Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 3.djvu/573

 PHILOSOPHICAL PRESUMPTION. 557 was caused by the antagonism of the Dominican Realists to the Nominalism of the victim, and he deplores the rage which led the Thomists to regard every one who denied the existence of universals as though guilty of the sin against the Holy Ghost, and as a traitor to God, to the Christian religion, to justice, and to the State.* The annals of the schools are full of cases which show how the recklessness of disputatious logic led to subtleties most perilous in minute details of theology, and also how sensitive were the con- servators of the faith as to anything that might be construed by perverse ingenuity as savoring of heresy. Duns Scotus did not escape, nor Thomas Bradwardine ; William of Ockham and Buri- dan were enveloped in a common condemnation by the University of Paris, of which the latter had been rector. The boundaries be- tween philosophy and the theology which sought to define every- thing in the visible and invisible world were impossible of defini- tion, and it was a standing grievance that the philosophers were perpetually intruding on the domains of the theologians. When their daring speculations were unorthodox they sought to shelter themselves behind the assertion that according to the methods of philosophy the Catholic religion was erroneous and false, but that it was true as a matter of faith, and that they believed it accord- ingly. This only made matters worse, for, as the authorities pointed out, it assumed that there were two opposite truths, contradicting each other. It was not merely that orthodox sensitiveness Avas called upon to condemn, as was done in 1447 by the University of Louvain, such vain sophisms as the assertion that it is possible to conceive of a line a foot long which shall yet have neither begin- ning nor end, and that a whole may be in England while all its parts are in Rome ; or those of Jean Fabre, condemned by the Uni- versity of Paris in 1463, that any part of a man is a man, that one man is infinite men, that no man is ever corrupted, though some- times a man is corrupted — propositions in which lurked the' possi- bilities of heretical development — or the apparently yet more in- nocent grammatical obtuseness which recognized no difference between the phrases "the pot boils" and "pot, thou boilest" — an obtuseness which Erasmus tells us was regarded as an infallible 298, 302-4.— Baluz. et Mansi, II. ?93-6.— Isambert, X. 664-72.
 * 1) Bracked Instit. Hist. Philos. Ed. 1756, p. 530.— D'Argentre I. 11. 258-84,