Between Aristotle and the thirteenth century the metaphysical evolution was slow, and the stages few and short. The idea of God as an independent existence received its first elaboration in the controversies of the Greek Fathers about the Trinity; was perhaps first sharply discriminated by Anselm; and was raised to the highest pitch of sublimation by the Deistic debates of the seventeenth century, with which the "return of the curve" begins. The idea of Nature, isolated alike from God and Man, emerged from the Italian pantheistic schools of the fifteenth century, to be decisively established with the foundation of Natural Philosophy. The idea of the Soul, with which we are here concerned, was the first of the three elements latent in the primitive homogeneous Cosmos to be completely "differentiated." Whether there was any intrinsic necessity in its earlier evolution; whether it was earlier developed because humanity itself and not merely the metaphysicians contributed to it;[1] or whether it was solely the result of the working of the statical factor in the history of Psychology—the necessities of Theology; its first clear, though not complete, extrication may plausibly be placed as high up as the thirteenth century. As with the other two constitutive ideas, its emergence was the issue of a prolonged debate. No mediæval controversy made more noise while it lasted than the fierce war between the Averroists and the Schoolmen de unitate intellectus (concerning the oneness of the intellect). Averroës himself, the Arabian Hobbes, had been dead for half a century, but his doctrines had excited an extraordinary ferment among the younger and more speculative minds, and they reached the climax of their popularity just when the Scholastic Philosophy attained in Thomas Aquinas the culminating point in its history. East and West, Semitism and Aryanism, pantheistic absorption and political individualism, in the guise of Aristotle Arabized and Aristotle Christianized, met in final conflict, and the overthrow was, for the time at least, decisive. The theory of Averroës about the Soul was an imposing and picturesque development of the cosmical Psychology of Aristotle. The Nous of Aristotle was only temporarily localized in the body, and, after the death of the matter which it informed, returned to the grand region of Form, the Celestial Body. Averroës first severed the Nous from the Cosmos, unified it in humanity which it actualized, and made it eternal there. But it was only the common possession of the race through all time, and not particular to the individual; there were no souls, but only a single vast Soul, of which each generation was the perishable embodiment, but itself imperishable. Simple-minded, undoubting Thomas, with his eternal "Aristoteles dicit," "Aristoteles respondet," "Aristoteles habet" (Aristotle says, replies, has this), as if the question were to be thus settled, had no difficulty in showing that this was not, what the Averroists felt obliged to maintain, the doctrine of Aristotle."De Unitate Intellectûs," passim. But it was an advance upon that doctrine
- ↑ See Michelet, "Histoire de France," book iv., ch. vi.
