76 MEMOIR OP ARISTOTLE. 



lized himself as among the earliest to impugn the in- 

 fallibility of this great oracle of philosophy. He 

 wrote twenty hooks of Animadversions against Aris- 

 totle's Logic, eight against his Physics, and fourteen 

 against his Metaphysics a boldness which proved 

 fatal, as it made him first an exile and at length a 

 martyr. It is but fair to add, that in the glory or 

 disgrace which the schools then attached to his opi- 

 nions, the Stagirite had no concern. The true spi- 

 rit and meaning of his philosophy was completely re- 

 fined away by the fanciful glosses of copyists and cri- 

 tics; so that those scholastic combatants who banish- 

 ed or murdered each other in his name, fought mere- 

 ly about the husks of science, without the kernel. 



These observations are particulaily just as ap- 

 plied to the absurd jargon or logomachy which pass- 

 ed for learning, and during five centuries and a half 

 divided Europe between the two renowned sects of 

 Nominalists and Realists ; so called because the for- 

 mer, whose reputed founder was Roscellinus, Canon 

 of Compeigne, in the eleventh century, held the doc- 

 trine of universals in logic to depend solely on names 

 or words, and treated as mere illusions of fancy the 

 Platonic ideas of their opponents, who regarded as 

 their founder the celebrated monk Abelard, immor- 

 talized by his amorous follies and misfortunes, and 

 numbered among their champions Anselm, arch- 

 bishop of Canterbury. Under the banners of one 

 or other of these factions, the learning of Christen- 

 dom arrayed itself during a succession of many ge- 



