one believe? By will, aided by the grace of God. Then henceforth must no
appeal be made to reason? Yes, indeed! Reason serves to refute the errors
of the adversaries of the faith, and by this refutation to confirm itself
in belief. The famous _Credo ut intelligam_--I believe in order to
understand--is therefore true. Comprehension is only possible on condition
of belief; but subsequently comprehension helps to believe, if not more, at
least with a greater precision and in a more abundant light. St. Thomas
Aquinas here is in exactly the position which Pascal seems to have taken
up: Believe and you will understand; understand and you will believe more
exactly. Therefore an act of will: "I wish to believe"--a grace of God
fortifying this will: faith exists--studies and reasoning: faith is the
clearer.

ST. BONAVENTURA; RAYMOND LULLE.--Beside these men of the highest
brain-power there are found in the thirteenth century mystics, that is,
poets and eccentrics, both by the way most interesting. It was St.
Bonaventura who, being persuaded, almost like an Alexandrine, that one
rises to God by synthetic feeling and not by series of arguments, and that
one journeys towards Him by successive states of the soul each more pure
and more passionate--wrote _The Journey of the Soul to God_, which is,
so to speak, a manual of mysticism. Learned as he was, whilst pursuing his
own purpose, he digressed in agreeable and instructive fashion into the
realms of real knowledge.

Widely different from him, Raymond Lulle or de Lulle, an unbridled
schoolman, in his _Ars magna_ invented a reasoning machine, analogous
to an arithmetical machine, in which ideas were automatically deduced from
one another as the figures inscribe themselves on a counter. As often
happens, the excess of the method was its own criticism, and an enemy of
scholasticism could not have more ingeniously demonstrated that it was a