594 THE MIDDLE AGES. A.D. 1049-1294.
at the same time, whether one angel can be in several places at the same time, and whether God loved the human race more than He loved Christ.1 Anselm, in his work on the Trinity, asked whether God could have taken on the female sex and why the Holy Spirit did not become incarnate. Of the former question, Walter of St. Victor, speaking of Peter the Lombard, very sensibly said that it would have been more rational for him to have asked why the Lombard did not appear on earth as an ass than for the Lombard to ask whether God could have become incarnate in female form. The famous discussion over the effect the eating of the host would have upon a mouse will be taken up in connection with the Lord's Supper. Albertus Magnus, Bonaventura, Thomas Aquinas, and others pondered over the problem. It was asked by Robert Pullen whether man in the resurrec tion will receive back the rib he lost in Eden, and whether a man will recover all the clippings of his finger nails.
Such endless discussions have been ridiculed as puerile and frivolous, though, as has already been said, they grew out of the desire to be exhaustive. At last and justly, they brought Scholasticism into disrepute. While it was losing itself in the clouds and mists of things transcendental, it neglected the earth at its feet. As the papacy passed sen tence upon itself by intolerable ambition, so Scholasticism undermined its authority by intellectual sophistries and was set aside by the practical interests of the Renaissance and Humanism and by simple faith, searching through the Scrip tures, to reach the living sympathy of Christ.2
§ 97. Realism and Nominalism.
The underlying philosophical problem of the Scholastic speculations was the real and independent existence of gen eral or generic concepts, called universalia or universals. Do they necessarily involve substantial being ? On this ques-
1 Peltier's ed., V. 38.
2 Thomas Fuller quaintly compared the Schoolmen to those who built their houses in London on small patches of ground " improving their small bottom with towering speculations."
§ 97. REALISM AND NOMINALISM. 595
tion the Schoolmen were divided into two camps, the Realists and the Nominalists.1 The question, which receives little attention now, was regarded as most important in the Mid dle Ages.
Realism taught that the universals are not mere generali zations of the mind but have a real existence. Following Plato, as he is represented by Aristotle, one class of Realists held that the universals are creative types, exemplars in the divine mind. Their view was stated in the expression — universalia ante rem — that is, the universals exist before the indi vidual, concrete object. The Aristotelian Realists held that the universals possess a real existence, but exist only in indi vidual things. This was the doctrine of universalia in re. Humanity, for example, is a universal having a real existence. Socrates partakes of it, and he is an individual man, distinct from other men. Anselm, representing the Platonic school, treated the universal humanity as having independent exist ence by itself. Duns Scotus, representing the second theory, found in the universal the basis of all classification and gives to it only in this sense a real existence.
The Nominalists taught that universals or general concep tions have no antecedent existence. They are mere names — nomina, flatus vocis, voces — and are derived from a comparison of individual things and their qualities. Thus beauty is a conception of the mind gotten from the observation of ob jects which are beautiful. The individual things are first observed and the universal, or abstract conception, is derived from it. This doctrine found statement in the expression universalia post rem, the universal becomes known after the individual. A modification of this view went by the name of Conceptualism, or the doctrine that universals have exist ence as conceptions in the mind, but not in real being.2
1H. Doergens, Lehre von d. Universalien, Heidelb., 1867; J. H. Lowe, D. Kampf zwischen d. Bealismus und Nominalismus im Mittelalter, Prag, 1876. Art. "Universalien," in Wetzer-Welte, XII. 305 sqq. The Histt. of Philosophy.
2 According to John of Salisbury there were no less than thirteen different shades of opinion on the subject. See Prantl, Gesch. der Logik, II. 118.