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in the ardour of research into the nature of being, 

 the modes of individuating principles were distin- 

 guished or contrasted with an ingenuity incom- 

 prehensible to Plato or Aristotle, or at any rate 

 undesired by these greater thinkers. Aristotle 

 avoided the question whether form or matter 

 individuate ; he held that there is no form and 

 no matter extrinsic to the individual. But by the 

 medieval realist every particular, every thing, was 

 regarded as after some fashion the product of 

 universal matter and individual form. Now "form" 

 might be regarded, and severally was regarded, as 

 a shaping, determinative force or principle, pattern 

 type or mould, having real existence apart from 

 stuff, or, on the other hand, as an abstract prin- 

 ciple or pattern having no existence but as a con- 

 ception of the mind of the observer. The realists 

 roundly asserted that form is as actual as matter, 

 and that things arise by their participation with- 

 out whiteness no white thing, without humanity no 

 man ; and not individuals only : for the realist, out- 

 platonising Plato, genera and species also had their 

 forms, either pre-existent ("universalia ante rem"), 

 or continuously evolved in the several acts of 

 creation ("universalia in re"). Indeed for the 



