Encyclopedia of sacred theology - pagina 37

CiiAP. I]

Thus

§ 7.

tlie

CONCLUSION

13

word Encyclopedia serves successively to indihuman knowledge ; then profane science ; then, the name of a look, taken partly as compendiu7n

cate a part of it is

used as

and partly

as an alphabetical agglomerate

name of an independent science. But however different these five

;

and, finally, as the

interpretations

may

seem,

the fundamental signihcance, that led to the formation of the

word

Encj^clopedia,

is

not

lost.

the Greek divided the whole of

By

his eyKVK\io<i TratSeca

human knowledge

;

i.e.

he

and brought a certain order into it, while b}' liis i'yKVKXio'? he bound the separated part to a given The Christian writers did this same thing; only circle. with this difference, that the part separated by them was larger, that it was bound to a more extended circle, and that this circle was determined by another principle as its centre. The Humanists put the content of this part of human knowledge in the place of the abstract conception of it, and tried to fix the boundary of the circle, in which this part of knowledge moved, not by the persons with whom it Ijelonged, but by the organic coherence of this knowledge itself. Polyhistory and Real-Encyclopedia in the alphabetical form gave, like the Compendia of the Humanists, the content of the knowledge itself, but under the two restrictions, that that only would be taken up which was objectified

of

it,

analyzed

it,

importance either to the circle of

tlie

learned or of the

public at large, and that the circle in which one Avas not

moved

bound

to the science itself, but, as with the Greek, to the " learned " or educated public. And finally the latest

interpretation,

which gives the name

individual science that takes

all

of Encyclopedia to an

the other sciences for the

its investigation, turns from the coiitent of the Humanists and of Polyhistory to the well-ordered conception of the Greeks, i.e. to a norma for the grouping; only

object of

with this difference, that it interprets this ordering, formulating and grouping organically, and so on the one hand extends them to the whole realm of science, and on the other

hand causes them itself.

to be

governed by

the principle of science

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