Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/239

VITALISM : A BRIEF HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL REVIEW. 225 after secession was made from the mother Church, until the movement culminated in the misshapen growth of Scholasticism. This phase of philosophic history perhaps found its first opening in the teachings of John Scotus Erigena (fl. 850). His philosophy was a quaint combination of Platonic and Christian doctrines ; and so incomprehensible were his views that it may be assumed that the wrath poured down on him by orthodox Authority arose rather from the spirit of scepticism which he displayed than for the commis- sion of definite heresy. Meanwhile a new culture had begun to influence the development of Western thought ; for the centres of Euro- pean philosophy, eager in their scepticism for anything new, were welcoming the now rapid spread of Arabian philosophy. This school, more properly Semitic than Arabian, did little to further the experimental side of biology, although its disciples won great renown for their Aristotelian philosophy tinged with native mysticism, and for their system of medi- cine and physics which a careful preservation of Aristotle's scientific work had afforded them. At the same time the teachings of the wandering Spaniards and Jews of this school took a definite hold on the current thought of Europe, rapidly hastening the dawn of the revival of independent inquiry, and tending no less to the encouragement of the objective method (Eoger Bacon fl. about 1200) than to the preservation of the subjective method. Sceptics began now to pour in from either side. The Franciscans came to the fore armed with the heretical doctrine of a plurality of souls. Thus, too, reasoned Duns Scot (fl. 1300) against Thomas Aquinas : " Since the body has form after the soul has left it, form and the soul are necessarily distinct " (3). Such wilful resistance to the received doctrine of the Church quickly roused the fury of orthodoxy. (Ecumenical councils were held in rapid suc- cession, denouncing all scepticism as heretical and finally forbidding the study of Arabian and Aristotelian philosophy. Whether because of this thunder from authority or through the more silent voice of the revival of learning, Aristotelian- ism fell to the ground. The year 1548, which saw the birth alike of the last Scholastic, the Spanish Jesuit Francisco Suarez (1548-1617), and of the first independent philosopher, the Italian martyr Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), marks the turning-point. The overthrow of Aristotelianism in theology and metaphysic found its equivalent in the rejection of Galenism by Natural Science. Little by little the implicit faith in Galen's infallibility had become shaken, and the 15