Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/125

Rh Hence we know the author principally as a natural philosopher, it would be more accurate to say, as a cosmologer; and in this quality his writings are a good sample of the freedom of thought that issued from the classic calm of Chartres.

Bernard had found in his philosophy an adequate explanation of all the phaenomena of life, ethical and metaphysical as well as physical: and William was his true disciple; but with this difference, that he expanded the definition of philosophy so as to include theology. His views on this subject, there can be no doubt, he derived almost exclusively from the writings of Abailard; but if he was only a theologian at second hand, this was because his interest was still confined to the outward facts of nature. He borrowed from theology just so much as was necessary to elucidate the genesis and order of the universe, and beyond this he did not care to go. For the same reason he parted company with the realists before accepting that doctrine of ideas which others found the most attractive feature in Platonism. Alike in his o commentary on Boëthius's Consolation of Philosophy, a work of a comparatively early date, and in the p Dragmaticon which he wrote long afterwards with an avowedly apologetic purpose, we find the same reluctance to admit conclusions which, he plainly felt, did not belong to his proper field of enquiry. His business was with the external and tangible. The root of his system is disclosed in the sentence above quoted: By the knowledge of the creature we attain to a knowledge of the Creator. Nor was this any but a legitimate application of the habits of thought current in the schools of the time. Realism no less than nominalism, as Bernard and Theodoric are witness, had its q inevitable issues running counter to the accepted religion: yet the realists as a rule were disposed rather to compromise Christianity in favour of Plato than to loose hold of the universal truth of their philosophical theories. William of Conches treats the two authorities as practically coördinate, and, with the one exception to which we have