Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/311

Rh in 1107. We cannot, then, be sure that they are anterior to Berengar of Tours, or even to Roscelin.

 

1. Author:Saint Anselm has been generally regarded as the first writer in the course of the middle ages who put forth a formal argument in favour of the existence of a God. Dr. von Prantl, however, claims the priority for William abbat of Hirschau, and infers from the fact that William is known to have been in correspondence with Anselm, at a date anterior to the publication of his Monologium, that the latter derived from William the idea of framing the argument in question. Dr. von Prantl's hypothesis is contained in a paper printed in the first part of the Sitzungsberichte der königlich Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu München for 1861; and his results on the particular point which I have stated are given in full in his m Geschichte der Logik im Abendlande. The two arguments, however, are quite different, William's resting  upon the design and orderly government of the universe, while Anselm's proceeds from the existence of relative good to that of an absolute Good; a reasoning which he subsequently exchanged for the simple proof that the being of God is implied in our thought of him. Besides, it is clear that the link sought to be established is at best a plausible conjecture: we have no evidence that the two men corresponded on the subject. Still it would be a sufficiently interesting coincidence if we could show that the first attempt among Christians during the middle ages to prove the existence of a God suggested itself to these two contemporaries.

2. Dr. von Prantl thinks that the argument was derived from Constantine the Carthaginian, afterwards a monk of 