OCEANIC DISCOVERIES. 617 



the object that is recognised separated the dialectics into the 

 two celebrated schools of realists and nominalists. The almost 

 forgotten contests of these schools of the middle ages deserve 

 a notice here, because they exercised a special influence on 

 the final establishment of the experimental sciences. The 

 nominalists, who ascribed to general ideas of objects only a 

 subjective existence in the human mind, finally remained the 

 dominant party in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, after 

 having undergone various fluctuations of success. From 

 their greater aversion to mere empty abstractions, they urged 

 before all the necessity of experiment, and of the increase of 

 the materials for establishing a sensuous basis of knowledge. 

 This direction was at least influential in favouring the culti- 

 vation of empirical science ; but even among those with whom 

 the realistic views were maintained, an acquaintance with 

 the literature of the Arabs had successfully opposed a taste 

 for natural investigation against the all-absorbing sway of 

 theology. Thus we see that in the different periods of the 

 middle ages, to which we have perhaps been accustomed to 

 ascribe too strong a character of unity, the great work of 

 discoveries in remote parts of the earth, and their happy 

 adaptation to the extension of the cosmical sphere of ideas, 

 were gradually being prepared on wholly different paths and 

 in purely ideal and empirical directions. 



Natural science was intimately associated with medicine and 

 philosophy amongst the learned Arabs, and in the Christian 

 middle ages with theological polemics. The latter from their 

 tendency to assert an exclusive influence, repressed empirical 

 enquiry in the departments of physics, organic morphology, 

 and astronomy, which was for the most part closely allied to 

 astrology. The study of the comprehensive works of Aristotle 

 which had been introduced by Arabs and Jewish Rabbis, had 

 tended to lead to a philosophical fusion of all branches of 

 study ;* 4 and hence Ibn-Sina (Avicenna) and Ibn-Roschd 

 (Averroes), Albertus Magnus, and Roger Bacon, passed for 

 the representatives of all the knowledge of their time. The 

 fame which in the middle ages surrounded the names of these 

 great men was proportionate to the general diffusion of this 

 opinion of their endowments. 



* Jourdain, Sur Us trad. d'Aristote, p. 236; and Michael Sachs, 

 J>ie religiose Poesie der Judenin Spanien, 1845, s. 180-200. 



