But Mr. Lecky goes much further than this. He tells us that this opinion of the materiality of the human soul--which, if we except at most two or three writers, had certainly died out in the sixth, if not in the fifth century--was the dominant opinion in the middle ages:
"Under the influence of mediaeval habits of thought, every spiritual conception was materialized, and what at an earlier and a later period was generally deemed the language of metaphor, was universally regarded as the language of fact. The realizations of the people were all derived from paintings, sculpture, or ceremonies that appealed to the senses, and all subjects were therefore reduced to palpable images. The angel in the last judgment was constantly represented weighing the souls in a literal balance, while devils clinging to the scales endeavored to disturb the equilibrium. Sometimes the soul was portrayed as a sexless child, rising out of the mouth of the corpse. But, above all, the doctrine of purgatory arrested and enchained the imagination. ... Men who believed in a physical soul readily believed in a physical punishment, men who materialized their view of the punishment, materialized their view of the sufferers.
"We find, however," he proceeds, "some time before the reformation, evident signs of an endeavor on the part of a few writers to rise to a purer conception of the soul." And he goes on to attribute this to "the pantheistic writings that flowed from the school of Averrhoes;" and to ascribe to the Cartesian philosophy "the final downfall of the materialistic hypothesis." Vol. i. pp. 373-378.
It is not too much to say that the whole of this is entirely unsupported by evidence. Anyone who likes to glance over the Coimbricenses _De Animâ_, the beginning of the second book of the Sentences, the questions _De Animâ_ in the Summa of St. Thomas, the recapitulation of the scholastic theology on that subject in the third volume of Suarez, or the very earliest treatises _De Angelis_, will see that, far from there being merely "a few writers" who maintained the spirituality of the soul, the notion of immateriality was as well defined in the dominant scholastic philosophy as ever it was by Descartes; whose doctrine that the essence of the soul is thought, was clearly stated by the scholastics in the sense that intellection can only belong to the spiritual, and not to the material and the extended. [Footnote 13] The manner in which the Scholastics explained the punishment of a spiritual being by a material fire affords us a test-question on this subject. _Did_ their "intense realization" of this doctrine lead them to infer the materiality of the soul? Certainly not. On the contrary; _because_ all thoroughly realized the spirituality of the soul, all felt this difficulty regarding the manner of its punishment; but, although there was sufficient diversity among them as to its explanation, not one had recourse to the materialistic hypothesis.