at the vulgar
languages are indebted for what precision and analytical subtlety they
possess;" and that, as the Frenchman, going still further, but hardly
exaggerating, lays it down, "logic, ethics, and metaphysics itself owe
to Scholasticism a precision unknown to the ancients themselves."

[Footnote 11: I should feel even more diffidence than I do feel in
approaching this proverbially thorny subject if it were not that many
years ago, before I was called off to other matters, I paid
considerable attention to it. And I am informed by experts that though
the later (chiefly German) Histories of Philosophy, by Ueberweg,
Erdmann, Windelband, &c., may be consulted with advantage, and though
some monographs may be added, there are still no better guides than
Haureau, _De la Philosophie Scolastique_ (revised edition) and Prantl,
_Geschichte der Logik im Abendlande_, who were our masters
five-and-twenty years ago. The last-named book in especial may be
recommended with absolute confidence to any one who experiences the
famous desire for "something craggy to break his mind upon."]

[Sidenote: _Its influence on phrase and method._]

There can be no reasonable or well-informed denial of the fact of
this: and the reason of it is not hard to understand. That constant
usage, the effect of which has been noted in theological verse, had
the same effect in philosophico-theological prose. Latin is before all
things a precise language, and the one qualification which it lacked
in classical times for philosophic use, the presence of a full and
exact terminology, was supplied in the Middle Ages by the fearless
barbarism (as pedants call it) which made it possible and easy first
to fashion such words as _aseitas_ and _quodlibetalis_, and then,
after, as it were, lodging a specification of their meaning, to use
them ever afterwards as current coin. All the peculiarities which
ignorance or sciolism used to ridicule or reproach in the
Scholastics--their wiredrawnness, their lingering over special points
of verbal wrangling, their neglect of plain fact in comparison with
endless and unbridled dialectic--all these things did no harm but much
positive good from the point of view which we are now taking. When a
man defended theses against lynx-eyed opponents or expounded them
before perhaps more lynx-eyed pupils, according to rules familiar to
all, it was necessary for him, if he were to avoid certain and
immediate discomfiture, to be precise i