least in his reply to her happy wistful exclamation at the sight of the fine company:

We will not so identify Shakespeare with his magician as to have him say, as thinking of lovely Stratford:

"And thence retire we to my Milan, where

Every third thought shall be my grave."

And yet who will not find Shakespeare's self in the words following the vanishing of the vision-masque, which has astounded Ferdinand:

"You do look, my son, in a mov'd sort,

As if you were dismay'd; be cheerful, sir.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep."

Without any sure support from the play, one almost wonders whether Shakespeare does not mean that a man may find himself and at least the provisional truth of his nature, through realizing the insubstantial character of the phantasmagoria of the world. Such a suggestion may be extorted from the words of Gonzalo, exclaiming on the issue of that wonderful voyage of theirs, through which one daughter of Naples found a husband,

"And Ferdinand, her brother, found a wife

Where he himself was lost; Prospero his dukedom,
In a poor isle; and all of us, ourselves,

When no man was his own."

BOOK V

PHILOSOPHY AND SCIENCE

CHAPTER XXX

THE SCHOLASTIC ARISTOTLE, PLATONISM, AND NICHOLAS OF CUSA

I

THE Catholic philosophy of the Middle Ages through the whole course of its development evinces general characteristics which never were more strongly marked than at its culmination in the system of Aquinas. Still with the great Dominican, as before him, Scholasticism was acceptant, reverential, largely engaged in appropriation and re-expression; it was extremely formal through its endeavor to appropriate and re-express, and because the formal logic of Aristotle had been the chief moulding instrument. Furtherance of salvation was still the supreme sanction of knowledge; and the highest task of the philosopher was still to use his knowledge in the service of theology, and demonstrate philosophy's handmaidenly accord with revealed Christian truth. The system of Aquinas exemplified this hardly won and soon to be lost coöperation between authority and reason, so necessary for a philosophical theology which had to digest. the solid facts of revelation.

Intellectual conditions, past and present, contributed to the achievement of Aquinas, and conspired to render his Summa (along with Gothic cathedrals and the Roman de la Rose!) the typical constructions of the time. Much of humanity's best intelligence had long been consecrated to the Catholic or scholastic theology-philosophy. In spite of controversies and divergencies of attitude among its thoughtful, academic, and usually quite orthodox, promoters, the lines of progress had tended to draw together towards a common method and unity of system. This unity finally was established through the action of the