Note 54 — Chapter IX · The Schoolmen of the Middle Ages.

If there were any doubt on this subject, we might refer to the writers who afterwards questioned the supremacy of Aristotle, and who with one voice assert that an infallible authority had been claimed for him. Thus Laurentius Valla: "Quo minus ferendi sunt recentes Peripatetici, qui nullius sectæ hominibus interdicunt libertate ab Aristotele dissentiendi, quasi sophos hic, non philosophus." Pref. in Dial. (Tenneman, ix. 29.) So Ludovicus Vives: "Sunt ex philosophis et ex theologis qui non solum quo Aristoteles pervenit extremum esse aiunt naturæ, sed quâ pervenit eam rectissimam esse omnium et certissimam in natura viam." (Tenneman, ix. 43.) We might urge too, the evasions practised by philosophical Reformers, through fear of the dogmatism to which they had to submit; for example, the protestation of Telesius at the end of the Proem to his work, De Rerum Natura: "Nec tamen, si quid eorum quæ nobis posita sunt, sacris literis, Catholicæve ecclesiæ decretis non cohæreat, tenendum id, quin penitus rejiciendum asseveramus contendimusque. Neque enim humana modo ratio quævis, sed ipse etiam sensus illis posthabendus, et si illis non congruat, abnegandus omnino et ipse etiam est sensus."