the Trinitarian analogies in the world of nature and of man. Now a whole system of thought, risen full-fledged from the head of the Stagirite Jupiter, appeared in its grandeur, and no wonder that the students of the time took their fill of the honey thus offered to the eager palate. But there was danger lurking in the foreign sweetness, and those who were committed to Augustinianism became apprehensive of the novel doctrines contained in or evolved from the Physics and Metaphysics of Aristotle. The eternity of the world, the unity of the human intellect, the determinism of the will, the independence of the reason, or the two-fold truth,—all these were so many thorns in the flesh of the true Catholic doctrine, as taught by the Church. Hence the repeated prohibitions to teach the Physics and the Metaphysics of Aristotle in the Schools as well as the commentaries of the Arabians on the same. But the tide was not to be stemmed. The Church soon realized that conquest could be achieved now, if at all, only by an apparent submission to the enemy. It is to the credit of the Dominicans to have led the way in the Christianization of Aristotle, i.e., in adapting his teachings to those of the Church and in endeavoring to work out a harmony where the two conflicted, instead of rejecting Aristotle en bloc.
Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas undertook this task and carried it through successfully for their time, but not without a hard struggle in which they opposed both extremes, the Augustinians, represented by Alexander of Hales, Bonaventura, Henry of Ghent, etc., and the out and out Aristotelians, who read Aristotle through the spectacles of Averroes, the "Commentator," and whose names till lately were not so well known to us. The harmonists, as we know, won the day, and the pure Aristotelians, or Averroists, as they were called, were condemned as heretics, hence no doubt the subsequent neglect of their works and the permanent loss perhaps of some of them. When Renan wrote his book he could scarcely name with any certainty a single representative of the Averroists. That there were such and what their doctrines were he had to learn from the refutations of their opponents, for both Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas wrote treatises "Contra Averroistas," and in particular on the problem "De anima," or "De unitate intellectus"—a heresy which seems, despite the abstruseness of the technical discussions, easily to have lent itself to popularization in the form that, inasmuch as the human mind was one in all men, Tom, Dick, and Harry can do any thing they please, and they are sure to be saved if any body is, since the soul of the saint is also the soul of the sinner. Renan suspects that Siger of Brabant,
