Nevertheless, under various forms, the echo of Platonism was propagated from Augustin to Alcuin, far into the middle ages. The philosophy of Aristotle was based upon ample and substantial logic, and from the beginning was a wonderful _organum_, admirably adapted to the uses of scientific truth. His perspicacious, piercing, and comprehensive intellect reduced all the historical and philosophic principles of preceding ages and of his own time, to the exactest system, and for twenty centuries he remained the master-guide. Considered merely as an effort of unassisted reason, the ethics of Aristotle have an extraordinary interest; but as a scientific introduction to divine revelation, and in all important moral questions, the Stagyrite is far from being so valuable a guide as Plato. It was an ominous gift to western Europe, when the works of Aristotle were brought from the East, translated into Arabic, and thence turned again into Latin almost as obscure. The Christian philosophers belonging to the first period of the middle ages, such as Bernard and Abelard of France, Anselm, and Scotus Erigena, the cotemporary of Alfred of England, were incomparably more luminous and forcible than the schoolmen of succeeding times, being much more free from idle logic and empty subtleties. Apparently, it would have been much better if the powerful emperors and potentates who patronized science had brought away with them, from the Latin empire at Constantinople, those philological treasures which there abounded, instead of fostering a universal and irresistible rage for the most metaphysical of authors, and whom it was quite impossible for them to comprehend. But the strange proceeding was overruled for the greatest benefit. The whole foundation of the scholastic philosophy was doubtless thoroughly false, and inflicted great injury, not only on theology, but on the whole range of mediæval thought. But when the evil became most formidable, a mighty service was rendered to mankind, when acute and sagacious men like Thomas Aquinas, endowed with exalted philosophical talents, adopted the old Aristotelian rationalism, and founded thereon a system in which they attempted to reconcile philosophy with faith, and thus avert from their age the dangerous consequences of false dialectics. This, however, was no true reconciliation, and the rationalism of the middle age afterward broke into a violent collision with the divine doctrines to which it had been unnaturally allied. But before this extreme was arrived at, the resuscitation of a nobler rationalism began, and gradually obtained the mastery over leading minds, producing a radical change in the whole spirit of literature and science. Philosophy passed through a very important renovation, and its profoundest votaries began to set themselves wholly free from the authority of Aristotle in his own department, and proceeded to the unfettered investigation of the deepest and most solemn problems.