through the waters of Lethe. From the sixth to the thirteenth century all knowledge of the Greek writers was lost. But long before the close of this period intellectual life had begun to stir again among the friars and ecclesiastics of the Continent; and the chief nourishment for that life consisted of a fragment from antiquity, being none other than Latin translations[1] of the so-called ‘Categories’ and ‘Interpretation’ of Aristotle (see above, pp. 50-57), and of the ‘Introduction’ of Porphyry to the first-named of the two treatises. In earlier and better-informed ages Aristotle had been repudiated by some of the Fathers of the Church as being, at all events in comparison with Plato, “atheistical.” But no harm to theology could arise from a study of the dry formulæ of logic and metaphysics. Nay, these formulæ, while totally devoid of all dangerous colouring or character—being merely some of the fundamental and ordinary principles of reasoning —were likely to do good service to the Church, by training her adherents to argue skilfully in her behalf. Thus, the ‘Categories’ and ‘Interpretation’ won their place as text-books for youth; and thus the “Scholastic Philosophy,” which consisted in lectures and disputations chiefly on matters mooted by Aristotle, took its rise out of the Latin translations of these Peripatetic treatises.
Afterwards a richer knowledge of Aristotle came to the schools of the West from what might have been considered an unlikely source—namely, the Arabs in
- ↑ These translations were attributed to Boethius, the “last of the philosophers,” at the end of the fifth and beginning of the sixth century.
