THE BELFAST ADDRESS. 147 



between the Church and civil governments, so power- 

 fully depicted by Draper, must have done much to 

 stifle investigation. 



Whewell makes many wise and brave remarks re- 

 garding the spirit of the Middle Ages. It was a menial 

 spirit. The seekers after natural knowledge had for- 

 saken the fountain of living waters, the direct appeal 

 to nature by observation and experiment, and given 

 themselves up to the remanipulation of the notions of 

 their predecessors. It was a time when thought had 

 become abject, and when the acceptance of mere au- 

 thority led, as it always does in science, to intellectual 

 death. Natural events, instead of being traced to 

 physical, were referred to moral, causes; while an ex- 

 ercise of the phantasy, almost as degrading as the 

 spiritualism of the present day, took the place of scien- 

 tific speculation. Then came the mysticism of the 

 Middle Ages, Magic, Alchemy, the Neoplatonic philo- 

 sophy, with its visionary though sublime abstractions, 

 which caused men to look with shame upon their own 

 bodies, as hindrances to the absorption of the creature 

 in the blessedness of the Creator. Finally came the 

 scholastic philosophy, a fusion, according to Lange, of 

 the least mature notions of Aristotle with the Christian- 

 ity of the West. Intellectual immobility was the re- 

 sult. As a traveller without a compass in a fog may 

 wander long, imagining he is making way, and find 

 himself after hours of toil at his starting-point, so the 

 schoolmen, having 'tied end untied the same knots, 

 and formed and dissipated the same clouds,'* found 

 themselves at the end of centuries in their old position. 



With regard to the influence wielded by Aristotle 

 in the Middle Ages, and which, to a less extent, he still 

 wields, I would ask permission to make one remark. 

 * Whewell. 



