MEDICINE AND PHILOSOPHY llTH AND 12TH CENTURIES 97 



is proved from consideration of the characteristic of effects/^ 

 WiUiam opens his treatise with the definition of philosophy as 

 " the true comprehension of things which are and are not seen 

 and of things which are and are seen," and specifies that the 

 first are incorporeal things, and the second corporeal things, 

 whether they are possessed of divine or perishable bodies.*^ 

 He treats incorporeal things first — God, the soul of the world, 

 demons, and the souls of men. Since God can be known in 

 this life, William undertakes to prove his existence to the 

 incredulous by arguments from the creation of the world and 

 from its daily disposition. The first argument begins with the 

 fact that the world is compounded from contrary elements, hot 

 and cold, wet and dry. This composition of the world might 

 have been effected by nature, or chance, or some artificer. 

 Not by nature, since nature flees contraries and seeks similars. 

 Not by chance, since simpler constructions, like houses, are not 

 made by chance, and, moreover, chance is the unexpected 

 occurrence of a thing from a confluence of causes, but nothing 

 preceded the world except the Creator. But the artificer was 

 not man, since the world was made before man; nor an angel, 

 since the angels were made with the world; therefore the 

 artificer was God. The second argument, from the daily dis- 

 position of things proceeds similarly. Whatever is disposed is 

 disposed in accordance with some wisdom, and in the case of 

 the world it is not human or angelic but divine wisdom. From 

 the daily disposition of things one attains to the divine wis- 

 dom, and from the divine wisdom to the divine substance. 



and many of the Church Fathers, finds support in Paul (Rom. 1: 20, "For the 

 invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being under- 

 stood by the things that are made ") and elaboration in Platonic philosophies. 



*^ The dependence of phenomena perceived by sense or reason on a transcendent 

 cause, equally well established in the Christian tradition, finds like support in Paul 

 (Col. 1: 16, "For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are 

 in earth, visible and invisible ") and its elaboration may have an a ])riori Platonic 

 turn, in which man and the world are image, likeness, or imprint and reasoning 

 about them proceeds by models, or an a ■posteriori Aristotelian or Stoic turn in 

 which phenomena are effects and reasoning about first causes proceeds from effects. 

 " De Philosopkia Mundi, I, 1-3, PL 172, 43B-C. 



