American literature -- History and criticism; English literature -- History and criticism
Again, we may find a race, like the Greeks, in whom the imperturbable
stillness of the Orient and the restless activity of the Occident meet
together in intimate union and produce that peculiar repose in action,
that unity in variety, which we call harmony or beauty and which is the
special field of art. But if this harmonious union was a source of the
artistic sense among the Greeks, their logicians, like logicians
everywhere, were not content until the divergent tendencies were drawn
out to the extreme; and nowhere is the conflict between the two
principles more vividly displayed than in that battle between the
followers of Xenophanes, who sought to adapt the world of change to
their haunting desire for peace by denying motion altogether, and the
disciples of Heraclitus, who saw only motion and mutation in all things
and nowhere rest. "All things flow and nothing abides," said the
Ephesian, and looked upon man in the midst of the universe as upon one
who stands in the current of a ceaselessly gliding river. The brood of
Sophists, carrying this law into human consciousness, disclaimed the
possibility of truth altogether; and it is no wonder that Plato, while
avoiding the other extreme of motionless pantheism, regarded the
sophistic acceptance of this law of universal flux as the last
irreconcilable enemy of philosophy and morality alike. "The war over
this point is indeed no trivial matter and many are concerned therein,"
said he, not without bitterness.
It is, when rightly considered, this same question that lends dramatic
unity and human value to the long debate of the mediæval schoolmen.
Their dispute may be regarded from more than one point of view,--as a
struggle of the reason against the bondage of authority, as an attempt
to lay bare the foundation of philosophy, as a contest between science
and mysticism; but above all it seems to me a long conflict in words
between these two warring members within us. The desire of infinite
peace was the impulse, I think, which drove on the realists to that
"abyss of pantheism," from the brink of which the vision of most men
recoils as from the horror of shoreless vacuity. In this way Erigena,
the greatest of realists, spoke of God as that which neither acts nor is
acted upon, neither loves nor is loved; and then, as if frightened by
these blank words, avowed that God though he does not love is in a way
Love itself, defining love as the _finis quietaque statio_ of the
natural motion of all things that move. On the other hand it was the
impulse toward unresting activity which led the nominalists to deny
reality to the stationary ideas of genera and species, and to fix the
mind upon the shifting combinations of individual objects. In this
direction lay the labour of accurate observation and experimental
classification, and it is with prefect justice that Hauréau, the
historian of scholastic philosophy, closes his chapter on William of
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