An inquiry into the pedigree of 'dunce' lays open to us an important
page in the intellectual history of Europe. Certain theologians in the
Middle Ages were termed Schoolmen; having been formed and trained in
the cloister and cathedral _schools_ which Charlemagne and his
immediate successors had founded. These were men not to be lightly
spoken of, as they often are by those who never read a line of their
works, and have not a thousandth part of their wit; who moreover little
guess how many of the most familiar words which they employ, or
misemploy, have descended to them from these. 'Real,' 'virtual,'
'entity,' 'nonentity,' 'equivocation,' 'objective,' 'subjective,' with
many more unknown to classical Latin, but now almost necessities to us,
were first coined by the Schoolmen; and, passing over from them into
the speech of others more or less interested in their speculations,
have gradually filtered through the successive strata of society, till
now some of them have reached to quite the lowest. At the Revival of
Learning, however, their works fell out of favour: they were not
written in classical Latin: the forms into which their speculations
were thrown were often unattractive; it was mainly in their authority
that the Roman Church found support for her perilled dogmas. On all
these accounts it was esteemed a mark of intellectual progress to have
broken with them, and thrown off their yoke. Some, however, still clung
to these Schoolmen, and to one in particular, John _Duns_ Scotus, the
most illustrious teacher of the Franciscan Order.
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