British Thought and Thinkers Author:George Sylvester Morris Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. ENGLISHMEN OF THE RENAISSANCE—SPENSER, DAVIES, HOOKER. The revival of learning and the religious reformation reached their fulfillment in Engl... more »and in the sixteenth century. The tree of human life blossomed anew, and what magnificent and abundant fruit it bore in England is known to every student of the Eli/abethan period of English literature. It is a matter of the deepest significance to note the precise nature of the nourishment, which quickened and supported this new and masterly life, and of the ways in which it actively, spontaneously, powerfully, successfully manifested itself. The revival of learning meant, so far as it concerns the history of philosophy, the revival, and restoration to honor, of Platonism. And what was that, in distinction from Aristotelianism, which had been so completely absorbed, in form and substance, into the Scholastic philosophy? I admit — every careful student admits — no absolute contrast between Platonism and Aristotelianism. Aristotle was the true disciple, though a critical one, of Plato. Aristotle was the real continuator of Plato, more than the members of the Academic school, in which the tradition of his teaching was guarded. Both Plato and Aristotle held to the same fundamental truth of Idealism. For both, essential reality was not material, but spiritual; the material, as such, or absolutely considered, was nonessential, non-real. For both, life (i.e. being) was, in Aristotle's phrase, "energy of mind." Nor were it true to say that the way in which Aristotle conceived the same ultimate philosophical truth to be reached and apprehended, was inherently different from Plato's way. If for Plato this result was only reached through a dialectic of definition, and division, and hypothesis, by which the clouds of mere sensuous...« less