Page:EB1911 - Volume 24.djvu/364

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346
SCHOLAR—SCHOLASTICISM

indecisive battle of Franklin. Two weeks later he took part in Thomas's crowning victory at Nashville. For his services at Franklin he was awarded the rank of brigadier-general (November 1864) and the brevet rank of major-general (March 1865) in the regular army. Being ordered to co-operate with Sherman in North Carolina, Schofield moved his corps by rail and sea to Fort Fisher, North Carolina, in seventeen days, occupied Wilmington on the 22nd of February 1865, fought the action at Kinston 0, Ii the 8-10th of March, and on the 23rd joined Sherman at Goldsboro. After the war he was sent on a special diplomatic mission to France, on account of the presence of French troops in Mexico; and from June 1868 to March 1869 he served as secretary of war under President Andrew Johnson, after the retirement of E. M. Stanton (q. v.). From 1876 to 1881 he was superintendent of the Military Academy at West Point, and from 1888 until his retirement in 1895 he was commanding general of the United States army. He had become major-general in March 1869, and in February 1895 he was made lieutenant-general. He died at St Augustine, Florida, on the 4th of March 1906. General Schofield published Forty-six Years in the Army (New York, 1897).


SCHOLAR, SCHOLARSHIP. The term “ scholar,” primarily meaning a “ learner,” is secondarily applied to one who has thoroughly learnt all that “ the school ” can teach him, one who by early training and constant self-culture has attained a certain maturity in precise and accurate knowledge. Hence the term “ scholarship ” in the sense of the knowledge or method of a scholar. Similarly “ classical scholarship ” may be defined as the sum of the mental attainments of a classical scholar. Scholarship is sometimes identified with classical learning or erudition; it is more often contrasted with it. The contrast is thus drawn by Donaldson in his Classical Scholarship and Classical Learning (1856), and by Mark Pattison, in his Essay on Oxford Studies (1855). “ I maintain,” says Donaldson, &ldqo; that not all learned men are accomplished scholars, though any accomplished scholar may, if he chooses to devote the time to the necessary studies, become a learned man ” (p. 149). “ It is not a knowledge,” writes Mark Pattison, “ but a discipline, that is required; not science, but the scientific habit; not erudition, but scholarship ” (Essays, i. 425).

The expression “ a scholarship ” is also used in England for a money payment made by a school, college or university, as a prize (either for one year or a series of years) to the successful competitors at an examination at which one or more such scholarships are to be awarded; and the successful candidate is called a “ scholar,” as the holder of a “ scholarship.” In this sense the word is almost synonymous with “ an exhibition,” but the latter is usually considered inferior in merit and dignity, if not in amount.

On the general history of classical scholarship, see Classics: Greek and Latin.


SCHOLASTICISM, the name usually employed to denote the most typical products of medieval thought. After the centuries of intellectual darkness which followed upon the closing of the philosophical schools in Athens (529), and the death of Boetius, the last of the ancient philosophers, the first symptoms of renewed intellectual activity appear contemporaneously with the consolidation of the empire of the West in the hands of Charlemagne. He endeavoured to attract to his court the best scholars of Britain and Ireland, and by imperial decree (787) commanded the establishment of schools in connexion with every abbey in his realms. Peter of Pisa and Alcuin of York were his advisers, and under their care the opposition long supposed to exist between godliness and secular learning speedily disappeared. Besides the celebrated school of the Palace, where Alcuin had among his hearers the members of the imperial family and the dignitaries of the empire as well as talented youths of humbler origin, we hear of the episcopal schools of Lyons, Orleans and St Denis, the cloister schools of St Martin of Tours, of Fulda, Corbie, Fontenelle and many others, besides the older monasteries of St Gall and Reichenau. These schools became the centres of medieval learning and speculation, and from them the name Scholasticism is derived (cf. Sandys, Hist. of Class. Schol., i. 471, 1906). They were designed to communicate instruction in the seven liberal arts which constituted the educational curriculum of the middle ages (see Trivium). The name doctor scholasticus was applied originally to any teacher in such an ecclesiastical gymnasium, but gradually the study of dialectic or logic overshadowed the more elementary disciplines, and the general acceptation of " doctor " came to be one who occupied himself with the teaching of logic. The philosophy of the later Scholastics is more extended in its scope; but to the end of the medieval period philosophy centres in the discussion of the same logical problems which began to agitate the teachers of the 9th and 1 oth centuries.

Scholasticism in the widest sense thus extends from the 9th to the end of the 14th or the beginning of the 15th century - from Erigena to Occam and his followers. The belated ScholasticsChronological limits. who lingered beyond the last mentioned date served only as marks for the obloquy heaped upon the schools by the men of the new time. Erigena is really of the spiritual kindred of the Neoplatonists and Christian mystics rather than of the typical Scholastic doctors, and, in fact, the activity of Scholasticism is mainly confined within the limits of the 11th and the 14th centuries. It is divisible into two well-marked periods - the first extending to the end of the 12th century and embracing as its chief names Roscellinus, Anselm, William of Champeaux and Abelard, while the second extended from the beginning of the 13th century to the Renaissance and the general distraction of men's thoughts from the problems and methods of Scholasticism. In this second period the names of Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus represent (in the 13th century and the first years of the 14th century) the culmination of Scholastic thought and its consolidation into system.

Prantl says that there is no such thing as philosophy in the middle ages; there are only logic and theology. The remark overlooks two factsLogic and theology. - firstly that the main objects of theology and philosophy are identical, though the td°f ogyod method of treatment is different, and secondly that logical discussion commonly leads up to metaphysical problems, and that this was pre-eminently the case with the logic of the Schoolmen. But the saying draws attention to the two great influences which shaped medieval thought - the tradition of ancient logic and the system of Christian theology. Scholasticism opens with a discussion of certain points in the Aristotelian logic; it speedily begins to apply its logical distinctions to the doctrines of the church; and when it attains its full stature in St Thomas it has, with the exception of certain mysteries, rationalized or Aristotelianized the whole churchly system. Or we might say with equal truth that the philosophy of St Thomas is Aristotle Christianized. The Schoolmen contemplate the universe of nature and man not with their own eyes but in the glass of Aristotelian formulae. Their chief works are in the shape of commentaries upon the writings of "the philosopher."[1] Their problems and solutions alike spring from the master's dicta - from the need of reconciling these with one another and with the conclusions of Christian theology.

The fact that the channels of thought during the middle ages were determined in this way is usually expressed by saying that reason in the middle age is subject to authorityReason and authority.. It has not the free play which characterizes its activity in Greece and in the philosophy of modern times. Its conclusions are predetermined, and the initiative of the individual thinker is almost confined, therefore, to formal details in the treatment of his thesis. To the church, reason is the handmaid of faith (ancilla fidei). But this principle of the subordination of the reason wears a different aspect according to the century and writer referred to. In Scotus Erigena, at the beginning of the Scholastic era, there is no such subordination contemplated, because philosophy and theology in his work are in implicit unity. " Conficitur inde veram esse philosophiam veram religionem, conversimque veram religionem esse veram

  1. The common designation of Aristotle in the middle ages.