3. _Hermolaus Barbarus, &c._--Along with the feeling there prevailed
also, among those who had learnt to relish the genuine beauties of
the Greek and Latin writers, a strong disgust for the barbarisms in
which the scholastic philosophy was clothed. Hermolaus Barbarus[88],
who was born in 1454, at Venice, and had formed his taste by the
study of classical literature, translated, among other learned works,
Themistius's paraphrastic expositions of the Physics of Aristotle;
with the view of trying whether the Aristotelian Natural Philosophy
could not be presented in good Latin, which the scholastic teachers
denied. In his Preface he expresses great indignation against those
philosophers who have written and disputed on philosophical subjects
in barbarous Latin, and in an uncultured style, so that all refined
minds are repelled from these studies by weariness and disgust. They
have, he says, by this barbarism, endeavoured to secure to themselves,
in their own province, a supremacy without rivals or opponents. Hence
they maintain that mathematics, philosophy, jurisprudence, cannot
be expounded in correct Latin;--that between these sciences and the
genuine Latin language there is a great gulf, as between things that
cannot be brought together: and on this ground they blame those who
combine the study of philology and eloquence with that of science.
This opinion, adds Hermolaus, perverts and ruins our studies; and is
highly prejudicial and unworthy in respect to the state. Hermolaus
awoke in others, as for instance, in John Picus of Mirandula, the same
dislike to the reigning school philosophy. As an opponent of the same
kind, we may add Marius Nizolius of Bersallo, a scholar who carried
his admiration of Cicero to an exaggerated extent, and who was led,
by a controversy with the defenders of the scholastic philosophy,
to publish (1553) a work _On the True Principles and True Method of
Philosophizing_. In the title of this work, he professes to give "the
true principles of almost all arts and sciences, refuting and rejecting
almost all the false principles of the Logicians and Metaphysicians."
But although, in the work, he attacks the scholastic philosophy, he
does little or nothing to justify the large pretensions of his title;
and he excited, it is said, little notice. It is therefore curious that
Leibnitz should have thought it worth his while to re-edit this work,
which he did in 1670, adding remarks of his own.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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