Strange, no doubt, and singular is it at first sight, to view this old master of philosophical thought and science, who, on the whole, is so perfectly heathen, suddenly received among the medieval theologians, and taking, as it were, his seat, and giving his voice among them. Still, if men of great mental powers and authority sought to make themselves masters of the whole matter--both of the much-disputed works of this writer, this Aristotle, so strangely disguised in his new motley dress of Arabic Latin, and also of the voluminous labors bestowed upon him--we must look upon this procedure as analogous to that of the thoughtful physician, who, in the midst of a wide-spread pestilence and inevitable contagion, prefers to inoculate it himself, in order the more safely to treat and to cure it. In short, as the case really stands, we must look on these illustrious men in two distinct lights. On the one hand we must see in them the Church's venerable teachers, and the sagacious and discriminating theologians of the day; on the other, the scholastic interpreters of Aristotle, who had now become a necessary evil for the Christian middle ages.
This, however, and whatever else was the matter and object of such subtile disputes, was too soon forgotten. In these scholastic contests, after the fashion of the day, the combatants, horse and man, were armed _cap-a-piè_, incased and disguised in logical coats of mail, composed of countless rings of thought and chains of ideas. With this heavy panoply, the great object was to heave their antagonist out of the saddle. Often they recoiled from the shock without advantage on either side--so equally matched were they in their good lances and the weight of their armor--and often they swerved from the charge. Mostly, however, both of the philosophical knights found themselves, at the end of the strife, at their old station in the lists, or driven back, perhaps, to their original entry. This scholastic philosophy, in the form it now took, of a highly elaborate art of logical tourney in the philosophical schools, was, undoubtedly, an abiding evil in the age that immediately followed, and furnished an important element to the party disputes of later, and to the rationalism of these latest times.