MS 628-640 (1909) - Meaning

1909 March 23 MEANING 4

boys was almost exclusively in disputations, which were hedged about with rules, called Obligationes, for keeping them to the point at issue. They entered into these exercises with all their might and disputed incessantly from morning till night. When a syllogism struck a disputant for straight in the head, his only possible reply would be "distinguo" , with an explanation that in admitting the premisses, he had in one of them taken the middle term in one sense, and in the other premiss in another sense. Since this situation was continually recurring, they became extremely acute in drawing distinctions, acquired great exactitude of thought and language, without really often penetrating to the real substance of the questions in dispute (when real substance they had), and learned to command great concentration of mind in keeping in view all the points of disputations whose intricacy

1909 March 23 MEANING 5

often became bewildering to an ordinary intelligence; while they were apt to lose all practical good sense.]

To Roger Bacon, that XIIIth century monk that so much resembled a XIXth century scientist, the schoolmen's conception of reasoning appeared but an obstacle to truth as but a dyke against any inroad of truth. He discerned that experience alone teaches anything, -- a principle that to use seems manifest, because former generations have gradually worked out and handed down to us an adequate conception of the out relation to experience and that to him too seemed clear, because the import of the principle was not fully unfolded to his mind. Of all kinds of experience, the very best, he thought, was an interior illumination; for it can teach many things that the external senses could never unaided discover, such as the transformation transsubstantiation of bread. [So Galileo, three centuries later, relied much upon il lume naturale; but

1909 March 24 MEANING 6

the objects this light allowed enabled him to see were very different from transsubstantiation; and it is very important to distinguish any light of nature or of grace from experience. Experience, in the proper sense of the term, is all that one has gone through. It consists in the events of one's life. But a "light" is a faculty enabling its subject to recognize the characters of what future experience may put before him. Neither the one nor the other, nor any combination ot these two alone can teach him anything, if we by understand by "teaching" the communications of the the skill and power to conduct oneself as one might so as to reach attain a desired result; although both are indispensible to such teaching. What else is requite, it is the object of these studies in some measure to make out as well far as may be to ascertain.]

until I had published an original research in each department, not a mere student's thesis executed under a master's guidance, but investigations thoroughly entirely independent [?] in every particular as nothing remarkable, be it understood, yet receiving the general approval of masters in the several departments, and in some cases modifying accepted methods after objections to my conclusions had been made and withdrawn by leading men. I do trust I may not be misunderstood as claiming anything like any eminence in any science; since such a claim would be false. I merely mention my studies in order to show how earnest was their animating purpose, which was to obtain an intimate acquaintance with as great a variety as possible of the methods of investigation those sciences that had unquestionably been pursued with success.

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