Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 2.djvu/734

 faith; but what it signified to Pomponazzi we shall best understand by turning to his famous treatise on the Immortality of the Soul. The treatise is at once an attempt at the historical interpretation of Aristotle and a serious independent discussion. It is practically concerned with the question: How did Aristotle conceive immortality, as personal or as collective? It is as little soluble by the natural reason as the cognate question whether the world is eternal or created; in each case the problem as to the beginning holds the key of the problem as to the end. The Aristotelian Schoolmen had argued that the capacity of the soul to think the eternal and will the universal implied its immortality. But what is the soul? We cannot define it as thought percipient of the universal reason, for there can be no thought without ideas and no ideas without sense. The soul which lives within nature must develop according to natural law and in obedience to it. Now, we never find soul without body; and hence we must ask: how are these related? Not as mover and moved, else their proper analogies would be the ox and the waggon it draws, but as matter and form, i.e. without the body the soul could not be, for only through the body does man take his place in nature and realise his rational activity. Hence the human soul cannot exist without the human body, and must therefore be liable to the same mortality. And this conclusion is worked out in connexion with the moral doctrine that man is bound to act from love of virtue and horror of vice, and not from any hope of reward or fear of punishment, and so to act as to make all nature the better for his action. Reason, then, must conclude that the soul is mortal; but religion comes to our aid, and by teaching us to believe in the resurrection of the body resolves our doubts. Of this doctrine philosophy knows nothing, and so we can hold it only as an article of faith. This is in effect all Pomponazzi can teach us; religion and reason occupy opposite camps; neither can hold intercourse with the other. The truths of religion are the contradictions of the reason; the processes of the reason cannot serve the cause of religion. The new scholasticism was a philosophy of reasoned ignorance where the cardinal verities of religion were the inconceivabilities of thought,

But here certain new forces which seriously affected the course and the development of Latin thought must be referred to and analysed. The ecclesiastical situation began to change, and the temper of the Renaissance changed with it. Thought had revived without conscious antagonism to the Church, though with the clear sense of opposition to the Schools and their methods. Churchmen had been forward in cultivating the new spirit, had encouraged and studied its literature, appreciated and promoted its art. But the Reformation, with its attendant incidents, made the Church suspicious of movements which might contain the seeds of revolt, while the Renaissance, always sensitive to