by an account of the quarrel between the rival schools of Thomists and
Scotists. The great teacher of the generation after St. Thomas was a
Franciscan, Duns Scotus, the "Subtle Doctor," who taught at Oxford and
Paris and died in 1308. His teaching differed in two ways from that of
his Dominican predecessor. In the first place he excepted a larger
number of theological doctrines as not being capable of philosophic
proof, so that his teaching tended to bring back and to emphasise the
dualism between faith and reason. It is for this reason that his
system has been considered as the beginning of the decline of
Scholasticism. In the second place, the real quarrel between Thomists
and Scotists centred round the question of the freedom of the will.
The followers of St. Thomas maintained that although the will is to
some extent subordinate to the reason, yet it is free to determine its
own course of action after a process of rational comparison, by
contrast with the animals which act on the impulse of the moment. The
Scotists, on the other hand, taught that what is called the will is
merely a name for the possibility of determining without motive in
either of two opposite directions. The importance of this difference
of view consisted in this--that whereas the Thomists held that God
subjects His will to a rational determination and therefore commands
what is good because it is good, the Scotist taught that good is so
because God wills it; if He chose to will the exact opposite, that
would be equally good--in other words, he attributed to God an
entirely arbitrary will. The two greatest disciples of St. Thomas were
Dante and the Franciscan Roger Bacon (1214-92), the latter of whom
fell into disfavour with the superiors of his own Order in consequence
of his scientific studies, and spent many years at the end of his life
in prison.

[Sidenote: Results of Scholasticism.]