Page:King Alfred's Old English version of St. Augustine's Soliloquies - Hargrove - 1902.djvu/45

ALFRED'S VERSION OP THE SOLILOQUIES XXXIX sides'. The Latin Father here shows himself the forerunner of scholasticism. The newly converted Christian sinks his identity for the time into the dialectic philosopher. He leads us through a labyrinth of reasonings, in which he hopelessly confuses the forms of logic with the essential truth. The chief dictum asserted is that truth persists; even if truth itself should pass away, yet it would be true that it has passed away. Falsity is so, because it is otherwise than it seems if therefore there are none to whom it may seem, nothing is false; but falsity existing implies a perceiving sense, and a perceiving sense implies a subjective immortal soul.

The following summaries will reveal his process: 'You have said that falsity cannot be without sense, and that sense cannot but be; therefore there is always sense. But there is no sense without soul; therefore the soul is everlasting. Nor has it power to exercise sense, unless it lives; therefore the soul always lives'. And again: 'Therefore if nothing is true unless it be as it seems; and if nothing corporeal can appear, except to the senses; and if the only subject of sense is the soul; and if no body can exist unless it be a true body: it follows that there cannot be a body unless there has first been a soul'. Finally: 'From this truth, as I remember, that Truth cannot perish, we have concluded that not only if the whole world should perish, but even if Truth itself should, it will still be true that both the world and Truth have perished. Now there is nothing true but truth; in no wise therefore does Truth perish'.

After various and long excursions in which abstraction is complicated by abstraction, and confusion worse confounded, the book is closed rather abruptly with a promise that another book would be written on the subject of in-

1 Schaff : The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, VH. 549.

8 ib.

8 ib. 556.