PHILOSOPHIC SCIENCES. 



the nature of God. Realism, therefore, has committed a grave and dangerous 

 error in attempting to explain the' nature of Divine ideas. God imagined 

 the world before creating it: St. Augusti7ie has stated this ; but is it necessary 

 to go any further? Why people the thought of God with element*, and 

 inti'lliijibles, and spiritual atoms ? To credit God himself with all these 

 imaginary things, does not this imply the placing of limits and bounds upon 

 his omnipotent will, and submitting Him, by analogy, to the same conditions 



Fig. 48. Italian Doctors (Fifteenth Century). Miniature of " The Life of St. Catherine of 

 Sienna." Manuscript in the Paris National Library. 



as his creatures ? Is it becoming to reduce the nature of God to a concep- 

 tion derived from experience, formed by human reason, representing a sum of 

 qualities abstract from things, but not defining the pure essence of God, 

 inasmuch as that mysterious essence escapes by its very nature all the investi- 

 gations of intuitive energy ? Such was the principal thesis of "William of 

 Ockham, who was the most thorough-going interpreter of nominalism during 

 the Middle Ages, 



