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Untitled Article
torpor of mind , fatal to human progress $ * ° for , while many minds think , some will diverge into eccentricities which will benefit the rest of the world , if right , or be ridiculed and exploded , if wrong . In no age was knowledge , religion ; or morals , at a lower ebb , than in the tenth . In no
% ge can the mind be impartially exercised without some diversity from Existing opinions $ but wise men will always look upon those eccentricities as transitory projectiles , that , if not kept up by the force of controversy , always tend to fall out of sight and notice . -
From the time that the sciences were cultivated by the Arabs in Spain , some of their illuminating rays began to penetrate the darkness of Europe . The Spanish Christians , in the ninth century , studied atthe Arab seminaries , and , in the next , French ecclesiastics went thither in search of knowledge ,
as Gerbert , who became Pope in 1000 . In the works of the disciples of his scholar Fulbert , we may trace marks of this intercourse , in some of the illustrations of their reasoning j * and it is probable , that the conversation and attainments of the minds
acquainted with Arab studies , excited in many others unusual curiosity and the spirit of disquisition . The person who seems to be best entitled to the name of the father of the Scholastic Philosophy , was Roscelin of Bretagne . —A prelate , almost his contemporary , says , ** Bretagne is full of clerks , who have acute minds , and
20 Dupin must have felt this , for in accounting for these being no heresy , after remarking- that the sober people consented themselves with implicit faith , he addsa and the profligate abandoned themselves to gross sensualities , satisfying their brutal appetites , rather than to the vices of the mind , to which only ingenious persons 7
are liable . ' Eccl . Hist . Cent . 10 . c . 6 . 21 As Adalman , in his treatise against Berengarius , a model of benign and truly Christian controversy . Bib . Mag . vol . iii . p . 167—171 . It begins very kindly : — u I have called you my colleetaneum , on
account of that dulcissimuin eontubemium , which I had with you when a youth in the Academy at Chartreux , under our venerable Socrates ( Fulbert ) . I conjure you by those private evening conversations which he often had with us in the garden near the chapel , wben he besought us with tears to keep on iu the rig-lit way , " &c .
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apply them to the art *; hat as tr other concerns , it is fertile only If blockheads / * One of these clerks wa Roscelin , who , the same author savjf " first in our times established tie sententiam vocum . " 22 He was th earliest preceptor of Abelard , also a Breton : Abelard was bom abou *
eight miles from Nantz . His father though a knight , had imbibed so great a love for letters , that he determined to have his son well instructed in them before he learned the use of arms , although his eldest child . Abelard
became so attached to studv . thn * I , * became so attached to study , that he says of himself , he left the pomp of military glory with the prerogatives of primogeniture to his younger brother ; and , preferring the dialectical art , lie resolved to distinguish himself in it-
He rambled over various provinces , disputing wherever he heard that the study of this art flourished . He came at last to Paris , about 1100 , where this new topic then chiefly prevailed . William de Champeaux was the famous teacher there . Abelard became his
pupil ; and interested his master , though lie often ventured to argue with him , and sometimes to confute him . Abelard soon became ambitious of being a preceptor himself . This intention roused the jealousy and
attacks of De Champeaux , But some great patrons favouring the young aspirant , he obtained leave to open a school , which he soon transferred to Paris j his fame and scholars multiplying as those of his master decreased .
Illness , brought on by excess of study , compelled him to re-visit his native air . His master in the
mean-22 Otto Frisingins de Gest . Fred . c . 47 p . 433 . 23 These and the following- particulars are taken from Abelaid ' s account ofhiw se » : printed at the head of his works . It isa » interesting piece of biography ; aI 1 ( * u Rousseau had read it , might have convinced him that his idea of writing u '
" Confessions was not so original as he thought . 94 It was to him that Hildcbert , bishop of Tours , addressed his first letter , con
giatulating him on his conversion ^ " ^ secular science of the age to true P *" ** phy , or religion . Ep . 1 . So thai twnpeaux started like Abelard , a disptt *» Vf layman at first . He was nained the uerable Doctor .
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136 History of the Scholastic Philosophy .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), March 2, 1815, page 136, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1758/page/8/
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