Note i — Chapter IX · [a] (continued 3)

Mr. Turner has with his characteristic spirit of enterprise examined some of the writings of our chief English schoolmen, Duns Scotus and Ockham (Hist of Eng. vol. i.), and even given us some extracts from them. They seem to me very frivolous, so far as I can collect their meaning. Ockham in particular falls very short of what I had expected; and his nominalism is strangely different from that of Berkeley. We can hardly reckon a man in the right, who is so by accident, and through sophistical reasoning. However, a well-known article in the Edinburgh Review, No. liii. p. 204, gives, from Tennemann, a more favourable account of Ockham.

Perhaps I may have imagined the scholastics to be more forgotten than they really are. Within a short time I have met with four living English writers who have read parts of Thomas Aquinas; Mr. Turner, Mr. Berington, Mr. Coleridge, and the Edinburgh Reviewer. Still I cannot bring myself to think that there are four more in this country who can say the same. Certain portions, however, of his writings are still read in the course of instruction of some Catholic universities.

[I leave this passage as it was written about 1814. But it must be owned with regard to the schoolmen, as well as the jurists, that I at that time underrated, or at least did not anticipate, the attention which their works have attracted in modern Europe, and that the passage in the text is more applicable to the philosophy of the eighteenth century than of the present. For several years past the metaphysicians of Germany and France have brushed the dust from the scholastic volumes; Tennemann and Buhle, Degerando, but more than all Cousin and Rémusat, in their excellent labours on Abelard, have restored the mediæval philosophy to a place in transcendental metaphysics, which, during the prevalence of the Cartesian school, and those derived from it, had been refused. 1848.]