- 

 osophy exists at all ; but that it does exist is none the 

 less a truth. The peripatetic philosophy simply fell out 

 of fashion at the period of the Renaissance, when in the 

 scientific and literary intoxication of the period, with its 

 reviving Platonism, pantheism, and paganism, men left 

 traditional lines of speculative thought to fall into bond- 

 age to the philosophical empiric Descartes and the 

 wonderfully over-estimated Bacon. The French phil- 

 osophical heresiarch the logical father both of our 

 modern materialists and idealists never understood he 

 had never even learned the philosophy he ignorantly 

 opposed. That philosophy, ridiculed and overborne, but 

 never refuted, was pushed aside by the force of the 

 popular current, and became, after a time, like the 

 architecture of the colleges it had illustrated, a byeword 

 of reproach and contempt ; till, ignored and forgotten, 



