Ramus, PETRUS. Pierre de la Ramée, an illustrious French 'humanist,' was the son of a poor labourer, and was born at the village of Cuth, in Vermandois, in 1515. In his twelfth year he got a situation as servant to a rich scholar at the Collège de Navarre, and, by devoting the day to his master, obtained the night for study, and made rapid progress. The method of teaching philosophy then prevalent dissatisfied him, and he was led to place a higher value on 'reason' than on 'authority'; when taking his degree in his twenty-first year he even maintained the extravagant thesis that 'all that Aristotle had said was false.' Immediately after he began lectures on the Greek and Latin authors, designed to combine the study of eloquence with that of philosophy. His audience was large, and his success as a teacher remarkable. He now turned his attention more particularly to the science of logic, which, in his usual adventurous spirit, he undertook to reform. His attempts excited much hostility among the Aristotelians, and when his treatise on the subject (Dialecticæ Partitiones) appeared in 1543 it was fiercely assailed by the doctors of the Sorbonne, who managed to get it suppressed by a royal edict, and his lectures for a time suspended. But Ramus had at this time two powerful friends, Cardinals Charles de Bourbon and Charles de Lorraine, through whose influence he was, in 1545, appointed principal of the Collège de Presles. In 1551 Cardinal Lorraine succeeded in instituting for him a chair of Eloquence and Philosophy at the Collège Royal. He mingled largely in the literary and scholastic disputes of the time, and ultimately embraced Protestantism. He had to flee from Paris; after 1568 he travelled in Germany and Switzerland; but on returning to France in 1571 he perished in the fatal massacre of St Bartholomew, 24th August 1572. It was believed that he was assassinated by the direct instigation of one of his most persistent enemies.
Ramus holds an honourable place in the list of intellectual reformers. His assault on scholasticism as a method of thinking is vigorous, and his exposure of its puerile and useless subtleties is thorough. His system of logic, by which his name is best known, is marked by its lucid definitions, its natural divisions, and its simplification of the rules of the syllogism; but it really adds little to logical science. What strikes one most, however, in Ramus is his universal intellectual activity. He wrote treatises on arithmetic, geometry, and algebra which were text-books for a hundred years; he was among the earliest adherents of the Copernican system of astronomy; Latin, Greek, and
French grammar, rhetoric, morals, and theology all engaged his pen, and he seldom handled a subject which he did not to some degree elucidate. His followers were a widespread, and for long a powerful body of thinkers and teachers; France, England, the Low Countries, Germany, Switzerland, Denmark, and even Spain had their Ramists.
See monographs by Waddington (Paris, 1855), Desmazié (1864), and Lobstein (Strasb. 1878).