Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 3.djvu/571

 NOMINALISM AND REALISM. 555 While Bacon suffered because he antagonized the thought of his time, there was much of scholastic bitterness which escaped animadversion because it was the development of the tendencies of the age, and the schoolmen were allowed to indulge in endless wrangling for the most part without censure. The great quarrel between the Nominalists and the Realists occupies too large a space in the intellectual history of Europe to be wholly passed over, al- though its relation to our immediate subject is not intimate enough to justify detailed consideration. In the developed theory of the Realists, genera and species — the distinctive attributes of individual beings, or the conceptions of those attributes — are real entities, if not the only realities. In- dividuals are ephemeral existences which pass away ; the only things which survive are those which are universal and common to all. In man this is humanity, but humanity again is but a por- tion of a larger existence, the animate, and the animate is but a transitory form of an Infinite Being, which is All and nothing in particular. This is the sole Immutable. These conceptions took their origin in the Periphyseos of John Scot Erigena in the ninth century, whose reaction against the prevailing anthropomorphism led him to sublimated views of the Divine Being, which trenched closely on Pantheism. The heresy latent in his work lay undis- covered until developed by the Amaurians, when the book, after nearly four centuries, was condemned by Honorius III., in 1225.* Nominalism, on the other hand, regarded the individual as the primal substance ; universals are only abstractions or mental con- ceptions of qualities common to individuals, with no more of real- ity than the sounds which express them. Even as Realism in the hands of daring thinkers led to Pantheism, so, step by step, Nom- inalism could be brought to recognize the originality of the indi- vidual and finally to Atomism.f The two antagonistic schools were first clearly defined in the beginning of the twelfth century, with Roscelin, the teacher of Wood's Life of Bacon (Brewer, pp. xciv.-xcv.).— C.Muller, Die Anfange des Mi- noritenordens, pp. 104-5. 1. 14; iv. 5.— Alberic. Triuin Font. ann. 1225. f Tocco, p. 4.
 * Tocco, L'Heresia nel Medio Evo, p. 2.— J. Scoti Erigenae de Divis. Naturae