It is so with Bernard of Clairvaux (109053), who condemns Abelard's distinctions and reasonings as externalizing and degrading the faith.
Thus in the end of the 17th century the seed was sown which has at intervals brought forth recurrent crops of evolutional hypotheses, based, more or less completely, on general reasonings.
Such is this famous work, full of obscurities, redundancies and contradictions, in which the thread of the argument is sometimes lost in a labyrinth of reasonings and citations, both sacred and profane, but which nevertheless expresses, both in religion and politics, such audacious and novel ideas that it has been possible to trace in it, as it were, a rough sketch of the doctrines developed during the periods of the Reformation and of the French Revolution.
The weighty reasonings of this work were expounded with all the additional force of a clear and animated style.
On the other hand, it is argued that the authority of Galen and Cicero (pro Cluentio) place it beyond a doubt that, so far from being allowed to pass with impunity, the offence in question was sometimes punished by death; that the authority of Lysias is of doubtful authenticity; and that the speculative reasonings of Plato and Aristotle, in matters of legislation, ought not to be confounded with the actual state of the laws.
