OCEANIC DISCOVERIES. 243 



ual being the relations between the mind that recognizes 

 and the object that is recognized separated the dialectics 

 into the two celebrated schools of Realists and Nominalists. 

 The almost forgotten contests of these schools of the Middle 

 Ages deserve a notice here, because they exercised a special 

 influence on the final establishment of the experimental sci- 

 ences. The Nominalists, who ascribed to general ideas of 

 objects only a subjective existence in the human mind, finally 

 remained the dominant party in the fourteenth and fifteenth 

 centuries, after having undergone various fluctuations of suc- 

 cess. From their greater aversion to mere empty abstrac- 

 tions, they urged before all the necessity of experiment, and 

 of the increase of the materials for establishing a sensuous 

 basis of knowledge. This direction was at least influential in 

 favoring the cultivation of empirical science ; but even among 

 those with whom the Realistic views were maintained, an ac- 

 quaintance with the literature of the Arabs had successfully 

 opposed a taste for natural investigation against the all-ab- 

 sorbing sway of theology. Thus we see that in the different 

 periods of the Middle Ages, to which we have perhaps been 

 accustomed to ascribe too strong a character of unity, the 

 great work of discoveries in remote parts of the earth, and 

 their happy adaptation to the extension of the cosmical sphere 

 of ideas, were gradually being prepared on wholly different 

 paths and in purely ideal and empirical directions. 



Natural science was intimately associated with medicine 

 and philosophy among the learned Arabs, and in the Chris- 

 tian Middle Ages with theological polemics. The latter, from 

 their tendency to assert an exclusive influence, repressed em- 

 pirical inquiry in the departments of physics, organic morphol- 

 ogy, and astronomy, which was for the most part closely allied 

 to astrology. The study of the comprehensive works of Aris- 

 totle, which had been introduced by Arabs and Jewish rabbis, 

 had tended to lead to a philosophical fusion of all branches 

 of study ;* and hence Ibn-Sina (Avicenna) and Ibn-Roschd 

 (Averroes), Albertus Magnus, and Roger Bacon, passed for 

 the representatives of all the knowledge of their time. The 

 fame which in the Middle Ages surrounded the names of these 

 great men, was proportionate to the general diffusion of this 

 opinion of their endowments. 



Albertus Magnus, of the family of the Counts of Bollstadt, 

 must also be mentioned as an independent observer in the do- 



* Jourdain, Sur les Trad. d'Arislote, p. 236 ; and Michael Sachs, Did 

 religiose Poesie der Juden in Spanien, 1845, s. 180-200. 



