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 died in 1342, and Occam, who had received from him the official seal of the order, was recognized as general by his party. The date of his death and the place of his burial are both uncertain. He probably died at Munich in 1349.

William of Occam was the most prominent intellectual leader in an age which witnessed the disintegration of the old scholastic realism, the rise of the theological scepticism of the later middle ages, the great contest between pope and emperor which laid the foundations of modern theories of government, and the quarrel between the Roman curia and the Franciscans which showed the long-concealed antagonism between the theories of Hildebrand and Francis of Assisi; and he shared in all these movements.

The common account of his philosophical position, that he reintroduced nominalism, which had been in decadence since the days of Roscellinus and Abelard, by teaching that universals were only flatus vocis, is scarcely correct. The expression is nowhere found in his writings. He revived nominalism by collecting and uniting isolated opinions upon the meaning of universals into a compact system, and popularized his views by associating them with the logical principles which were in his day commonly taught in the universities. He linked the doctrines of nominalism on to the principles of the logic of Psellus, which had been introduced into the West in the Summulae of Peter of Spain, and made them intelligible to common understandings. The fundamental principles of his system (see ) are that “Essentia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem” (“Occam’s Razor”), that nouns, like algebraical symbols, are merely denotative terms whose meaning is conventionally agreed upon (suppositio), and that the destructive effect of these principles in theological matters does not in any way destroy faith (see the Centilogium Theologicum, Lyons, 1495, and Tractatus de Sacramento Altaris).

OCCASIONALISM (Lat. occasio, an event), in philosophy, a term applied to that theory of the relation between matter and mind which postulates the intervention of God to bring about in the one a change which corresponds to a similar change in the other. The theory thus denies any direct interaction between matter and mind. It was expounded by Geulincx and Malebranche to avoid the difficulty of Descartes’s dualism of thought and extension, and to explain causation. Thus mind and matter are to Geulincx only the “occasional” causes of each other’s changes, while Malebranche, facing further the epistemological problem, maintains that mind cannot even know matter, which is merely the “occasion” of knowledge.

OCCLEVE (or ), THOMAS (1368–1450?), English poet, was born probably in 1368/9, for, writing in 1421/2 he says he was fifty-three years old (Dialog, i. 246). He ranks, like his more voluminous and better known contemporary Lydgate, among those poets who have a historical rather than intrinsic importance in English literature. Their work rarely if ever rises above mediocrity; in neither is there even any clear evidence of a poetic temperament. Yet they represented for the 15th century the literature of their time, and kept alive, however faintly, the torch handed on to them by their “maister” Chaucer, to whom Occleve pays an affectionate tribute in three passages in the De Regimine Principum. What is known of Occleve’s life has to be gathered mainly from his works. At eighteen or nineteen he obtained a clerkship in the Privy Seal Office, which he retained on and off, in spite of much grumbling, for about thirty-five years. He had hoped for a benefice, but none came; and in 1399 he received instead a small annuity, which was not always paid as regularly as he would have wished. “The Letter to Cupid,” his first poem to which we can affix a date, was translated from L’Epistre au Dieu d’Amours of Christine de Pisan in 1402, evidently as a sort of antidote to the moral of Troilus and Cressida, to some MSS. of which we find it attached. “La Male Regle,” one of his most readable poems, written about 1406, gives some interesting glimpses of his “misruly” youth. But about 1410 he settled down to married life, and the composition of moral and religious poems. His longest work, The Regement of Princes or De Regimine Principum, written for Prince Hal shortly before his accession, is a tedious homily on the virtues and vices, imitated from Aegidius de Colonna’s work of the same name, from the supposititious epistle of Aristotle, known as the Secreta secretorum, and the work of Jacques de Cessoles (fl. 1300) Englished later by Caxton as The Game and Playe of Chesse. It is relieved by a proem, about a third of the whole, containing some further reminiscences of London tavern and club life, in the form of dialogue between the poet and a beggar. On the accession of Henry V. Occleve turned his muse to the service of orthodoxy and the Church, and one of his poems is a remonstrance addressed to Oldcastle, calling upon him to “rise up, a manly knight, out of the slough of heresy.” Then a long illness was followed for a time, as he tells us, by insanity. His “Dialog with a Friend,” written after his recovery, gives a naïve and pathetic picture of the poor poet, now fifty-three, with sight and mind impaired, but with hopes still left of writing a tale he owes his good patron, Humphrey of Gloucester, and of translating a small Latin treatise, Scite Mori, before he dies. His hopes were fulfilled in