Page:The Mediaeval Mind Vol 2.djvu/389

CHAP. XXXVI of his notions of physics, of nature, of matter and form, of man's mind and body, and of the Triune Godhead. In his cosmology, however, we may note his imaginatively original employment of the conception or personification of Nature. God is the Creator, and Nature is His creature, and His viceregent or vicarious maker, working the generation and decay of things material and changeable. This thought, imaginatively treated, makes a good part of the poetry of the De planctu and the Anticlaudianus. The conception with him is full of charming fantasy, and we look back through Bernardus Silvestris and other writers to Plato's divine fooling in the Timaeus, not as the specific, but generic, origin of such imaginative views of the contents and generation of the world. Such imaginings were as fantasy to science, when compared with the solid and comprehensive consideration of the material world which was to come a few years after Alanus's death through the encyclopaedic Aristotelian knowledge presented in the works of Alexander of Hales and Albertus Magnus.