The Monist, Vol. 3, 1892-1893 : $b A quarterly magazineVarious
Philosophy
The Monist, Vol. 3, 1892-1893 : $b A quarterly magazine
Various
Philosophy -- Periodicals
Anancastic evolution advances by successive strides with pauses between.
The reason is that in this process a habit of thought having been
overthrown is supplanted by the next strongest. Now this next strongest
is sure to be widely disparate from the first, and as often as not
is its direct contrary. It reminds one of our old rule of making the
second candidate vice-president. This character, therefore, clearly
distinguishes anancasm from tychasm. The character which distinguishes
it from agapasm is its purposelessness. But external and internal
anancasm have to be examined separately. Development under the pressure
of external circumstances, or cataclasmine evolution, is in most cases
unmistakable enough. It has numberless degrees of intensity, from the
brute force, the plain war, which has more than once turned the current
of the world’s thought, down to the hard fact of evidence, or what has
been taken for it, which has been known to convince men by hordes. The
only hesitation that can subsist in the presence of such a history is
a quantitative one. Never are external influences the only ones which
affect the mind, and therefore it must be a matter of judgment for which
it would scarcely be worth while to attempt to set rules, whether a
given movement is to be regarded as principally governed from without
or not. In the rise of medieval thought, I mean scholasticism and
the synchronistic art developments, undoubtedly the crusades and the
discovery of the writings of Aristotle were powerful influences. The
development of scholasticism from Roscellin to Albertus Magnus closely
follows the successive steps in the knowledge of Aristotle. Prantl
thinks that that is the whole story, and few men have thumbed more
books than Carl Prantl. He has done good solid work, notwithstanding
his slap-dash judgments. But we shall never make so much as a good
beginning of comprehending scholasticism until the whole has been
systematically explored and digested by a company of students regularly
organised and held under rule for that purpose. But as for the period we
are now specially considering, that which synchronised the Romanesque
architecture, the literature is easily mastered. It does not quite
justify Prantl’s dicta as to the slavish dependence of these authors
upon their authorities. Moreover, they kept a definite purpose steadily
before their minds, throughout all their studies. I am, therefore, unable
to offer this period of scholasticism as an example of pure external
anancasm, which seems to be the fluorine of the intellectual elements.
Perhaps the recent Japanese reception of western ideas is the purest
instance of it in history. Yet in combination with other elements,
nothing is commoner. If the development of ideas under the influence of
the study of external facts be considered as external anancasm,—it is on
the border between the external and the internal forms,—it is, of course,
the principal thing in modern learning.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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