author determines nothing:" "Conclusio est negativa, si placet, nihil enim determinat auctor." (p. 262). What makes Duns's hesitation on this occasion the more remarkable is, that it is, as far as we have observed, the only instance in which he has the modesty to confess himself in doubt throughout the volume. The learned Luke Wadding, a Spanish Franciscan, but an Irishman by birth, who writes a life of Duns Scotus, tells us, with all imaginable gravity, that, as Duns was proceeding along one of the streets of Paris, on his way to this famous disputation, he came up to a certain image of the Virgin, and kneeling down before it, begged for aid and support from his celestial patroness, in the combat he was about to wage in her cause, upon which the image actually answered him by nodding its head. A fact, adds the

historian, which it is impossible to doubt, since any one who will take the trouble of going to Paris, may behold the image with its head still inclined, in perpetual commemoration and testimony of the miracle ! One wonders to read such a passage as this, in a work written about the middle of the seventeenth century; but the same tale is repeated, with equal gravity, even by subsequent writers.2

Wadding, by-the-by, labours hard to prove Scotus to have been an Irishman, a theory which his common designation by no means refutes, since the name of Scotland was at one time given to Ireland, as well as to the northern part of Britain. He acknowledges, however, that the matter is by no means perfectly clear, quaintly remarking, that "the subtlety of Duns may be said to have commenced even before his birth, since no one has yet been able to track him to his first appearance in our world." An old English translator of one of his smaller works,3 who contends strenuously that he was born south of the Tweed, advances a theory of his own in explanation of the epithet Scotus, or Scot, which he maintains is merely a corruption of the word Cot, the name being originally and properly Duns-cot, after some village so called in Northumberland. This writer dedicates his work to a Mr Dunce, a north-county squire, whom he affirms to be of the same family that produced the subtle doctor. We do not know whether any remnant of the race is still to be found in those parts. While upon this subject, too, we may mention that Duns Scotus is supposed by many to have the honour of being the true parent of the common English dunce, the synonyme of dolt or blockhead, the term having been applied to his followers, the Scotists, as an epithet of opprobrium, by their opponents, the Thomists, or disciples of St Thomas Aquinas. Some time after this disputation, Duns took a final leave of Oxford, and settled at Paris, continuing his duties as a professor in the university there, and teaching with undiminished applause. When he had resided, however, in that city only about a year, as he was one day walking, attended by several of his pupils, in a field in the neighbourhood, a letter was put into his hands from the general or principal of the religious order to which he belonged, commanding his presence immediately at Cologne. Without even returning to the city to collect his books, or bid adieu to his friends, he set out on his journey on the instant. It was in his usual mendicant attire, barefooted, and in rags, and with that cord about his waist which, as one of the poets of the

See Life by Colganus, Antwerp, 1655.

Idiota's, or Duns' Contemplations of Divine Love. Paris, 1662.

day expresses it, was his kingly crown, that this extraordinary genius approached the gates of Cologne, where he was met by a solemn procession of the clergy and the magistrates, attended by an immense concourse of people of all degrees, and, being placed in a triumphal chariot, was welcomed to the city, even, says one of his historians, as Plato of old was welcomed to Syracuse by his royal friend Dionysius. At Cologne, as formerly at Oxford and Paris, pupils crowded around him from all parts; but his brilliant career was now rapidly drawing to a close. One day after he had been exerting himself in teaching, he was suddenly struck with apoplexy, which proved fatal in the course of a few hours; and thus perished, in his forty-second, or, as other accounts say, in his thirty-fourth year, the man who had, even at that early period of life, already attained to be universally reputed, both for genius, learning, and piety, the wonder and chief glory of his age. Wadding has published an edition of the works of Duns Scotus, which extends to twelve thick volumes in folio-an amazing mass of literary labour to have been accomplished in so short a life. His admirers extol his genius as of unrivalled acuteness; and there can be no question that, both for talent and erudition, he was one of the most remarkable of that very remarkable class of men to which he belongs. He lived during the very height and fury of the scholastic mania; and his works, accordingly, present a picture of the disputatious temper of the philosophy which he cultivated in all its extravagance. But still there is the inspiration of an active and penetrating intellect in many of his conceptions, which shows what he might have performed, had he been born in a more fortunate age. As it was, not only his contemporaries, but many succeeding generations, looked upon him as one of the greatest men that had ever appeared. Many of his followers, in the church especially, although he was never canonized, regarded his memory with the veneration usually paid to that of a saint; and Baptista Mantuanus, in one of his epigrams, goes so far as to say of him, that, for his services to the faith, both religion and God himself are debtors to Scotus. A complete copy of the twelve volumes of his works, published by Wadding, is an extremely rare collection.

William Occam.

BORN CIRC. A. D. 1280-DIED A. D. 1350.

THE most distinguished of the disciples of Scotus was William Occam, born at Ockham in Surrey about the year 1280.1 While yet a youth he entered into the order of St Francis, and prosecuted his studies with great vigour and success, first at Oxford, and afterwards at Paris. In both these universities, he enjoyed the opportunity of hearing the scholastic prelections of Scotus, many of whose opinions he retained through life, and amongst others, the position which makes the distinction of right from wrong depend on the will of the supreme Being. But he by no means reposed implicit faith in all the doctrines of his illustrious master. On the contrary, he expressly avowed his determination to reject

Bruckeri Hist. Phil. iii. 846.

66

was

human authority, even that of his master, whenever any doctrine appeared to him repugnant to reason: "I do not support this opinion,” says he, "because he lays it down, but because I think it true, and therefore, if he has elsewhere maintained the opposite, I care not." This language, it has been justly observed, "now so trivial that no lave can disclaim it, and every schoolboy would think it too commonplace to be repeated, was, in the fourteenth century, far more important than the most brilliant discoveries, and contained the germ of all reformation in philosophy and religion. Luther and Bacon were actuated by no other principle in the deliverance of the human understanding.' The principal question upon which Occam opposed his master Scotus was that concerning universals as they were called. He held that the words which are called universal, are to be considered as signs which equally indicate any one out of many particular objects. "This opinion," says one of the most accomplished metaphysicians of the present age in his review of Stewart's Introduction to the Encyclopædia, revived by Hobbes, Berkeley, Hume, Hartley, and Condillac; abused with great ingenuity by Horne Tooke; and followed by Mr Stewart, who has on this occasion made common cause with philosophers in whose ranks he is not usually found. Few metaphysical speculations have been represented as more important by its supporters and opponents. Perhaps, however, when the terms are explained, and when the darkness is dissipated with which controversy never fails to cloud a long contested question, it may appear that this subject has not yet been examined on true principles. But whatever may be the future fate of the controversy, it cannot be denied, that the reasonings in defence of Nominalism are stated with singular ingenuity, and even perspicuity, in the passages of Occam which now lie before us. Among many other observations, perfectly unlike his age, we find him limiting the philosophy of the human mind to what can be known by experience of its operations, and utterly excluding all questions relating to the nature of the thinking principle. 'We are conscious that we understand and will; but whether these acts be performed by an immaterial and incorruptible principle, is a matter of which we are not conscious, and which is no farther the subject of demonstration than it can be known by experience. All attempts to prove it must be founded on the assumption of something doubtful.' But the most remarkable of all the reasonings of this original thinker, are those which he employs against the then received doctrine of sensible and intelligible species' (or appearances) of things which are the immediate objects of the mind when we perceive or think. These images or likenesses of objects alone, were supposed to be contemplated by the senses and the understanding, and to be necessary to perception and mental apprehension. Biel, a follower of Occam, in expounding the doctrine of his master, tells us, that 'a species was the similitude or image of a thing known, naturally remaining in the mind after it ceases to be the object of actual knowledge; or otherwise, that likeness of a thing, which is a previous condition of knowledge, which excites knowledge in the understanding, and which may remain in the mind in the absence of the thing repre sented.'2 The supposed necessity of such species, moving from the

Gabriel Biel, ii. Sent. in Tenn.

object to the organ of sense, is, according to Occam, founded on the assumed principle, that what moves must be in contact with what is moved. But this principle he asserts to be false; and he thinks it sufficiently disproved by the fact, that the loadstone attracts iron to it without touching it. He thought nothing necessary to sensation but the power of sensation, and the thing which is its object. All intermediate beings he regarded as arbitrary figments. We cannot pursue these quotations farther. It is easy to conceive his application of a similar mode of reasoning to the intelligible species,' which, indeed, he who denied abstract ideas, had already virtually rejected. It is plain, indeed, that Occam denied both parts of this opinion; not only that which is called Aristotelian, concerning the species supposed to move from outward objects to the organs of sense; but also that which, under the name of the Ideal theory, has been imputed by Dr Reid and Mr Stewart to Descartes, and all succeeding philosophers, who are consi dered as teaching the actual resemblance of our thoughts to external things, and thereby laying their philosophy open to the inferences afterwards made from it by Berkeley about the origin of our perceptions, and by Hume against the possibility of knowledge. The philosophical reader will be struck with the connexion between this rejection of 'images or likenesses of things' as necessary to perception; and the principle, that we know nothing of mind but its actions; and cannot fail, in a system of reasoning of which these are specimens, illustrated by an observation of the less observed appearances of outward nature, and animated by a disregard of authority in the search for truth, to perceive tendencies towards an independent philosophy, to be one day built by reason upon a wide foundation of experience.'

Occam took a conspicuous part in those violent disputes which agitated the church during the pontificate of John XXII. from 1316 to 1334. He opposed the ambitious pretensions of the pope, and defended generally the rights of the civil magistrate against the usurped prerogatives of the church, with great spirit and success. In 1322, he was chosen provincial of the Franciscans in England, and afterwards definitor of the whole order of St Francis, in which latter capacity he was present at the general chapter held at Perusium in Tuscany, where he boldly defended the principles of the 'spiritual brethren,' as they were called, which the pope had condemned as heretical by two solemn decrees.3 He also impugned with much vehemence a favourite opinion of John XXII. that the souls of good men are not admitted to the beatific vision and full happiness of heaven until after the resurrection. For such contumacious conduct, the holy father cited him to Rome, but instead of obeying the summons, Occam took shelter at the court of Lewis of Bavaria, who had himself been deposed and excommunicated by the pope, and who received his fellow in misfortune in a very gracious manner. In this retirement Occam composed several of his works, particularly his compendium of the heresies of Pope John, of which he enumerated no fewer than seventy-seven. He also published several treatises in defence of his patron, and against that maxim of the papal court, first promulgated by Boniface VIII. in 1301, that "all emperors, kings, and princes, are subject to the supreme authority of the pope,

and that in temporals as well as spirituals." His works against the papal authority are represented by Selden as "the best that had been written in former ages on the ecclesiastical power."

During the life of the emperor, Occam defied the rage of three su cessive pontiffs; but on the death of Lewis in 1347, he no longer found himself in a capacity to brave the papal thunders, and was constrained to make his peace with the church by many humiliating concessions By the interest of the Franciscans, he obtained absolution for all past offences from Clement VI.; but he did not long survive his abjuration of those opinions which it had been the great object of his life to establish and promulgate. He died at Capua in Italy, on the 20th of September 1350. His writings are voluminous but scarce. An account of them is given in Tenneman's History of Philosophy,' vol. viii. part 2. Fublished at Leipsic in 1811.

Walter Burleigh,

FLOR. CIRC. A. D. 1320.

AMONG the men of extraordinary ability who flourished in the age when the passion for scholastic learning was at its height, Burleigh holds a conspicuous station. Little is known of his early life, or of the methods he pursued in attaining that high rank to which he rose in the learned world. It appears to have been one of the peculiarities of the period, that only men of a certain turn or habit of mind had a chance of making their way to eminence. The rigid forms of study and reasoning to which intellects of every degree of strength, and every character, were subjected, tended to destroy all those tenderer germs of original thought, which though not essential perhaps to the existence of truth, give so much grace and beauty to the whole intellectual world. Few things are better adapted to prove the power of individual peculiarities over external force than the variety of styles which may be seen in the writings of the most devoted disciples of Aristotle: but it was only men of the hardiest minds that could endure the discipline they had to undergo; the rest shrunk, withered into useless weeds, and even those who lived through the process, appeared possessed rather of a strong rigidity, than a genial, living strength. Burleigh was one of the few who succeeded in retaining somewhat of his natural character, and enjoyed among his cotemporaries the singular honour of being named 'the perspicuous doctor'. He studied first at Oxford, and then at Paris, where he was a fellow-pupil with Occam in the school of Duns Scotus. On his return to England, he became a most determined opponent of the system of his master, and acquired a reputation for acuteness and learning, which recommended him to the notice of Edward the Third, of whom he was for some time the preceptor. There were few branches of literature or science on which his fruitful mind had not been employd. Logic and metaphysics, in which he chiefly excelled, did not prevent his becoming noted for his skill in natural philosophy, on the one hand, and his profound acquaintance with theology on the other. His works consequently embrace a vast variety of subjects; but his princi