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JESUIT EDUCATION.
ticular the Jesuit schools contrasted strongly with their rivals of old, as indeed with the ordinary school of the present day."[1]
If we ask to which sources the Ratio Studiorum is to be referred, we must confess that an adequate answer is not easy. There are many little brooks which by their conflux form that mighty river. Ignatius and his companions had been trained in scholastic philosophy. The Constitutions and the Ratio Studiorum adapted this philosophic system, modified, however, and perfected by the teachers and writers of the Order. Hence the central position of Aristotle in philosophy, and St. Thomas Aquinas in theology.[2]
- ↑ Ib., p. 49.
- ↑ This close adherence to Aristotle has been made a subject of reproach against the Jesuit system. And yet Protestant universities followed Aristotle as closely as the Ratio. Professor Schwalbe said in the Conference on questions of Higher Education, held at Berlin in 1900: "We have grown up in the belief in the infallibility of the dogma of Aristotle. When I was a student, Aristotle was still considered the greatest scientist on earth. I have investigated this question most thoroughly, and have found that the universities, even the freest, with the one exception of Wittenberg, fined any one who dared to contradict any of Aristotle's propositions on scientific subjects. In Oxford the penalty was so high that Giordano Bruno was unable to pay it." Verhandlungen über die Fragen des höheren Unterrichts (Halle, 1902), p. 109. – This is a good illustration of the fact that there existed a Protestant "Inquisition" as well as a Catholic, and it should warn certain writers to speak with less religious bitterness on the regrettable Galileo affair. – Professor Paulsen states in his latest work: Die deutschen Universitäten (1902, p. 43), that the dread of heresy, during the seventeenth century, was probably greater in the Lutheran universities than in the Catholic, because in the former the doctrine was less certain, and dangers were apprehended not only from Catholicism
