Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/111

Rh was an old-fashioned realist, found his position menaced by the increasing popularity of a certain Raimbert and a whole school of nominalists at Lille; since it was observed that the lectures of the latter had a much more practical result in training men to reasoning and to readiness of speech; maxime quia eorum lectiones ad exercitium disputandi vel eloquentiae, imo loquacitatis et facundiae, plus valere dicebant. Yet there could be no fault in Odo, for he departed not from the doctrine of the ancients. Thus exercised in his mind, therefore, one of the canons of the church had recourse to a wizard, who unhesitatingly declared in favour of the realist. To him realism had indeed the support of authority; and the fact expressed under this grotesque guise still holds good in a more reasonable form when we approach the master to whose credit is usually assigned the establishment of realism. The distinction of the parties is still the same; the realism of William of Champeaux, like that of saint Anselm, proceeds from a metaphysical rather than a logical starting-point.

But the dialectical spirit was now too strong to endure a subordinate rank: it animated the realists, now that William of Champeaux had given them a tangible formula, just as vigorously as the nominalists. But the formula was no sooner discovered than the appearance of Abailard, and his criticism first of one side and then of the other, drove each to its defences. The immediate effect of this disturbance was to break up the parties into manifold subdivisions. John of Salisbury, the acutest historian of the movement, reckons no less than ten distinct positions on the mam dialectical problem, and this enumeration is not exhaustive. With this universal outburst of criticism the intellectual history of the middle ages enters into its second youth. The interval of darkness is now quite past. The age of the church schools is about to be succeeded by the age of the universities. The nature