34 



Even Francis Bacon, who was deeply indebted to 

 Aristotle, never extricated himself from the tangle 

 of form, cause and law 1 . 



Now this was a great argument, no empty 

 dispute ; the bones of dead controversies cumber 



/ the ground, but no controversy was empty which 

 moved profoundly the minds and passions of men : 

 both for ecclesiastical and secular thought the 

 dispute was grave. While realism was essential 

 to the Church for instance, on realist grounds 



\ St Anselm defended the medieval doctrine of the 

 Trinity against Roscellinus; the Church herself 



while in Met. Z, and elsewhere, the primary existent is the 

 form. The inconsistency is, however, more apparent than 

 real ; for in the Categories it is the individual so far as he 

 represents his natural kind which is primarily existent, whilst 

 the form which in the Metaphysics is primarily existent occurs 

 only in the individual. This terse appreciation is one of my 

 many debts to Dr Jackson. 



1 It were almost to be desired, for our own lucidity, that 

 we could get rid of the words cause and law, and use language 

 significant of order only. Aristotle's influence has weighed 

 heavily in favour of studying " Causes " rather than sequences ; 

 thus it is hard to clear our own minds, and impossible to clear 

 the minds of our pupils, of a genetic notion of causation 

 that an effect comes, as it were, from the womb of its causes. 

 Even Ockham taught as if causes contained their effects. 

 Mr Marshall (West. Rev. loc. cit.) is of opinion that Roger 

 Bacon by his "non oportet causas investigare" intended to 

 confine scientific thought to the relations of phenomena. 



