Scholasticism

“ If common sense were true, why should science have had to brand the secondary qualities, to which our world owes all its living interest, as false, and to invent an invisible world of points and curves and mathematical equations instead? Why should it have needed to transform causes and activities into laws of 'functional variation'? Vainly did scholasticism, common sense's college-trained younger sister, seek to stereotype the forms the human family had always talked with, to make them definite and fix them for eternity. ”

“ Every college should devote at least two years of its course to the study of philosophy. Education without a sound philosophy must always be a mere broken shaft, a truncate cone, an abortion. We ought to organize a crusade for the welfare of philosophy in our colleges. I was right glad, Mr. World, to hear you advocating the study of this crowning branch of education, and insisting, I think, upon sound scholasticism. Scholastic philosophy, that is the philosophy. ”

“ But there is a more cheerful mode of looking at the history of scholasticism. It ground and sharpened the dialectic implements of our race as perhaps nothing but discussions, in the result of which men thought their eternal, no less than their temporal, interests were at stake, could have done. ”

“ As Aim, an education, scholasticism aimed also at furnishing a training in dialectic and intellectual discipline that should make the student both keen and learned in the knowledge of the times. The scholastic course of study, which was given at first in the monastic and episcopal schools and later in the universities, consisted in the content, beliefs of the Church and the limited learning of the times arranged in a systematized form largely on the deductive basis of the Aristotelian logic. ”

“ Taken historically, scholasticism, in the spirit of which persons of towering intellectual powers, such as Thomas of Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Abélard, William of Occam and others, have labored, is the mother of the modern scientific attitude, and a later time will see clearly how and in what scholasticism still furnishes living undercurrents to the science of today. ”

“ All scholasticism is an attempt to take by storm; the authority pretends to explain itself, but only pretends, and its deference is merely illusory. The dice are loaded and the premises are pre-judged. ”

“ With Duns Scotus, scholasticism reasoned itself out of human reach. And with him also, the wholeness of the scholastic purpose finally broke. For he no longer maintained the union of metaphysics and theology. The latter, to be sure, was valid absolutely; but, from a speculative, it has become a practical science. It neither draws its principles from metaphysics, nor subordinates the other sciences—all human knowledge—to its service. Although rational in content, it possesses proofs stronger than dialectic, and stands on revelation.
There had always been men who maintained similar propositions. ”

“ The emancipation of the American university from slavery to this prejudice was the final triumph over scholasticism, which defeated elsewhere had found its last refuge in our American school methods. The schoolman has implicit faith in books and authority. Knowledge for him is the acquisition of information established before. This view is involved in the very fundamental proposition of all scholasticism. Truth is a fixed quantity. To it nothing may be added, from it nothing can be detracted. Truth, in very fact, comes to man ”

“ The distinguishing characteristic of scholasticism is the acceptance by reason of a given matter, the truth of which is independent of rational grounds, and which remains a presupposition even when it cannot be understood. Scholasticism aims, it is true, in its chief representatives, at demonstrating that the content of revelation and the teaching of reason are identical. ”

“ But the creative power of scholasticism was well nigh extinct. Even Duns Scotus is rather an acute critic of the old than an original creator of new ideas. Miserable quarrels between the schools and a spiritless formalism now widely prevailed in the lecture halls, as well as in the treatises of the learned. Moral theology degenerated into fruitless casuistry and abstruse discussion on subtly devised cases where there appeared a collision of duties. ”

“ Scholasticism frequently has been used since the time of the revival of learning as a term of reproach. But all that it means is the method of The Schools, or of the School Men. In its essence, it is nothing but a highly effective systematization of the methods of teaching and learning which are appropriate to transmit an authoritative body of truths. Where literature rather than contemporary nature and society furnishes material of study, methods must be adapted to defining, expounding, and interpreting the received material, rather than to inquiry, discovery, and invention. ”

“ Our views as to what is proper, decent, and praiseworthy, are utter opposites; and if this opposition has not broken out before, it is simply because you had the benevolent opinion that my scholasticism was but a temporary aberration, and that my final object was, after all, the same as yours—namely, a popular and edifying everyday philosophy. ”

“ What the Latin Church preserved was not the religion of Christ, which lived on by its inherent indestructibility, but parts of the Aristotelian and Platonic philosophies, distorted and petrified by scholasticism, a vast quantity of purely Pagan superstitions, and the arcana imperii of Roman Cæsarism. The normal end of Scholasticism is a mummified philosophy of authority, in which there are no problems to solve, but a great many dead pundits to consult. The normal end of a policy which exploits the superstitions of the peasant is a desperate warfare against education. ”

“ And at bottom what is called Scholasticism is the whole-hearted and consistent formulation and application of the methods which are suited to instruction when the material of instruction is taken ready-made, rather than as something which students are to find out for themselves. So far as schools still teach from textbooks and rely upon the principle of authority and acquisition rather than upon that of discovery and inquiry, their methods are Scholastic—minus the logical accuracy and system of Scholasticism at its best. ”

“ All this confusion arises from the ignorance of metaphysics in which modern men of science glory. They declare light to be a force, and no two of them are agreed as to the meaning of the word. They declare that all forces are correlated, and nowhere do we find given by them the meaning of the term relation. Now, the scholastics give no fewer than six different modes of relation, and the modern school has not given us even a definition of one. And yet these are the contemners of metaphysics and scholasticism, the men who aspire to be leaders of thought. ”

“ Scholasticism was a movement having for its object the harmonizing of ancient philosophy, especially that of Aristotle, with the doctrines of Christianity. It covered a period reaching from the ninth to the fifteenth century, and displayed its greatest activity between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. It is called the philosophy of the Middle Ages. The term scholastic is also applied generally to forms of reasoning which abound in subtleties. Scholasticism was a dissent from the teachings of St. Augustine and the ascetics. ”

“ Even in the circle of students of philosophy who are outside the influence of scholasticism, there is no doubt that in recent years an opinion much more favorable to the Schoolmen has gradually arisen. ”

“ It was by this critical tendency, by the new clearness and precision which scholasticism gave to enquiry, that in spite of the trivial questions with which it often concerned itself it trained the human mind through the next two centuries to a temper which fitted it to profit by the great disclosure of knowledge that brought about the Renascence. ”

“ We see scholasticism, unmixed with streams from any source except its own, under going inward changes not less complete and not less significant than those which, in other minds, are brought upon it from elsewhere. ”

“ Scholasticism is often said to have been the very acme of absurdity in teaching, and its real import is entirely missed. Students and professors are supposed to have been limited in their interests to dialectics and metaphysics in the narrowest sense of these terms, and much time was, according to even presumably good authorities, frittered away in idle speculations with regard to things that are absolutely unknowable. ”

“ This was Scholasticism, which was the natural and inevitable consequence of the study of Greek dialectic and philosophy. It is not necessary to sketch the growth of scholasticism, with its barrenness of results in spite of its keen intellectual power, upon ground already fertilised by ecclesiastical pioneers. ”

“ He becomes neither scholar nor saint, but remains an Aristotelian student in the direct line of the scholastic tradition, occupied with the problems of the schoolmen and inheriting their instrument of thought—the Aristotelian logic.
In others we perceive scholasticism and the old intellectual world undergoing change from without, through the intrusion of new interests or the discovery of new realms of knowledge. ”

“ It is the historian who may best venture on into the philosophy of history;—to think the reverse is to remain in the pre-scientific order altogether: hence the construction of systems of abstract and deductive economics, politics or morals, has really been the last surviving effort of scholasticism. ”

“ The speculative intellect of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was so widely absorbed with the matter and methods of the dominant scholasticism, that no one is likely to think of the eminent scholastics as isolated phenomena. ”

“ Most of these men were in revolt against scholasticism and all its works. They speak often very slightingly of "Reasoning," the attempt to find a way to ultimate Realities by logical syllogisms, but they, nevertheless, believed great things of man's rational and moral nature. ”

“ It has already been shown how scholasticism developed as one of the important phases of the renaissance, and how, close upon its track, the universities rose as powerful aids to the revival of learning, and that the cathedral and monastic schools were the traditional forerunners of the great universities. ”

“ At the same time a very large proportion of the scholastic researches and speculations aimed directly at rules of expedient conduct, whether it took the form of a philosophy of life under temporal law and custom, or of a scheme of salvation under the decrees of an autocratic Providence. A naïve apprehension of the dictum that all knowledge is pragmatic would find more satisfactory corroboration in the intellectual output of scholasticism than in any system of knowledge of an older or a later date. ”

“ There were thus two broad stages in the educational revival commonly known as scholasticism. In the first the controversies were essentially metaphysical, and centred round the question of the nature of universals; the orthodox theological party generally supporting realism, or the doctrine that the universal is the true reality, of which particulars and individuals are only appearances ”

“ Before this event the intellect was bound down by a scholasticism which regarded knowledge as a rounded whole, the parts of which were written in books and carried in the minds of learned men. The student was taught from the beginning of his work to look upon authority as the foundation of his beliefs. ”

“ The penetration of the generations from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries worked within the limits of the ideas provided by scholasticism. These five centuries represent a period of the broadening of interests rather than a period of intellectual growth. ”

“ The effect of such a strong suggestion of boundless and unknown possibilities, intensified by the element of hazard and daring, became at once an important factor in development, stimulating ambition, creating moral fiber and inspiring a passion for freedom. With the opening of the sixteenth century the narrow and vague ideas characteristic of scholasticism began to give place to clear and strong thinking. As the church had been the center and source of medieval authority, the struggle for freedom naturally centered around this institution. ”

“ The effort of Scholasticism was to mediate between the dogma of religion and the reflecting self-consciousness; to reconcile faith and knowledge. When the dogma passed over into the schools from the Church which had given it utterance, and theology became a science of the universities, the scientific interest asserted its rights, and undertook to bring the dogma which had hitherto stood over against the self-consciousness as an external power, into a closer relation to the thinking subject. ”

“ Academic teaching ought to be not merely a continuation, but in one sense a correction of scholastic teaching. While at school instruction must be chiefly dogmatic, at the University is it to be Sokratic? for I find no better name for that method which is to set a man free from the burden of purely traditional knowledge; to make him feel that the words which he uses are often empty, that the concepts he employs are, for the most part, mere bundles picked up at random ”

“ If you are trying to learn how not to learn, and the aim of your teaching is to defeat itself, what can you expect but confusion? Such a curriculum does not make sense. This attempt at "learning" has so weakened your mind that you cannot love, for the curriculum you have chosen is against love, and amounts to a course in how to attack yourself. A supplementary goal in this curriculum is learning how not to overcome the split that makes its primary aim believable. And you will not overcome the split in this curriculum, for all your learning will be on its behalf. ”