As regards Scholasticism, his character predisposed him against it. Scholastic learning is founded on conceptual operations of reason; it aims at clear definitions, logical proofs and a systematic linking together of propositions. Luther’s mind, on the other hand, inclined more to a free treatment of the subject, one which allowed for feeling and imagination, and to such descriptions as offered a field for his eloquence. One of the chief reasons, however, for his lifelong dislike of Scholasticism was his very partial acquaintance with the same. He had, as we shall see, never studied its great representatives in the thirteenth century; he had made acquaintance only with its later exponents, viz. the Nominalists of Occam’s school, who gave the tone to his theological instructions and whose teachings were very prevalent in the schools in that day. He speaks repeatedly of William of Occam as his teacher. Of Luther’s relations to his doctrines we shall have to speak later: some of Occam’s views he opposed, others, which happened to be at variance with those of St. Thomas of Aquin, he approved. He would not have attributed to the latter and to other exponents of the better school of Scholasticism such foolish theses as he did—theses of which they never even dreamt—had he possessed any clear notion of their teaching. There can be no doubt that he also imbibed during his first years as a student at Erfurt, the spirit of antagonism against Scholasticism which Humanism with its craving for novelty displayed, an antagonism based ostensibly on disgust at the unclassic form of the former. Already during the earliest period of his career at Wittenberg, as soon, indeed, as he began to preach and lecture, he commenced his attacks against Scholasticism. He considers that Aristotle, on whom in the Middle Ages both theologians and philosophers had set such store, had been grossly misunderstood by most of the scholastics; all the good there is in Aristotle, he says, he has stolen from others; whatever in him is right, others must understand and make use of better than he himself.[191] He often passes judgment on the theology of the Middle Ages from the point of view of the narrow, one-sided school of Occam, and then, with his lively imagination, he grossly exaggerates the opposition between it and St. Thomas of Aquin and the more classic schoolmen. The whole herd of theologians, he says, has been led astray by Aristotle; nor have they understood him in the least; according to him, Thomas of Aquin—the Doctor whom the Church has so greatly honoured and placed at the head of all theologians—did not expound a single chapter of Aristotle aright; “all the Thomists together” have not understood one chapter. Aristotle has only led them all to lay too much stress upon the importance and merit of human effort and human works to the disadvantage of God’s grace. Here lay Aristotle’s chief crime discovered by Luther, thanks to his own new theology.[192]