Note r — Chapter IX · [a]

John Scotus, who, it is almost needless to say, must not be confounded with the still more famous metaphysician Duns Scotus, lived under Charles the Bald, in the middle of the ninth century. It admits of no doubt that John Scotus was, in a literary and philosophical sense, the most remarkable man of the dark ages; no one else had his boldness, his subtlety in threading the labyrinths of metaphysical speculations which, in the west of Europe, had been utterly disregarded. But it is another question whether he can be reckoned an original writer; those who have attended most to his treatise De Divisione Naturæ, the most abstruse of his works, consider it as the development of an oriental philosophy, acquired during his residence in Greece, and nearly coinciding with some of the later Platonism of the Alexandrian school, but with a more unequivocal tendency to pantheism. This manifests itself in some extracts which have latterly been made from the treatise De Divisione Naturæ; but though Scotus had not the reputation of unblemished orthodoxy, the drift of his philosophy was not understood in that barbarous period. He might, indeed, have excited censure by his intrepid preference of reason to authority. "Authority," he says, "springs from reason, not reason from authority—true reason needs not be confirmed by any authority." La véritable importance historique, says Ampère, de Scot Erigène n'est donc pas dans ses opinions; celles-ci n'ont d'autre intérêt que leur date et le lieu où elles apparaissent. Sans doute, il est piquant et bizarre de voir ces opinions orientales et alexandrines surgir au IXe siècle, à Paris, à la cour de Charles le Chauve; mais ce qui n'est pas seulement piquant et bizarre, ce qui intéresse le développement de l'esprit humain, c'est que la question ait été posée, dès lors, si nettement entre l'autorité et la raison, et si énergiquement résolue en faveur de la seconde. En un mot, par ses idées, Scot Erigène est encore un philosophe de l'antiquité Grecque; et par l'indépendance hautement accusée de son point de vue philosophique, il est déjà un dévancier de la philosophie moderne. Hist. Litt. iii. 146.

Silvester II. died in 1003. Whether he first brought the Arabic numeration into Europe, as has been commonly said, seems uncertain; it was at least not much practised for some centuries after his death.