a sect of school-divines and philosophers, thus called from their founder J. Duns Scotus, a Scottish cordelier, who maintained the immaculate conception of the virgin, or that she was born without original sin, in opposition to Thomas Aquinas and the Thomists.

As to philosophy, the Scotists were, like the Thomists, Peripatetics (see Peripatetics); only distinguished by this, that in each being, as many different qualities as it had, so many different formalities did they distinguish; all distinct from the body itself, and making as it were so many different entities; only these were metaphysical, and as it were superadded to the being. The Scotists and Thomists likewise disagreed about the nature of the divine cooperation with the human will, the measure of divine grace that is necessary to salvation, and other abstruse and minute questions, which it is needless to enumerate.