Page:Science and medieval thought. The Harveian oration delivered before the Royal College of Physicians, October 18, 1900 (IA sciencemedievalt00allbrich).pdf/37

31 in the ardour of research into the nature of being, the modes of individuating principles were distinguished or contrasted with an ingenuity incom- prehensible to Plato or Aristotle, or at any rate undesired by these greater thinkers. Aristotle avoided the question whether form or matter individuate; he held that there is no form and no matter extrinsic to the individual. But by the medieval realist every particular, every thing, was regarded as after some fashion the product of universal matter and individual form. Now "form" might be regarded, and severally was regarded, as a shaping, determinative force or principle, pattern type or mould, having real existence apart from stuff, or, on the other hand, as an abstract principle or pattern having no existence but as a con- ception of the mind of the observer. The realists roundly asserted that form is as actual as matter, and that things arise by their participation-without whiteness no white thing, without humanity no and not individuals only: for the realist, out-platonising Plato, genera and species also had their forms, either pre-existent ("universalia ante rem"), or continuously evolved in the several acts of creation ("universalia in re"). Indeed for the man;