as the being of God, the immortality of the soul, and the creation of the world out of nothing-were held to admit of rational proof, and thus to belong to "natural theology." The arguments for the latter doctrines are subjected to criticism by Scotus. He denied the validity of natural theology-except in so far as he recognised that a certain vision of God may be reached by reason, although it needs to be reinforced by revelation. In restricting the power of intellect, Scotus exalted the significance of will. Faith is a voluntary submission to authority, and its objective ground is the unconditional will of God.

At the hands of Ockham (d. 1349?), who was a pupil of Duns Scotus, the separation between theology and philosophy, faith and reason, was made complete. He admitted that there are probable arguments for the existence of God, but maintained the general thesis that whatever transcends experience belongs to faith. In this way, he broke with Scotism as well as with Thomism on a fundamental question. He denied the real existence of ideas or universals and reverted to the doctrine known as nominalism, of which he became the greatest exponent. Entities are not to be postulated without necessity shown. The universal exists only as a conception in the individual mind: though it signifies, without change of meaning, any one of a number of things. The only reality is the individual, and all knowledge is derived from experience. Ockham is equally remarkable for his political writings, in which he defended the independent power of the temporal sovereign against the claims of the pope. His philosophical doctrines had many followers and opponents: but he is the last of the great scholastics, for his criticisms struck at the root of the scholastic presuppositions.

For more than two centuries after Ockham's death, only one writer of importance can be reckoned among English philosophers. That writer was John Wyclif (d. 1384), in whose case a period of philosophical authorship

-on scholastic lines-preceded his theological and religious activity. After him comes a blank of long duration. The leaders of the Renaissance, both in philosophy and in science, belonged to the continent; and, although their ideas affected English scholarship and English literature, philosophical writings were slow to follow. And the theological controversies of the Reformation led to no new enquiry into the grounds of knowledge and belief. On the universities the teaching of Aristotle retained its hold, at least as regards logic, even after the introduction of the new "humanistic" studies.

In the latter part of the sixteenth century Aristotelianism experienced an academic revival, though its supporters, in all cases, were suspected of papistical leanings. John Case of St John's College, Oxford (B.A. 1568), gave up his fellowship on this ground (it is said), married, and was allowed by the university to give lectures on logic and philosophy in his house. In 1589 he took the M.D. degree and, in the same year, became a canon of Salisbury. He died in 1600. Between 1584 and 1599 he published seven books-text-books of Aristotelianismdealing with logic, ethics, politics, and economics. His Speculum moralium questionum in universam ethicen Aristotelis (1585) was the first book printed at Oxford at the new press presented by the Earl of Leicester, chancellor of the university. John Sanderson, fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge (B.A. 1558), was appointed logic reader in the university in 1562, but, in the same year, was expelled from his fellowship for suspicious doctrine. He became a student at Douay in 1570, was ordained priest in the Roman Catholic Church, and was appointed divinity professor in the English college at Rheims. He died in 1602. The only work of his that is known is Institutionum Dialecticarum libri quatuor, printed at Antwerp in 1589 and at Oxford in 1594.

About the year 1580 a vigorous controversy regarding the merits of the old logic and the new was carried on

between two fellows of Cambridge colleges, Everard Digby and William Temple. They were both younger in academic standing than Sanderson or Case, but they published earlier. Digby took his B.A. degree in the beginning of 1571, and became fellow of St John's early in 1573, shortly before Francis Bacon entered Trinity College as an undergraduate. He began to give public lectures on logic soon after this date. It is possible— we have no evidence on the point-that Bacon attended these lectures. If he did, they may have been the means of arousing his interest in the question of method, and they may also, at the same time, have awakened the spirit of criticism in him and led to that discontent with the philosophy of Aristotle which, according to his own account, he first acquired at Cambridge.

Digby's career was chequered. He was suspected of "corrupt religion," and he made enemies in his own society by his contempt for the authorities. In the end of December 1587, on the nominal ground of an irregularity in his payments for commons, he was deprived of his fellowship by Whitaker, master of the college and a stern puritan. But Digby seems to have had friends in high place. He appealed to Burghley the chancellor and to Archbishop Whitgift. By their order a commission was appointed to enquire into the grounds of his dismissal, and, as a result, Digby was restored 28 May 1588. But, by the end of the same year, he seems to have been got rid of-how, we do not know1. Probably, the real ground of objection to him-his lukewarm protestantism -made it prudent for him to leave the university. Digby was famous in his day for his eloquence as a lecturer, his skill in the disputations of the schools, and his learning. His learning, however, is much less than appears from the mere array of authorities which he cites. These are

1 All the ascertainable facts were for the first time brought together by R. F. Scott in The Eagle (St John's College magazine), October term, 1906, PP. 1-24.

often taken from Reuchlin's De arte cabbalistica (1517), the fictitious personages of this work being sometimes referred to as actual authors. Digby wrote in the true scholastic spirit; for him Aristotle's doctrines were authoritative, and to disagree with them was heresy. At the same time, his own Aristotelianism was coloured by a mystical theology for which he was largely indebted to Reuchlin. Digby's chief work, Theoria analytica, viam ad monarchiam scientiarum demonstrans, was published in 1579. This was followed next year by two books-a criticism of Ramus entitled De duplici methodo, and a reply to Temple's defence of the Ramist method. He was also the author of a small treatise De arte natandi (1587), and of an English Dissuasive from taking away the lyvings and goods of the Church (1589).

William Temple passed from Eton to King's College, Cambridge, in 1573; in due course he became a fellow of the latter society, and was soon engaged in teaching logic. From about 1582 till about 1585 he was master of Lincoln grammar school. He then became secretary to Sir Philip Sidney (to whom his edition of the Dialectica of Ramus had been dedicated). After the latter's death he occupied various secretarial posts, and was in the service of the Earl of Essex when he was obliged by the favourite's fall to leave England. He does not seem to have returned till after the accession of King James. In 1609 he was made provost of Trinity College, Dublin, and, a few months later, master of chancery in Ireland. He was knighted in 1622, and died in January 1627.

Temple's important philosophical writings belong to the early part of his career. He was a pupil of Digby at Cambridge, and wrote in terms of warm appreciation of his master's abilities and fame and of the new life that he had put into philosophical study in England. But he had himself found a more excellent way of reasoning in the logical method of Ramus, then coming to be known in this country. When scarcely twenty years of age, Ramus

had startled the university of Paris by his strenuous opposition to the doctrines of Aristotle; he had allied himself to the Calvinists; and he ended his life as a victim of St Bartholomew's eve. The protestant schools, accordingly, tended to favour his system, in which logic, as the art of discourse, was assimilated to rhetoric and given a practical character. Ascham indeed, in a letter of 1552 and again in his Scholemaster (1570), expressed his disapproval of it. But, as early as 1573, we hear of its being defended in Cambridge1. And in 1574, when Andrew Melville returned from Geneva and was appointed principal of the University of Glasgow, he "set him wholly to teach things not heard in this country of before2," and the Dialectica of Ramus took the place of Aristotle's Organon or the scholastic manual elsewhere current in the universities of Great Britain. By his published works Temple became celebrated on the continent as well as at home as an expositor and defender of Ramist doctrine; and, doubtless, it is to his activity that Cambridge acquired a reputation in the early part of the seventeenth century as the leading school of Ramist philosophy3. Temple began authorship in 1580, under the pseudonym of Franciscus Mildapettus Navarrenus, with an Admonitio to Digby in defence of the single method of Ramus. Other controversial writings on the same text, against Digby and Piscator of Strasbourg, followed in 1581 and 1582. In 1584 he published an annotated edition of Ramus's Dialectica, and in the same year he issued, with a preface by himself, a disputation against Aristotle's

1 Mullinger, The University of Cambridge, 11, p. 411.

2 James Melvill's Diary (Edinburgh, Wodrow Society, 1842), p. 49; cf. T. McCrie, Life of Melville, 1, p. 73; Sir A. Grant, Story of the University of Edinburgh, 1, p. 80.

3 See Mullinger, op. cit. 11, p. 412.

"Navarrenus" proclaims the author's allegiance to Ramus, who was educated at the Parisian collège de Navarre; "Franciscus" may indicate nothing more than the French origin of the doctrine; the word "Mildapettus" is obscure.