Page:Science and medieval thought. The Harveian oration delivered before the Royal College of Physicians, October 18, 1900 (IA sciencemedievalt00allbrich).pdf/38

32 extreme realist every "predicamental modality" was "aliquid ens separatum"; for instance, the soul, the active intellect, the passive intellect, and so on: conversely, by fusing idea with will, for other philosophers realism would get pushed back into efficient reason or divine will, and almost vanish³. By this latter route the Sorbonne, originally opposed to the Thomists, became nominalist after all; as did those once pions realists the Augustinians and Cistercians. Setting aside then the extreme nominalists, who would have dissolved thought by declaring all creatures to be so individual as to be incomparable,-"pulverising existence into de- tached particulars," as some one has put it and that names of kinds are mere nouns, or indeed mere air ("flatus vocis "), the prevalent nominalists were content to deny to ideas, forms, principles, or abstractions any other existence than as functions

1 The opponents of the theory of the Mass are apt to charge the Roman Church with the proposition that therein the ele- ments are changed into "real" flesh and blood. In the nineteenth century, as in the thirteenth, this Church has not, I believe, determinod whether the "real" substance be corporeal or incorporeal, separable or inseparable from the sensible pro- perties of things; whether in a word it be something or, as many of us would say, nothing at all. Spinoza regarded "substance" as intelligent and extended.