The opinions in themselves need not disturb us, although the question is as open to dispute as ever it was and perhaps as much disputed; but the turn of Thomas’s mind is worth study.  A century or two later, his passion to be reasonable, scientific, architectural would have brought him within range of the Inquisition.  Francis of Assisi was not more archaic and cave-dweller than Thomas of Aquino was modern and scientific.  In his effort to be logical he forced his Deity to be as logical as himself, which hardly suited Omnipotence.  He hewed the Church dogmas into shape as though they were rough stones.  About no dogma could mankind feel interest more acute than about that of immortality, which seemed to be the single point vitally necessary for any Church to prove and define as clearly as light itself.  Thomas trimmed down the soul to half its legitimate claims as an immortal being by insisting that God created it from nothing in the same act or will by which He created the body and united the two in time and space.  The soul existed as form for the body, and had no previous existence.  Logic seemed to require that when the body died and dissolved, after the union which had lasted, at most, only an instant or two of eternity, the soul, which fitted that body and no other, should dissolve with it.  In that case the Church dissolved, too, since it had no reason for existence except the soul.  Thomas met the difficulty by suggesting that the body’s form might take permanence from the matter to which it gave form.  That matter should individualize mind was itself a violent wrench of logic, but that it should also give permanence—­the one quality it did not possess—­to this individual mind seemed to many learned doctors a scandal.  Perhaps Thomas meant to leave the responsibility on the Church, where it belonged as a matter not of logic but of revealed truth.  At all events, this treatment of mind and matter brought him into trouble which few modern logicians would suspect.

The human soul having become a person by contact with matter, and having gained eternal personality by the momentary union, was finished, and remains to this day for practical purposes unchanged; but the angels and devils, a world of realities then more real than man, were never united with matter, and therefore could not be persons.  Thomas admitted and insisted that the angels, being immaterial,—­neither clothed in matter, nor stamped on it, nor mixed with it,—­were universals; that is, each was a species in himself, a class, or perhaps what would be now called an energy, with no other individuality than he gave himself.