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Initiation into Philosophy by Émile Faguet
page 59 of 144 (40%)
ST. THOMAS AQUINAS.--As Aristotelian theologians must be cited
William of Auvergne, Vincent of Beauvais, Albertus Magnus; but the
sovereign name of this period of the history of philosophy is St. Thomas
Aquinas. St. Thomas Aquinas wrote several small works but, surpassing them
all, the _Summa_ (encyclopaedia) which bears his name. In general
philosophy St. Thomas Aquinas is an Aristotelian, bending but not
distorting the ideas of Aristotle to Christian conceptions. Like
Aristotle, he demonstrated God by the existence of motion and the necessity
of a first motive power; he further demonstrated it by the contingent,
relative, and imperfect character of all here below: "There is in things
more or less goodness, more or less truth." But we only affirm the more or
less of a thing by comparing it with something absolute and as it
approaches more or less to this absolute; there is therefore an absolute
being, namely God--and this argument appeared to him better than that of
St. Anselm, which he refuted.

HIS CONCEPTION OF NATURE.--He showed the whole of nature as a great
hierarchy, proceeding from the least perfect and the most shapeless to the
most complete and determinate; from another aspect, as separated into two
great kingdoms, that of necessity (mineral, vegetable, animal), and that of
grace (humanity). He displayed it willed by God, projected by God, created
by God; governed by God according to antecedent and consequent wills, that
is, by general wills (God desires man to be saved) and by particular wills
(God wishes the sinner to be punished), and the union of the general wills
is the creation, and the result of all the particular wills is
Providence. Nature and man with it are the work not only of the power but
of the goodness of God, and it is by love that He created us and we must
render Him love for love, which is involuntarily done by Nature herself in
her obedience to His laws, and which we must do voluntarily by obedience to
His commandments.
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