Thomas Aquinas, we may see from what has been said, was both Platonic and Aristotelian.  He resembled Plato in his deep and pious meditations on the eternal realities of the spiritual world, while in the severity of his logic he resembled Aristotle, from whom he learned precision of language, lucidity of statement, and a syllogistic mode of argument well calculated to confirm what was already known, but not to make attainments in new fields of thought or knowledge.  If he was gentle and loving and pious like Plato, he was also as calm and passionless as Aristotle.

This great man died at the age of forty-eight, in the year 1274, a few years after Saint Louis, before his sum of theology was completed.  He died prematurely, exhausted by his intense studies; leaving, however, treatises which filled seventeen printed folio volumes,—­one of the most voluminous writers of the world.  His fame was prodigious, both as a dialectician and a saint, and he was in due time canonized as one of the great pillars of the Church, ranking after Chrysostom, Jerome, Augustine, and Gregory the Great,—­the standard authority for centuries of the Catholic theology.

The Scholastic Philosophy, which culminated in Thomas Aquinas, maintained its position in the universities of Europe until the Reformation, but declined in earnestness.  It descended to the discussion of unimportant and often frivolous questions.  Even the “angelical doctor” is quoted as discussing the absurd question as to how many angels could dance together on the point of a needle.  The play of words became interminable.  Things were lost sight of in a barbarous jargon about questions which have no interest to humanity, and which are utterly unintelligible.  At the best, logical processes can add nothing to the ideas from which they start.  When these ideas are lofty, discussion upon them elevates the mind and doubtless strengthens its powers.  But when the subjects themselves are frivolous, the logical tournaments in their defence degrade the intellect and narrow it.  Nothing destroys intellectual dignity more effectually than the waste of energies in the defence of what is of no practical utility, and which cannot be applied to the acquisition of solid knowledge.  Hence the Scholastic Philosophy did not advance knowledge, since it did not seek the acquisition of new truths, but only the establishment of the old.  Its utility consisted in training the human mind to logical reasonings.  It exercised the intellect and strengthened it, as gymnastics do the body, without enlarging it.  It was nothing but barren dialectics,—­“dry bones,” a perpetual fencing.  The soul cries out for bread; the Scholastics gave it a stone.