THE UNIVERSE. OCEANIC DISCOVERIES. 245 



paratory invigorating training of men's minds, and this, as well 

 as for other and more obvious reasons, in order that in the 

 often awakened contest between knowledge and faith, they 

 might- not be deterred by threatening forms, which even in 

 modern times have been unwisely regarded as forbidding 

 access to certain departments of experimental science. 



When touching on intellectual development, we may not 

 separate the animating influences of the conciousness of man's 

 just privilege of intellectual freedom, and the long unsatisfied 

 desire of wider fields of knowledge, embracing the more distant 

 regions of the surface of the earth. A series of such inde- 

 pendent thinkers might be named, beginning in the middle 

 ages with Duns Scotus, William of Occam, Nicholas of Cusa, 

 and continued through Ramus, Campanella and Giordano 

 Bruno to Descartes. ( 379 ) 



The apparently impassable "gulf between thinking and 

 being, thought and actual existence ; the relation between 

 the mind which recognises and the object recognised" divided 

 the Dialecticians into the two celebrated schools of the 

 Realists and the Nominalists. The almost forgotten con- 

 tests of these schools of the middle ages are here referred to, 

 because they exerted a material influence on the final 

 establishment of the basis of the experimental sciences. 

 After many fluctuations in the success of the two parties, the 

 victory finally remained in the 14th and 15th centuries with, 

 the Nominalists, who allow to external nature only a sub- 

 jective existence in the human mind. Prom their greater 

 aversion to empty abstractions they first urged the necessity 

 of experience, and the propriety of augmenting the bases 

 of knowledge, or recognition through the medium of the 

 senses. Thus, this direction of men's thoughts was at 



