DOGMATISM OF THE STATIONARY PERIOD. 235 



untied ; the same clouds were formed and dissipated. The poet's cen 

 sure of "the Sons of Aristotle," is just as happily expressed : 



They stand 



Locked up together hand in hand 



Every one leads as he is led, 



The same bare path they tread, 

 And dance like Fairies a fantastic round, 

 But neither change their motion nor their ground. 



It will therefore be unnecessary to go into any detail respecting the 

 history of the School Philosophy of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fif- 

 teenth centuries. "We may suppose it to have been, during the inter- 

 mediate time, such as it was at first and at last. An occasion to 

 consider its later days will be brought before us by the course of our 

 subject. But, even during the most entire ascendency of the scho- 

 lastic doctrines, the elements of change were at work. While the 

 doctors and the philosophers received all the ostensible homage of 

 men, a doctrine and a philosophy of another kind were gradually form- 

 ing : the practical instincts of man, their impatience of tyranny, the 

 progress of the useful arts, the promises of alchemy, were all disposing 

 men to reject the authority and deny the pretensions of the received 

 philosophical creed. Two antagonist forms of opinion were in exist- 

 ence, which for some time went on detached, and almost independent of 

 each other ; but, finally, these came into conflict, at the time of Galileo ; 

 and the war speedily extended to every part of civilized Europe. 



3. Scholastic Physics. It is difficult to give briefly any appropriate 

 examples of the nature of the Aristotelian physics which are to be 

 found in the works of this time. As the gravity of bodies was one of 

 the first subjects of dispute when the struggle of the rival methods 

 began, we may notice the mode in which it was treated. 20 " Zabarella 

 maintains that the proximate cause of the motion of elements is 

 the form, in the Aristotelian sense of the term : but to this sen- 

 tence we," says Keckerman, "cannot agree; for in. all other things 

 the form is the proximate cause, not of the act, but of the power or 

 faculty from which the act flows. Thus in man, the rational soul is 

 not the cause of the act of laughing, but of the risible faculty or power." 

 Keckerman's system was at one time a work of considerable authority : 

 it was published in 1614. By comparing and systematizing what he 

 finds in Aristotle, he is led to state his results in the form of definitions 



20 Keckerman, p. 1428. 



