Note 56 — ERRATUM. p. 78, note 1, l. 19; for “were in orders, for the most part in holy orders;” read “were generally speaking in holy orders;”

Albert—“nostri temporis stupor et miraculum!”—is an attractive figure, and deserves his renown as the greatest of the medieval sages. His endowments were richer and wider than those of the great Italian logician, his pupil, whose name has had a greater vogue, and whose doctrines are still the accepted discipline of the Church of Rome. Albert restored Aristotle, and in astronomy and chemistry sought for truth in nature. That St Thomas was a man of the highest intellectual power and attainments, an eminence which is claimed for him by many scholars, as by Mr Vernon in his edition of the Paradise, I cannot admit; unless it be to a critical scholar who has mastered the contents of his many folios, if such a scholar there be. For my part, after reading much of what is written of St Thomas, I have but done what was possible to me in other such cases; that is, I have run my eye over the titles of his books and chapters, and formed some rapid judgment here and there of the ways of his thought. Now I venture to assert that the ways of the thought of Aquinas, subtle and symmetrical as they are, lie wholly within the formulas of his age. He left science for logic, the stuff of thought for its instrument; satisfying himself with such tinkling cymbals as “Nihil potest per se operari, nisi quod per se subsistit; ... Impossibile est quod forma separetur a seipsa ... quod subsistens per se desinat esse” ... and so forth. Albert though a less symmetrical is a more original genius. To Aquinas indeed I should hesitate to attribute genius; to Albert it seems to me this title may be granted, if with some hesitation. “Vir famosus et erroneus” was Roger Bacon’s summary of Albert’s career, but Bacon was scarcely an indifferent witness.