the scientific predecessors of Descartes. This is no anomaly. Once again crea-
tivity breaks out simultaneously on rival sides of the field. The modernists of
the scientific revolution scorned the old university metaphysics; the Spanish
university networks revived and carried forward the sophisticated abstractions
of the scholastic tradition. When the later generation of the revolutionists’
network got over their anti-metaphysical ideology, it was Suarez’s line of
cultural capital that they continued.
Expansion and Crisis of the Spanish Universities
Why then did the Spanish intellectual world disappear again from view in the
1600s? The easy answer would be the dominance of reactionary Catholicism;
but this begs the question of cause and effect. Authoritarianism was not always
dominant, and the Inquisition itself was not uniformly reactionary in intellec-
tual matters; the first wave of liberalism at the beginning of the 1500s was led
by the Grand Inquisitor, Cardinal Cisneros, who supported the Erasmian
reformers (Heer, [1953] 1968: 8–9, 13, 29–31). Cisneros founded the new
university of Alcalá, near Madrid, in 1509, with chairs for the ancient lan-
guages and Bible study in the original texts; this Humanist move was balanced
by founding chairs for Thomist, Scotist, and nominalist philosophy against the
late medieval tendency toward sectarianism and exclusiveness. Salamanca re-
sponded by founding its own rival chairs, and from here the material base of
the Spanish intellectual takeoff was established.
That material base went through a boom and bust which coincided with
the rise and fall of Spanish philosophical creativity. Spanish universities of the
Middle Ages had been modest in number and size. In the 1400s the rate of
new foundations picked up, reaching a deluge in the 1500s and early 1600s
(see Table 9.1 and sources cited there). Of the 32 Spanish universities of this
period, three were overwhelmingly dominant. Salamanca alone had some
6,000 students most years between 1550 and 1620—a figure matched by no
previous university except Paris in the 1200s, and by none subsequently until
the late 1800s in Germany. Alcalá at its height had 2,500 to 3,500 students,
Valladolid 2,000. Three or four other universities had as many as 600 students,
while the others were small, reaching 60 to 70 students at most. At the height
in the late 1500s, approximately 3 percent of young Spanish males were
attending universities, and perhaps half of them took degrees. The immensity
of this educational movement in a relatively small population needs to be
appreciated. The United States, the modern pioneer of mass higher education,
did not pass this ratio until 1900, modern England until 1950.^4
The underlying dynamic was a market for educational credentials. By the
late 1500s, the lower arts faculty had largely dropped out, displaced by the
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