MEDICINE AND PHILOSOPHY IITH AND 12TH CENTURIES 95 



through Aristotle to Galen, were at times used for discovery 

 or systematization of knowledge and at times as repetitive 

 formulae for easy analogies or empty classifications. Their use 

 in the twelfth century was as principles employed over a 

 broadening scope in intellectual curiosity and on a diversifying 

 body of empirical and rational data. 



The framework within which the analysis of elements was 

 fitted in the twelfth century was a Platonic conception of the 

 universe derived from Plato's Timaeus and Latin Platonists, 

 like Apuleius and Macrobius, with echoes of Hermes Tris- 

 megistus and the pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, a human- 

 istic study of the liberal arts in which rhetoric and dialectic 

 colored an Aristotelian scheme of categories, syllogisms, and 

 topics, and a tradition of interpretation of the Mosaic account 

 of creation which used Platonic conceptions and methods 

 derived, by way of Augustine and Ambrose, from the Greek 

 Hexaemerons and Philo. The medical conception of elements 

 lent concreteness, specificity, and empirical detail to the con- 

 sideration of the nature of things, but it also accentuated the 

 tendency to use a variety of structures or organisms as models 

 for the universe or to use the structure of the universe as a 

 model for other lesser wholes, and therefore to analogize man 

 and universe (microcosm and macrocosm) , human soul and 

 world-soul, deliberate action and physical motion, in the treat- 

 ment of cosmology, psychology, physiology, geography, and 

 history. This merging of Platonism, the liberal arts, and the 

 new sciences was one of the distinguishing marks of the school 

 of Chartres in the twelfth century. 



William of Conches (c. 1080-1145) , whom John of Salisbury 

 calls the most richly endowed grammarian (John's epithet 

 opulentissimus has also been interpreted as a reference to the 

 high fees of grammarians) , was a grammarian and wrote 

 treatises of science and ethics. He was influenced by Thierry 

 of Chartres and Peter Abailard in cosmology and theology, and 

 he quotes Constantine the African about elements. William 

 divides science into two species in his Gloss on Boethius' Con- 



