In the same year there appeared in Danzig an anonymous satire, Pope a Metaphysician (Pope ein Metaphysiker), the authorship of which soon transpired.
This work made the "Cornish metaphysician," as he was called, widely known, and for some time it held a high place in the judgment of the religious world as a conclusive argument on its subject.
ANDREW BAXTER (1686-1750), Scottish metaphysician, was born in Aberdeen and educated at King's College.
But Gilbert de la Porree, according to Haureau, is the most eminent logician of the Realistic school in the 12th century and the most profound metaphysician of either school.
Dr Thomas Brown, the metaphysician (1778-1820), was a native of the parish (Kirkmabreck) in which Creetown lies.
MOSES AMYRAUT (1596-1664), also known as Amyraldus, French Protestant theologian and metaphysician, was born at Bourgueil, in the valley of Anjou, in 1596.
In 1822, he left Erlangen - where he subsequently complained that the contagion of the "greatest philosopher and metaphysician of the century" (Schelling), in a period "rich in words and ideas, but poor in true knowledge and genuine studies," had cost him two precious years of his life - and by the liberality of Louis I., grand-duke of Hesse-Darmstadt, was enabled to go to Paris.
Voltaire himself, speaking as a practical man rather than as a metaphysician, declared that if there were no God it would be necessary to invent one; and if the analysis is only carried far enough it will be found that those who deny the existence of God (in a conventional sense) are all the time setting up something in the nature of deity by way of an ideal of their own, while fighting over the meaning of a word or its conventional misapplication.
But as yet he had given no sign of system, and-what is surprisingno trace of logic. Aristotle was primarily a metaphysician against Plato; a metaphysician before he was a logician; a metaphysician who made what he called primary philosophy pd.Yrri 4aXocr00La) the starting-point of his philosophical development, and ultimately of his philosophical system.
The reason is that Aristotle was primarily a metaphysician half for and half against Plato, occupied himself with metaphysics all his philosophical life, made the science of things the universal basis of all sciences without destroying their independence, and so gradually brought round philosophy from universal forms to individual substances.
Aristotle was primarily a metaphysician, a philosopher of things, who uses the objective method of proceeding from being to thinking.
Their interest to the metaphysician is their opposition to physics on the one hand and to theism on the other.
He at least claims to have been the first to dissect the procedure of the debate-game, and the larger claim may be and Aristotle who was inferior as a metaphysician to neither.
So the idea of God which he sets forth is not that of a theologian or a metaphysician, but that of the unlearned man which even the child could understand.
Charles XII., under whose special patronage Rydelius wrote, was himself a metaphysician and physiologist of merit.
As a metaphysician he starts from what he terms "the higher scepticism" of the Hume-Kantian sphere of thought, the beginnings of which he discerns in Locke's perplexity about the idea of substance.
Wycliffe was a metaphysician and a theologian, and had to invent a metaphysical theory - the theory of Dominium - to enable him to transfer, in a way satisfactory to himself, the powers and privileges of the church to his company of poor Christians; but his followers were content to allege that a church which held large landed possessions, collected tithes greedily and took money from starving peasants for baptizing, burying and praying, could not be the church of Christ and his apostles.
Certainly the most able metaphysician and the most influential religious thinker of America, he must rank in theology, dialectics, mysticism and philosophy with Calvin and Fenelon, Augustine and Aquinas, Spinoza and Novalis; with Berkeley and Hume as the great English philosophers of the 18th century; and with Hamilton and Franklin as the three American thinkers of the same century of more than provincial importance.
Finally the metaphysician, and in another sphere the theologian, consider the nature of the pure or transcendental self apart from its relations, i.e.
