Page:Science and medieval thought. The Harveian oration delivered before the Royal College of Physicians, October 18, 1900 (IA sciencemedievalt00allbrich).pdf/35

 engaged more of the time and passions of men than for the house of Cæsar to conquer and govern the world; one indeed which even in our day and country is not wholly resolved.

The controversy lay between the Realists and

of due time, was first claimed as a Frenchman; then, as this "provenance" becomes untenable, he, and others, are called "Anglo-French." The University of Paris in the xırth century was no more France than Rome was Italy. In our sedentary arable life we do not realise the nomad habits of our forefathers. Edward the First would inhabit six distant castles in less than as many weeks; indeed Great Britain itself was then no island. The beroes, nay the armies, of Froissart's Story fly about the world in their seasons like migrating birds. All keen scholars of the West went to the University of Paris, the daughter of kings aud popes, and the intellectual centre not of a strip of kingdom between Anjou and the Empire, but of Europe itself. And of the scholars of Paris, Englishnen were, we hear, the most tur- bulent, but the boldest in argument and the most greedy of learning; this last character perhaps it is that now-a-days looks least Englishi. Kuno Fischer admires the procession of great Englishimcn down the highway of medieval thought, from Erigena to Francis Bacon. John was born at Salisbury, spent thirteen of his early years at the University of Paris, the best of them in the stormy service of Thomas Bocket, and but the last five as Bishop of Chartres. We do not call Lanfrane an Englishman, nor even Adrian the Fourth an Italian. 1 The name Realisin has been improperly used-improperly because previously engaged-to signify the conception of an objective world, from the play of which our impressions arise, and of which our impressions are, if not likenesses, at any rate symbols, as opposed to the name "Idealism" which, with a like violence, has been turned to signify the conception that