account for his more accurate appreciation of their teaching. Unquestionably St. Thomas Aquinas must be regarded as the prince of the Latin scholastics, for it is he who first draws freely upon metaphysics and psychology and co-ordinates them with theology—the psychological analysis given in the Secunda secundae of the Summa is one of the best products of the Latin scholastics—and also he was the first to appreciate correctly the difficulties of translation and insist on an accurate rendering as essential to an understanding of Aristotle. For the most part, as we have noted, the mediæval scholars undervalued the translator's task and were content with a hack interpreter, and saw no reason for applying themselves to the study of the original test, a view in which the Arabic philosophers shared. Incidentally St. Thomas was the first who makes free use of all the Arabic commentators and shows that he is fully aware of their defects. Undoubtedly he regarded Averroes as the best exponent of the Aristotelian text and the supreme master in logic, but heretical in his metaphysics and psychology.
About 1256 Averroes' teaching about the unity of intelligences was sufficiently widespread at Paris to induce Albertus to write his treatise "On the unity of the intellect against the Averroists," a treatise which he afterwards inserted in his Summa. In 1269 certain propositions from Averroes were formally condemned. At this time his works were well known, and there was a distinct party at Paris which
