Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/75

Rh truth by alternate affirmation and negation, confirmatory when they appear most contradictory to one another; and so he couples with the assertion that there was no time when the universe was not, the contrary assertion that there was a time when it was not. In a sense that transcends intelligence it exists eternally; in another sense it began to be when it passed into the sphere of time and place. The meaning is in strict correspondence with that which we have found in John's theory of evil. Evil arises by the passage from the spiritual to the material: objective creation by the passage from the eternal to the temporal. Good in the one argument, eternity in the other, is the positive element in the universal system; matter is the mere concourse of accidents of being.

Such is John Scotus's world. To him as to Plato its goodness is its essential significance: it begins and ends with thought, with pure being, with God. He fills in the outline with a confidence, a certainty, of the truth of his speculations. Yet, as though half conscious of their strangeness to the understanding of his age, he is ever anxious to prove that he is continuing, not breaking of from, the line of thought sanctioned by the greatest of the fathers and by the Bible itself. Authority is still a power with him, but limited, expanded, refined. The name of the fathers, of Augustin himself, cannot deter I him from forming his own conclusions on any subject. Even the Bible, though necessarily containing nothing but truth, presents that truth with so much accommodation to the bodily senses that it is the duty of the philosopher to endeavour to penetrate beneath its metaphors i and bring forth the substance that underlies them. For