These _Books of Sentences_ have sometimes been called _Summae_, inasmuch as their scope embraced the entire contents of the Faith. But the term _Summa_ may properly be confined to those larger and still more encyclopaedic compositions in which this scholastic method reached its final development. The chief makers of these, the veritable _Summae theologiae_, were, in order of time, Alexander of Hales, Albertus Magnus, and Thomas Aquinas. The _Books of Sentences_ were books of sentences. The _Summa_ proceeded by the same method, or rather issued from it, as its consummation and perfect logical form; thus the scholastic method arrived at its highest constructive energy. In the _Sentences_ one excerpted opinion was given and another possibly divergent, and at the end an adjustment was presented. This comparative formlessness attains in the _Summa_ a serried syllogistic structure. Thomas, who finally perfects it, presents his connected and successive topics divided into _quaestiones_, which are subdivided into _articuli_, whose titles give the point to be discussed. He states first, and frequently in his own syllogistic terms, the successive negative arguments; and then the counter-proposition, which usually is a citation from Scripture or from Augustine. Then with clear logic he constructs the true positive conclusion in accordance with the authority which he has last adduced. He then refutes each of the adverse arguments in turn. Thus the method of the _Sentences_ is rendered dialectically organic; and with the perfecting of the form of _quaestio_ and _articulus_, and the logical linking of successive topics, the whole composition, from a congeries, becomes a structure, organic likewise, a veritable _Summa_, and a _Summa_ of a science which has unity and consistency. This science is _sacra doctrina, theologia_. Moreover, as compared with the _Sentences_, the contents of the _Summa_ are enormously enlarged. For between the time of the Lombard and that of Thomas, there has come the whole of Aristotle, and what is more, the mastery of the whole of Aristotle, which Thomas incorporates in a complete and organic statement of the Christian scheme of salvation.[430] CHAPTER XXXV CLASSIFICATION OF TOPICS; STAGES OF EVOLUTION I. PHILOSOPHIC CLASSIFICATION OF THE SCIENCES; THE ARRANGEMENT OF VINCENT’S ENCYCLOPAEDIA, OF THE LOMBARD’S _SENTENCES_, OF AQUINAS’S _SUMMA THEOLOGIAE_. II. THE STAGES OF DEVELOPMENT: GRAMMAR, LOGIC, METALOGICS. I