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extreme realist every " predicamental modality " 

 was "aliquid ens separatum"; for instance, the soul, 

 the active intellect, the passive intellect, and so on : 

 conversely, by fusing idea with will, for other 

 philosophers realism would get pushed back into 

 efficient reason or divine will, and almost vanish 1 . 

 By this latter route the Sorbonne, originally opposed 

 to the Thomists, became nominalist after all ; as 

 did those once pious realists the Augustinians 

 and Cistercians. Setting aside then the extreme 

 nominalists, who would have dissolved thought by 

 declaring all creatures to be so individual as to 

 be incomparable, " pulverising existence into de- 

 tached particulars," as some one has put it and 

 that names of kinds are mere nouns, or indeed 

 mere air (" flatus vocis "), the prevalent nominalists 

 were content to deny to ideas, forms, principles, or 

 abstractions any other existence than as functions 



1 The opponents of the theory of the Mass are apt to charge 

 the Roman Church with the proposition that therein the ele- 

 ments are changed into "real" flesh and blood. In the 

 nineteenth century, as in the thirteenth, this Church has not, I 

 believe, determined whether the "real " substance be corporeal 

 or incorporeal, separable or inseparable from the sensible pro- 

 perties of things; whether in a word it be something or, 

 as many of us would say, nothing at all. Spinoza regarded 

 "substance" as intelligent and extended. 



