SUBJECTIVE AND OBJECTIVE METHODS 



philosophy.^ Scholasticism was a long and 

 hard-fought dialectic battle, in the course of 

 which this realism, as an avowed system, was at 

 last utterly routed. And the great result of 

 scholasticism was the purification of Latin phi- 

 losophic terminology from its realistic implica- 

 tions. By that long contest, which on a super- 

 ficial view seems so barren of result, the Eng- 

 lish as well as the French, and all languages 

 which derive their philosophic nomenclature 

 from the Latin, have been incalculably bene- 

 fited. There was no likelihood of a Hegel in 

 any language which had passed through the 

 scholastic furnace. But German had never 

 passed through such an ordeal. Its philoso- 

 phic terms had never been reduced to their real 

 value. As Mr. Lewes very happily observes, 

 it did not recognize the old ignis fatuus in its 

 new Irrlicht, Nowhere but in Germany would 

 a Hegel have been possible in the nineteenth 

 century. And that the peculiarities of the 

 German language are to a great extent respon- 



^ ** In the great mediaeval doctrine of transubstantiation, 

 the schoolman would have been the' first to admit that no 

 chemical analysis would detect any change in the consecrated 

 elements. But he asserted that the individuality of the bread 

 (its breadness) was exchanged for the individuality of Christ 

 (his humano-divinity).'* Pearson, Early and Middle Ages of 

 Englandy vol. i. p. 613. — An excellent illustration of the 

 realistic method. It was a noumenal, not a phenomenal, change: 

 the latter would have been ** transaccidentation. * * 

 181 



