Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 21.djvu/442

Rh 420 SCHOLASTICISM does not separate his Platonic theory of pre-existent exemplars from the Aristotelian doctrine of the universal as in the individuals. As Ueberweg points out, his theory is rather a result of the transference of the Aristotelian conception of substance to the Platonic Idea, and of an identification of the relation of accidents to the substance in which they inhere with that of the individuals to the Idea of which, in the Platonic doctrine, they are copies (Hist, of Philosophy, i. 363, Eng. trans.). Hence it may be said that the universals are in the individuals, constitut- ing their essential reality (and it is an express part of Erigena's system that the created but creative Word, the second division of Nature, should pass into the third stage of created and non-creating things); or rather, perhaps, we ought to say that the individuals exist in the bosom of their universal. At all events, while Erigena's Realism is pronounced, the Platonic and Aristotelian forms of the doctrine are not distinguished in his writings. Prantl has professed to find the headstream of Nominalism also in Scotus Erigena ; but beyond the fact that he discusses at considerable length the categories of thought and their mutual relations, occasionally using the term " voces " to express his meaning, Prantl appears to adduce no reasons for an assertion which directly contradicts Erigena's most fundamental doctrines. Moreover Erigena again and again declares that dialectic has to do with the stadia of a real or divine classification : " Intelligitur quod ars ilia, quae dividit genera in species et species in genera resolvit, quae SioAeK-ri/o; dicitur, non ab humanis machinationibus sit facta, sed in natura rerum ab auctore omnium artium, quae verae artes sunt, condita et a sapientibus inventa " (De Division* Naturae, iv. 4). The immediate influence of Erigena's system cannot have been great, and his works seem soon to have dropped out of notice in the centuries that followed. The real germs of Realism and Nominalism, as they took shape in mediaeval thought, are to be found in the 9th century, in scattered commentaries and glosses (mostly still in manu- script) upon the statements of Porphyry and Boetius. Influ- Boetius in commenting upon Porphyry had already race of g ta r ted the discussion as to the nature of universals. He is definitely anti-Platonic, and his language sometimes takes even a nominalistic tone, as when he declares that the species is nothing more than a thought or conception gathered from the substantial similarity of a number of dissimilar individuals. The expression " substantial simi- larity" is still, however, sufficiently vague to cover a multitude of views. He concludes that the genera and species exist as universals only in thought ; but, inasmuch as they are collected from singulars on account of a real resemblance, they have a certain existence independently of the mind, but not an existence disjoined from the singulars of sense. " Subsistunt ergo circa sensibilia, intelliguntur autem praeter corpora." Or, according to the phrase which recurs so often during the Middle Ages, " universale intelligitur, singulare sentitur." Boetius ends by declining to adjudicate between Plato and Aristotle, remarking in a semi-apologetic style that, if he has ex- pounded Aristotle's opinion by preference, his course is justified by the fact that he is commenting upon an intro- duction to Aristotle. And, indeed, his discussion cannot claim to be more than semi-popular in character. The point in dispute has not in his hands the all-absorbing importance it afterwards attained, and the keenness of later distinctions is as yet unknown. In this way, how- ever, though the distinctions drawn may still be compara- tively vague, there existed in the schools a Peripatetic tradition to set over against the Neoplatonic influence of John the Scot, and amongst the earliest remains of Scho- lastic thought we find this tradition asserting itself some- Boetius. what vigorously. There were Nominalists before Roscel- linus among these early thinkers. Alcuin, the first head of the school of the Palace, does nothing more in his Dialectic than abridge Boetius and the other commentators. But in the school of Fulda, pre- sided over by his pupil Hrabanus Maurus (776-856), there are to be found some fresh contributions to the discussion. The collected works of Hrabanus himself contain nothing new, but in some glosses on Aristotle and Porphyry, first exhumed by Cousin, there are several noteworthy expressions of opinion in a Nominalistic sense. The author interprets Boetius's meaning to be "Quodeadem res individuum et species et genus est, et non esse univer- salia individuis quasi quoddam diversum." He also cites, apparently with approval, the view of those who held Porphyry's treatise to be not de quinque relnis, but de quinque. vocibus. A genus, they said, is essen- tially something which is predicated of a subject ; but a thing cannot be a predicate (res enim non praedicatur). These glosses, it, should be added, however, have been attributed by Prantl and Kaulich, on the ground of diver- gence from doctrines contained in the published works of Hrabanus, to some disciple of his rather than to Hrabanus himself. Fulda had become through the teaching of the latter an intellectual centre. Eric or Heiricus, who studied there under Haimon, the successor of Hrabanus, and afterwards taught at Auxerre, wrote glosses on the margin of his copy of the pseudo-Augustinian Categoriae, which have been published by Cousin and Haureau. He there says in words which recall the language of Locke (Essay, iii. 3) that because proper names are innumerable, and no intellect or memory would suffice for the knowing of them, they are all as it were comprehended in the species (" Sciendum autem, quia propria nornina primum sunt innumerabilia, ad quae cognoscenda intellectus nullus seu memoria sufficit, haec ergo omnia coartata species com- prehendit, et facit primum gradum "). Taken in their strictness, these words state the position of extreme Nominalism ; but even if we were not forbidden to do so by other passages, in which the doctrine of moderate Realism is adopted (under cover of the current distinction between the singular as felt and the pure universal as understood), it would still be unfair to press any passage in the writings of this period. As Cousin says, "Realism and Nominalism were undoubtedly there in germ, but their true principles with their necessary consequences remained profoundly unknown ; their connexion with all the great questions of religion and politics was not even suspected. The two systems were nothing more as yet than two different ways of interpreting a phrase of Porphyry, and they remained unnoticed in the obscurity of the schools. . . . It was the llth century which gave Nominalism to the world." x Remi or Remigius of Auxerre, pupil of Eric, became the most celebrated professor of dialectic in the Parisian schools of the 10th century. As he reverted to Realism, his influence, first at Rheims and then in Paris, was doubtless instrumental in bringing about the general acceptance of that doctrine till the advent of Roscellinus as a powerful disturbing influence. " There is one genus more general than the rest," says Remi (apud Haureau, De la Philosophic Scolastique, i. 146), " beyond which the intellect cannot rise, called by the Greeks ova-La, by the Latins essentia. The essence, indeed, comprehends all natures, and everything that exists is a portion of this essence, by participation in which everything that is hath its existence." And similarly with the intermediate genera. " Homo est multorum hominum substantialis unitas." Remigius is thus a Realist, as Haureau remarks, 1 Ouvrages in4dits d'Atelard, Introd., p. Ixxxv. Hrabi Maur Eric. Remi,