opponent of St. Thomas. His extraordinary acuteness of mind led him rather to criticize than to develop the work of the thirteenth century. His stock of theological learning was by no means large. He composed no commentary on Holy Scripture, which to his predecessors was always the preparation for and foundation of their speculative efforts, nor did he complete any systematic work. His subtlety, his desultory criticisms, and his abstruse style make him far more difficult reading than the earlier Schoolmen, and consequently he is seldom studied in the original text, even by his own school. His principal work is the great Oxford Commentary on the Sentences, Opus Oxoniense. Besides this, he wrote a later and much shorter commentary, Reportata Parisiensia, the Questiones Quodlibetales (corresponding with St. Thomas’s Questiones Disputatæ), and various smaller opuscula on metaphysics and the theory of knowledge. The handiest edition of the Opus Oxoniense is that of Hugh Cavellus, an Irish Franciscan in Louvain, and afterwards Archbishop of Armagh, who enriched the text with good explanatory scholia.
Scotus cannot be considered as the continuer of the old Franciscan school, but rather as the founder of a new school which rightly bears his name. His excessive realism has a tendency quite opposed to the Platonism of the early members of his Order, and, indeed, agrees with Nominalism on many points. His stiff and dry style is very different from the ease and grace which charm us in St. Bonaventure. However, Scotus is the direct antagonist of St. Thomas, and it is in relation to him that the character of his mind stands out most clearly. St. Thomas is strictly organic; Scotus is less so. St. Thomas, with all his fineness of distinction, does not tear asunder the different tissues, but keeps them in their natural, living connection; Scotus, by the dissecting process of his distinctions, loosens the organic connections of the tissues, without, however, destroying the bond of union, and thereby the life of the loosened parts, as the Nominalists did. In other words, to St.
