owever, a well-known
article in the Edinburgh Review, No. liii. p. 204, gives, from
Tennemann, a more favourable account of Ockham.

Perhaps I may have imagined the scholastics to be more forgotten than
they really are. Within a short time I have met with four living English
writers who have read parts of Thomas Aquinas; Mr. Turner, Mr.
Berington, Mr. Coleridge, and the Edinburgh Reviewer. Still I cannot
bring myself to think that there are four more in this country who can
say the same. Certain portions, however, of his writings are still read
in the course of instruction of some Catholic universities.

[I leave this passage as it was written about 1814. But it must be owned
with regard to the schoolmen, as well as the jurists, that I at that
time underrated, or at least did not anticipate, the attention which
their works have attracted in modern Europe, and that the passage in the
text is more applicable to the philosophy of the eighteenth century than
of the present. For several years past the metaphysicians of Germany and
France have brushed the dust from the scholastic volumes; Tennemann and
Buhle, Degerando, but more than all Cousin and Remusat, in their
excellent labours on Abelard, have restored the mediaeval philosophy to a
place in transcendental metaphysics, which, during the prevalence of the
Cartesian school, and those derived from it, had been refused. 1848.]

[844] Roger Bacon, by far the truest philosopher of the middle ages,
complains of the ignorance of Aristotle's translators. Every translator,
he observes, ought to understand his author's subject, and the two
languages from which and into which he is to render the work. But none
hitherto, except Boethius, have sufficiently known the languages; nor
has one, except Robert Grostete (the famous bishop of Lincoln), had a
competent acquaintance with science. The rest make egregious errors in
both respects. And there is so much misapprehension and obscurity in the
Aristotelian writings as thus translated, that no one understands them.
Opus Majus, p. 45.

[845] Brucker, p. 733, 912. Mr. Turner has fallen into some confusion as
to this point, and supposes the nominalist system to have had a
pantheistical tendency, not clearly apprehending its characteristics, p.
512.

[846] Petrarch gives a curious account of the irreligion that prevailed
among the learned at Venice and Padua, in consequence of their unbounded
admiration for Aristotle and Averroes. One o