Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/138

120 in the philosophical theory of the 'art.' Traces of conceptualism there certainly are long before Abailard's time. We may find them in the ninth century in the glosses of Heric of Auxerre, if not in Rabanus Maurus: in the eleventh the doctrine reappears in Berengar of Tours. But Abailard, though not the creator, was not the less the principal organiser and, for his own age, the founder of the school which lies intermediate between those of his two first masters. The system which he produced, if it was eclectic, was certainly nearer nominalism than realism: he conceded in fact the affirmations of both sides while denying the correctness of their negations. The main tenet of the nominalists, the absolute existence of the individual, he accepted; but he did not rigidly limit existence to that which is open to the senses. Genera and species, the categories and predicables, he refused indeed to endow with essence as things; they had no actual existence apart from the individual: nor was the universal, as William of Champeaux held, contained in its entirety within the particular. The process was the other way; it was from the particular that we arrived at the general by an effort of thought. On the other hand if the universals, if abstractions of all sorts, were the creations of the intellect, they were also its necessary creations; they were therefore so far real that the human mind could not do without them. In the same way Abailard found no difficulty in the universalia ante rem, the universals considered as anterior to the sensible world; since universals might equally be conceived in relation to the mind of God as to our own. The Platonic world of ideas was thus to be understood as existing in God's creative thought.

Abailard's conceptualism was probably the most reason-