4 8 PHILOSOPHIC SCIENCES. 



close of the eleventh century, an extraordinary importance, when a canon of 

 Compiegne, Roscelin, maintained that all reality is in the individual ; that 

 general ideas, or the itnirersafs, as they were then called, have no real object ; 

 that they are purely verbal abstractions, mere words, noniinn; whence the term 

 nominalism applied to this doctrine. His opponents, who attributed to the 

 universal? a certain amount of reality, were called realists. Roscelin, applying 

 his theory to the dogma of the Trinity, argued that the three Divine Persons, 

 having only in common the resemblance or identity of power and will, 

 constitute three distinct beings, and, so to speak, three Gods. 



St. Anselm protested, in the name of the Church, against this interpre- 

 tation of the dogma, of which it was the negation. Condemned in 1092 by 

 the Council of Soissons, Roscelin retracted ; but the discussion which he 

 had raised was destined to last a long time. The school was divided into 

 two camps : upon the one side the nominalists who, in presence of the 

 anathema launched against Roscelin, scarcely dared to avow their opinions ; 

 upon the other the realists, amongst whom may be mentioned, besides 

 St. Anselm, Odo of Cambrai, Hildebert of Lavardin, and William of Cham- 

 peaux. The last mentioned, who died Bishop of Chalons-sur-Marne in 1120, 

 expounded the doctrine of realism in the schools of Paris, at the cloister of 

 Notre- Dame, and at the Abbey of St. Victor. The original part of his 

 teaching was the theory of the universal. He maintained that as the 

 universal is the primitive substance properly so called, individuals are merely 

 modalities or fashions of being, who manifest themselves, soon to disappear, 

 upon the surface of the unique and indivisible subject. Pressing the con- 

 sequences of his system a little further, he would have been brought to deny 

 human personality and liberty an error from which he was saved by the 

 sincerity of his religious faith. William of Champeaux none the less 

 recognised reason as the arbiter of natural philosophy, and his disciple, 

 Bernard of Chartres, declared that human thought is an emanation of the 

 Divine thought. 



Pierre Abelard had at first followed the lessons of William of Champeaux, 

 but he afterwards declared against him and the realist doctors in a public 

 course of philosophy which he commenced on his own account, without any 

 patronage sine magistro, as his rivals tauntingly said. From the very first 

 his success was so great that thousands of enthusiastic hearers assembled to 

 listen to his arguments and embrace his doctrine. He outdid his predecessors 



