f this school, conversing
with him, after expressing much contempt for the Apostles and Fathers,
exclaimed: Utinam tu Averroim pati posses, ut videres quanto ille tuis
his nugatoribus major sit! Mem. de Petrarque, t. iii. p. 759.
Tiraboschi, t. v. p. 162.

[847] Brucker, p. 898.

[848] This mystical philosophy appears to have been introduced into
Europe by John Scotus, whom Buhle treats as the founder of the
scholastic philosophy; though, as it made no sensible progress for two
centuries after his time, it seems more natural to give that credit to
Roscelin and Anselm. Scotus, or Erigena, as he is perhaps more
frequently called, took up, through the medium of a spurious work,
ascribed to Dionysius the Areopagite, that remarkable system, which has
from time immemorial prevailed in some schools of the East, wherein all
external phenomena, as well as all subordinate intellects, are
considered as _emanating_ from the Supreme Being, into whose essence
they are hereafter to be absorbed. This system, reproduced under various
modifications, and combined with various theories of philosophy and
religion, is perhaps the most congenial to the spirit of solitary
speculation, and consequently the most extensively diffused of any which
those high themes have engendered. It originated no doubt in sublime
conceptions of divine omnipotence and ubiquity. But clearness of
expression, or indeed of ideas, being not easily connected with
mysticism, the language of philosophers adopting the theory of emanation
is often hardly distinguishable from that of the pantheists. Brucker,
very unjustly, as I imagine from the passages he quotes, accuses John
Erigena of pantheism. Hist. Crit. Philos. p. 620. The charge would,
however, be better grounded against some whose style might deceive an
unaccustomed reader. In fact, the philosophy of emanation leads very
nearly to the doctrine of an universal substance, which, begot the
atheistic system of Spinoza, and which appears to have revived with
similar consequences among the metaphysicians of Germany. How very
closely the language of this oriental philosophy, or even that which
regards the Deity as the soul of the world, may verge upon pantheism,
will be perceived (without the trouble of reading the first book of
Cudworth) from two famous passages of Virgil and Lucan. Georg. I. iv. v.
219; and Pharsalia, I. viii. v. 578.

[849] This subject, as well as some others in this part of the present
chapter, h