Dual Forms of Cognition in the Middle Ages

Afterwards, the attempt was made to permeate with materialistic world-conceptions the many facts which were discovered at that time in regard to the external life of the senses and we may say: The materialistic world-conception has not been created by Darwinism, or by spectral analysis, but the facts which Darwin had so carefully collected, the facts which could be detected to a certain extent in spectral analysis, and all that could be discovered in connection with certain things which were once investigated in an entirely different manner (this may be seen, for instance, in Fechner's “Introduction to Aesthetics”), all this was immersed in the already extant conception of sensualism. Fundamentally speaking, materialism already existed; it had its origin in the propagation of that habit of thinking which was, in reality, an offspring of the scholastic manner of thinking. We do not grasp the modern development of the spirit, we do not grasp materialism, unless we realise that it is nothing but the continuation of medieval thinking, with the omission of the idea that it is necessary to rise from thinking to the super-sensible with the aid, not of human reason and human observation, but with the aid of the revelations contained in the dogmas.