PROFESSOR OF CASUISTRY AND MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE.

VOL. II.

FOURTEENTH CENTURY TO THE FRENCH REVOLUTION,

WITH

A GLIMPSE INTO THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.

NEW EDITION, WITH PREFACE.

London:

MACMILLAN AND CO.

1882.

DEDICATION.

ΤΟ

THE FRIEND

Who has been my fellow-worker in writing these volumes; whose hints and corrections have been of greater worth to me than those of all other critics; whose sympathy has been more to me than that of the largest circle of readers could have been; who has cheered me with the hope that a few may hereafter be the better for the lessons which we have learnt together respecting the lives of men and the ways of God.

January 2, 1862.

PREFACE.

THE first volume of this Manual attempted to trace the moral and metaphysical inquiries of different nations in the ages before the coming of Christ. The second volume continued this sketch down to the age of Justinian, by whose order the Greek schools of philosophy were closed. The third volume was occupied by the period between Boethius, the beginner of the Latin or scholastic philosophy, and Aquiuas and John Scotus, in whom it culminated. This concluding volume opens with William of Occam, in the fourteenth century, and terminates with Kant and Jacobi, at the end of the eighteenth.

From first to last I have kept one object before me. I have not aspired to give an account of systems and schools. That task, it seems to me, has been accomplished already as well as it can be accomplished. At all events, I could add nothing to the labours of previous writers. For I take no interest in the subject; I should have wearied myself and my readers equally if I had endeavoured to pursue it. But to trace the progress of the thoughts that have contributed to form these schools and systems; to connect them with the lives of the men in whom they have originated; to note the influence which they have exerted upon their times, and the influence which their times have exerted upon them; this I take to be an altogether different task. Whatever efforts have been made of this kind I have found most useful to myself; I think a number of young students have felt the usefulness of them, and have wished that they might be multiplied. For no one of them interferes with another. Every man who seriously studies