Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/260

242 books are the later in point of time. In fact, while the former quite overleaps the confines of the middle ages, Ockham preserves the orderly sequence and continuity of medieval thought: and more than this, while Marsiglio in the daring of his speculation stands absolutely alone and without a successor, Ockham, in virtue of his greater conformity to the spirit of his day, not to speak of his eminence as a philosopher, unequalled among contemporaries and hardly surpassed by Thomas Aquinas or John Duns Scotus, handed down a light which was never suffered to be extinguished, and which served as a beacon to pioneers of reform like Wycliffe and Huss. In politics, as well as in some points of doctrine, Ockham may be claimed as a precursor of the German reformers of the sixteenth century; but Marsiglio exercised little direct influence on the movement of thought. The truths which he brought into view had to be rediscovered, without even the knowledge that he had found them out beforehand, by the political philosophers of modern times.

Ockham indeed, with a philosophy that directly tended towards rationalism, was by far the more practical speculator than his swifter and bolder fellow-worker. He was more sensible of the difficulty, of the almost hope less intricacy, of the problems that called for solution. As strenuous as any man in contesting the 'plenitude of power' arrogated for the papacy, he was unwilling to transfer it to any other individual or to any body of human beings. The pope was no supreme autocrat; indeed the emperor was within certain limitations his