When Scholastic Philosophy ceased to be the subject of systematic
study in Protestant U niversities, and was regarded as possessing
an historical rather than a scientific interest, there was one
branch of it that was treated with less dishonour than the rest. In
Ethics and Metaphysics, in Psychology and Natural Theology, the
principles handed down by a tradition unbroken for centuries came
to be looked upon as antique curiosities, or as merely illustrating
the development of human progress and human thought. Thesesciences
were either set aside as things of the past, consisting of fine -
spun subtleties of no practical value, or else they were
reconstructed on an entirely new basis. But with Logic it was
different. Its underlying principles and its received method were
not so closely and obviously interlaced with the discarded system
of theology. It admitted of being more easily brought into apparent
harmony with the doctrines of the Reformation, because it had not
the same direct bearing on Catholic dogma. It was, moreover, far
less formidable to the ordinary student. Those who had no stomach
for the Science of Being, were nevertheless quite able to acquire a
certain moderate acquaintance with the Science and the Laws of
Thought. Men chopped Logic harmlessly, and the Logic they chopped
was the traditional Logic of the Schoolmen, with some slight
modifications. The. Text-book of Dean Aldrich, which has not yet
disappeared from Oxford, is medireval in its phraseology and its
method; medireval, too, in its principles, except where an
occasional inconsistency has crept in unawares from the new
learning. It still talks of "second intentions," . and assumes the
existence of an Infima Species, and has throughout the wholesome
flavour of the moderate realism of sound philosophy. But this state
of things could not last. Sir W. Hamilton, the champion of
conceptualism, put forth in his Lectures on Logic a theory of
intellectual apprehension quite inconsistent with the traditional
doctrine which still lingered in the meagre and obscure phraseology
of Dean Aldrich. Sir W. Hamilton's disciple, Dean Mansel, who
carried on the work of philosophic scepticism which his master had
inaugurated, published an edition of Aldrich, with explanatory
notes and appendices, which pointed out his supposed errors, while
John Stuart Mill, with far more, . ability and a wider grasp than
either of the two just named, substituted for the halting
conceptualism of Hamilton a nominalism which had but a thin veil of
plausible fallacies to hide from mankind the utter scepticism which
lay beneath it. Since then, the Kantian principle of antinomies
which underlies the Logic of Mansel and Hamilton has boldly come to
the front in England under the shadow of the great name of Hegel,
and English logicians have either ranged themselves under the
banner of one or other of these new schools, or else have sought to
cover the glaring inconsistencies of some one of them with patches
borrowed from the others, until the modern student has a
bewildering choice among a series of guides, each of whom follows a
path of' his own, leading in the end to obscurity. and confusion
and selfcontradiction, but who are all united in this, that they
discard and misrepresent the traditional teaching of Aristotle and
of the mediaeval logicians. Their facility in so doing is partly
owing to the fact that Aristotle has no methodical treatise cover
the ground of modern Logic, and St. Thomas gives merely a rapid
sketch of the technical part of it in one of his Opuscula. But from
the pages of the great philosopher of Pagan times and of the
Angelic Doctor of the middle ages, can be gathered by the careful
student all the principles necessary for the modern logician. Every
Catholic teacher of Logic follows of necessity closely in their
steps, and finds in them the solution of every difficulty, and the
treatment-at least the incidental treatment-of almost every
question that Logic can propose.
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