Science and Medieval Thought: The Harveian Oration Delivered Before the Royal College of Physicians, October 18, 1900Allbutt, T. Clifford (Thomas Clifford)
Philosophy
Science and Medieval Thought: The Harveian Oration Delivered Before the Royal College of Physicians, October 18, 1900
Allbutt, T. Clifford (Thomas Clifford)
Philosophy, Medieval
[10] Modern French historians do us the honour of annexing our heroes;
in respect of the scholars of the Middle Ages M. Charles Jourdain has
set, or followed, this example. John of Salisbury, that charming child
of renascence, born out of due time, was first claimed as a Frenchman;
then, as this “provenance” becomes untenable, he, and others, are
called “Anglo-French.” The University of Paris in the XIIth century
was no more France than Rome was Italy. In our sedentary arable life
we do not realise the nomad habits of our forefathers. Edward the
First would inhabit six distant castles in less than as many weeks;
indeed Great Britain itself was then no island. The heroes, nay the
armies, of Froissart’s Story fly about the world in their seasons like
migrating birds. All keen scholars of the West went to the University
of Paris, the daughter of kings and popes, and the intellectual centre
not of a strip of kingdom between Anjou and the Empire, but of Europe
itself. And of the scholars of Paris, Englishmen were, we hear, the
most turbulent, but the boldest in argument and the most greedy of
learning; this last character perhaps it is that now-a-days looks
least English. Kuno Fischer admires the procession of great Englishmen
down the highway of medieval thought, from Erigena to Francis Bacon.
John was born at Salisbury, spent thirteen of his early years at the
University of Paris, the best of them in the stormy service of Thomas
Becket, and but the last five as Bishop of Chartres. We do not call
Lanfranc an Englishman, nor even Adrian the Fourth an Italian.
[11] The name Realism has been improperly used—improperly because
previously engaged—to signify the conception of an objective world,
from the play of which our impressions arise, and of which our
impressions are, if not likenesses, at any rate symbols, as opposed to
the name “Idealism” which, with a like violence, has been turned to
signify the conception that the universe of things is but a picture
produced by the evolution of the phenomena of consciousness. The
proper names for these opposite conceptions are of course Noumenalism
and Phenomenalism. Realism proper as a habit of thought, whatever may
have been its provisional uses, is now a mischievous habit;
noumenalism is a harmless amusement.
[12] Roscellinus, the Roger Bacon of the eleventh century, learned,
rebellious, lucid and heroic, withstood the Church for philosophy as
did Bacon in the thirteenth for natural science. It would seem that in
heroism at any rate Abélard was below his master.
[13] Vid. p. 50.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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