was held suspect, and this divorce between faith and reason was vehemently rejected by the prelates and the doctors of that time, and condemned in the last Lateran Council under Leo X. On that occasion also, scholars were urged to work for the removal of the difficulties that appeared to set theology and philosophy at variance.  The doctrine of their incompatibility continued to hold its ground incognito.  Pomponazzi was suspected of it, although he declared himself otherwise; and that very sect of the Averroists survived as a school.  It is thought that Caesar Cremoninus, [81] a philosopher famous in his time, was one of its mainstays.  Andreas Cisalpinus, a physician (and an author of merit who came nearest after Michael Servetus to the discovery of the circulation of the blood), was accused by Nicolas Taurel (in a book entitled Alpes Caesae) of belonging to these anti-religious Peripatetics.  Traces of this doctrine are found also in the Circulus Pisanus Claudii Berigardi, an author of French nationality who migrated to Italy and taught philosophy at Pisa:  but especially the writings and the letters of Gabriel Naude, as well as the Naudaeana, show that Averroism still lived on when this learned physician was in Italy.  Corpuscular philosophy, introduced shortly after, appears to have extinguished this excessively Peripatetic sect, or perhaps to have been intermixed with its teaching.  It may be indeed that there have been Atomists who would be inclined to teach dogmas like those of the Averroists, if circumstances so permitted:  but this abuse cannot harm such good as there is in Corpuscular philosophy, which can very well be combined with all that is sound in Plato and in Aristotle, and bring them both into harmony with true theology.

12.  The Reformers, and especially Luther, as I have already observed, spoke sometimes as if they rejected philosophy, and deemed it inimical to faith.  But, properly speaking, Luther understood by philosophy only that which is in conformity with the ordinary course of Nature, or perhaps even philosophy as it was taught in the schools.  Thus for example he says that it is impossible in philosophy, that is, in the order of Nature, that the word be made flesh; and he goes so far as to maintain that what is true in natural philosophy might be false in ethics.  Aristotle was the object of his anger; and so far back as the year 1516 he contemplated the purging of philosophy, when he perhaps had as yet no thoughts of reforming the Church.  But at last he curbed his vehemence and in the Apology for the Augsburg Confession allowed a favourable mention of Aristotle and his Ethics.  Melanchthon, a man of sound and moderate ideas, made little systems from the several parts of philosophy, adapted to the truths of revelation and useful in civic life, which deserve to be read even now.  After him, Pierre de la Ramee entered the lists.  His philosophy was much in favour:  the sect of the Ramists was powerful in Germany, gaining many adherents among the Protestants, and even concerning itself with theology, until the revival of Corpuscular philosophy, which caused that of Ramee to fall into [82] oblivion and weakened the authority of the Peripatetics.