During the later decades of the eleventh century and the first part of the twelfth, the topic most keenly debated by masters of logic and dialectic was that of 'universals', that is, of the degree of reality and significance attributable to the mental perception of a similarity between groups of individual beings that can only be expressed by a term common to all, such as man, horse or rose, with its abstract equivalent such as 'humanity' or 'human nature'. Sixty or seventy years ago, in the pioneering epoch of the history of medieval thought, this topic seemed to writers such as Haureau and Rashdall to bulk so large in the writings of the thinkers of the time as to be a characteristic, if not a defining, note of the whole period. This was a misconception. The debate on universals passed through its acute stage in half a century, after which the topic took its place among the many other philosophical questions of the age. It owed its apparent paramountcy to the circumstances of the schools at the end of the eleventh century, and fell into the background when the field of philosophical speculation was broadened. Nevertheless, for fifty years or more it exercised the minds and developed the talents of the most eminent masters, and deserves notice in any account of their thought.
The subject was not wholly a novel one; it is, especially in its metaphysical implications, basic to any system of thought, but it emerged as something new to the masters of the age of Anselm, and as one to which their text-books gave no complete answer. They were logicians and took it up, so to say, by its logical end, and in so doing gave it a new look. The Greek thinkers, taking it up on the physical level, had been led on to the levels of epistemology and metaphysics, and ultimately to that of theology. The early scholastics approached 98
it as a matter of terms and concepts, and it was some time before the metaphysical and epistemological implications became apparent.
The problem of universals, in its simplest form, is this. On the level of speech and grammar we say that Socrates is a man, and has a human nature. On the level of logic we say that he is an individual being or substance, one of a numerous species, to which we give the name man, of individuals who are united in the possession of common qualities, a common nature. Socrates, the individual being, has a right to his name; he comes before us, and a name designates him. But what of 'man' or humanity? That does not come before us, it is we who 'isolate' or 'invent' it for purposes of classification or argument. Has it the same logical worth as the name of the individual? The problem can scarcely be left at this level. Is a different mental process involved? Granted that any mental perception is valid, we have a direct perception of the individual man. But by what process do we recognize and define in thoughts and words the resemblances between two individual beings which lead us to say that each is a man or a rose? Is it a merely visual process? Or an intuitive one? Or some kind of recognition or memory or inward light? Or is it what we call an abstractive process of the reason? But this is not the end of the problem. What, in the last resort, are the individual being and its 'nature'? Are they no more than mental divisions of one thing? Is the individual more 'real' than its 'nature'? Or is the 'nature' the only reality, and if so, what is the relationship between it and the individual? Or, if they are both real and extra-mental, what is their relationship and how does the mind achieve knowledge of them? Plato, as we have seen, following up the attempts of the pre-Socratics to find an answer to the problem of identity amid change in the physical universe, found his own answer in the intellectual and real world of Forms or Ideas, of which the physical universe and its content, the individual objects of our experience, are either reflections or participants. Though thus throwing out a metaphysical theory of great and permanent fruitfulness, he never answered - he did not even consider - the precise problem of 'universals', for he never asserted, and it would indeed be absurd to assert, that a real and subsistent 'form' existed in relation to every 'universal'.
Aristotle, having to his own satisfaction demolished the Platonic subsistent forms, took up the problem as he took up all problems, on the level of the observed physical universe. His world was one of 'substances' and 'essences', of intellectual concepts of physical beings, the concepts being less real than the physical substances in their motions and activities, but more real as expressing the reason, order
and purpose of all things, which alone gave meaning to all and were in the deepest sense the constitutive principles of all. When Aristotle descended from metaphysics to epistemology, he saw the mind as abstracting from individuals the 'essence' or 'nature' which constituted them what they were - a real entity present in each individual substance which the mind could grasp and possess in all its intellectual fulness. For Aristotle this analysis of the process of cognition was bound up with physics as well as metaphysics by his doctrine that the 'essence' or definition attained by abstraction was also a scientific description that could be used as an instrument of research and knowledge on the physical level, but this part of his system can be cut off without necessarily implying the destruction of his epistemology.
Aristotle was also the author of a massive system of logic, which was consistent with, and indeed geared to, his epistemology and metaphysics, but as a lower discipline it could be used without reference to the higher levels of philosophy. In the event, the later Platonists and Neoplatonists retained this logic while adopting a modified form of Platonic epistemology and metaphysics which were, as we have seen, adopted, with further modification, by Augustine. Boethius, as we have also seen, intended, but never achieved, a vast presentation and final synthesis of Plato and Aristotle, but in fact left to posterity no more than an important section of Aristotelian logic. This logic, while on the one hand it was scarcely compatible with a Platonic epistemology, was not incompatible with a metaphysical scepticism, though Aristotle himself was no sceptic. Thus at the birth of scholasticism, as at its death, we find Aristotelian logic as the queen of the schools, and at both periods it was sometimes used in a critical or Nominalist sense. The masters of the eleventh century knew nothing of Aristotelian metaphysics and scarcely anything of Plato's Forms. They were moving only on the level of grammar and elementary logic. Nothing perhaps reveals more clearly the mental awakening of the age than their reaction to their text-books. For five centuries their predecessors had read the tags of Porphyry and Boethius and had remained asleep. Now, the same words produced an explosion. Boethius, translating Porphyry, had written: 'Now concerning genus and species, whether they have real existence or are merely and solely creations of the mind, and, if they exist, whether they are material or immaterial, and whether they are separate from the things we see or are contained within them - on all this I make no pronouncement.'1 In this
celebrated passage Porphyry, as will have been noticed, is moving on two levels without distinguishing them. Genus and species are here purely logical terms. In physical nature, the same individual being falls, in different relationships, into both, and indeed into an indefinite series of such classes. 'Eclipse' is a horse, a mammal, an animal, and so forth. This was something Plato had never discussed. On the other hand Porphyry goes on to apply to genus and species, at least as a possibility, the Platonic doctrine of transcendent and immanent forms. This confusion was not without its influence on the debate about universals. Similarly, the well-known pronouncement of Boethius, that the treatise about the Aristotelian 'predicamants' (i.e., substance, accident, etc.) was a matter of words, not of things,2 was equally a source of confusion. No ancient metaphysician had ever held that the components of the logical analysis of a substance were reflections of ideas or forms, nor even that they possessed an 'essence' or a real existence in their own right. But by using the terms 'things' and 'words' Boethius, even while denying real existence to the predicaments, seemed to imply that there was a possibility for a debate similar to that about genera and species, or about universals in general, while on the other hand his opposition of 'words' and 'things' was transferred to the 'universal' debate, and the alternatives of 'things' and 'words' were sometimes treated as exhaustive.
Nor were other elements of confusion lacking. On the one hand there was the influence of the grammarians and the later cult of Sprachlogik, with the doctrine that words have an essential relationship to the things they denote. On the other was the application of logical theories to theological topics. Thus, in particular, views as to the relationship of the individual to the universal were applied to the Persons in a single Godhead, either to confirm an opinion, or as a corollary of a particular view, and it was not to be expected that the theologians would remain silent in the matter.
The origins of the medieval debate on universals are still uncertain, but it seems clear that Roscelin of Compiegne (died c. 1 125), who taught at Tours and elsewhere, was, though probably not the founder of Nominalism, at least its first influential advocate. His only surviving writing is an unattractive letter on the Trinity to Abelard, and much of the scanty information we have of him comes from references by Anselm, including the familiar but much discussed description of the 'dialecticians, nay rather the heretics of dialectic,
who consider universal substances to be no more than vocal sounds' .3 Anselm was not himself a professional dialectician, and he was condemning, and with reason, the application of a questionable logical doctrine to the transcendent mysteries of the faith. His own use of the then ambiguous term 'substance' as applicable to universals invited confusion. Recent scholarship has tended to credit Roscelin with opinions less superficial than sheer Nominalism. He was reacting, we are told, against the current extreme realism which found subsistent reality in qualities and accidents of every kind, so that the individual existing being was merely a chance collection of characteristics, while reality lay in a world of multitudinous ideas. Roscelin, wishing to assert the reality of the existent individual, could only do so by asserting that any analysis or classification of the individual beings of our experience was a matter of words, not of things, in the well-known Boethian dichotomy. This may be so, but undoubtedly many of those who attacked him, or who subsequently wrote of him, understood his nominalism in a less subtle, more radical sense.
Among those who reacted against him was William of Champeaux, born c. 1070 and the pupil successively of Manegold of
Lautenbach (Paris), Anselm of Laon (Laon) and Roscelin (Compiegne). He himself taught in the cathedral school at Paris, whence he was driven by Abelard's attacks and entered the Augustinian abbey of St Victor, where he was one of the founders of the Victorine school of theology. His conversion, to Abelard's embittered mind, was a case of reculer pour mieux sauter; he did in fact emerge as bishop of Chalons-sur-Marne, where he became the trusted friend of St Bernard until his death in 1 121. Abelard's familiar phrases have turned the attention of most readers away from the solid reputation that William of Champeaux won for himself as a theologian. In the matter of universals, he originally taught extreme realism, that the nature of a being (e.g., humanity) was essentially and wholly present at one and the same time in every individual. When Abelard objected that this destroyed individuality, by leaving room for no particularity, William emended his thesis by substituting the Boethian term indifferenter ('in a similar fashion') for essential iter in his account of universals. This he explained by using the term status. Each individual had the same kind of essence or substance. This was far from being a satisfactory philosophical position, and it was under
3Anselm, Epistola de lncarnatione Verbi, c. I (ed. Schmitt, ii.9): 'Illi . . . nostri temporis dialectici, immo dialecticae heretici, qui non nisi flatum vocis esse putant universales substantias.'
Abelard's subsequent attacks that William of Champeaux, so we are told, withdrew from the fray.
How then does Abelard himself stand in the long story of the problem of universals? Here the excavation and publication of his dialectical treatises, chiefly by B. Geyer over fifty years ago, changed the whole picture of his activities and made of him a much more important figure in this field than he had previously appeared to be. Abelard was par excellence a logician, and it is not surprising that the publication of his works on logic should have enhanced his reputation. Reacting both against the realism held by almost all his predecessors and contemporaries, and exploding it with the dictum rem de re predicare monstrum -'it is absurd to predicate a thing about a thing' (e.g., 'Charles', the individual, 'is man', the universal) - and nullam rem de pluribus dici sed nomen tantum -'only a name, not a thing, can be applied to a group' - he wished also to avoid what he, at least, seems to have considered the sheer, material, nominalism of his first master Roscelin. Hence his early formula, 'the universal is a mere vocal sound (vox)', was soon changed to 'the universal is a mental word (sermo)'. This mental representation is more indistinct than the thing itself, for it omits all that the individual does not share with other individuals, and is within the mind, not outside it. Nevertheless, it is an adequate representation of the nature of the thing; it is not something other (aliud) than it, but the same thing perceived in different wise (aliter). The mind takes, 'abstracts', certain features from the thing which are identical with those seen in others of the group. Abelard, it should be added, remains throughout his logical works on the logical plane; he never discusses the metaphysical implications. Yet, when it is remembered that he knew nothing of either the De anima or the Metaphysics of Aristotle, his anticipation of the Aristotelian doctrine of abstraction and moderate realism is very striking. Even Aquinas did little to develop this particular aspect, and indeed uses phrases which recall, if they do not exactly repeat, the phrases of Abelard. It may be added that Abelard, here also followed by Aquinas, while abandoning the Platonic ideas as a logical or metaphysical coefficient, retained them as an exemplary cause of created beings in the mind of God.
Abelard's celebrity precisely as a logician must have helped to plant his teaching firmly in the schools, but there is very scanty logical or metaphysical literature in the period that follows save from the School of Chartres. The Chartrains were throughout Platonists, so far as any thinker could be truly Platonist at a time when only the Timaeus (or at least a great part of it) was available from among all
the dialogues of Plato. 4 Naturally, therefore, they were extreme realists in the matter of universals, and made use, in one way or another, of the Platonic ideas. Bernard of Chartres, the first of the twelfth-century masters, evolved a doctrine of logic, epistemology and metaphysics which was accepted with some modifications by his successors at Chartres, and upon which his logical presentation of universals depended. It was an endeavour to harmonize the teaching of Plato and Aristotle as he understood them.
According to Bernard, there were three kinds of being apart from the Being of God, viz., the eternal ideas or forms of all created being, which were present to the mind of God from all eternity, and which had no contact with the material universe; the created ideas (nativae formae) based on the eternal ideas, examples of an exemplar, which, when subsistent in matter, made up all perishable things; and formless matter. These formae nativae, created with the creation of each separate thing, had a universal mode of existence and remained the same amid all the flux of sensible things. They alone were corporeal being and were known by the mind in their own form. A later master, Thierry, accepting in part the doctrine of forms, posited a Form of all the other forms, and asserted that the Form of God contained all other forms. This, the 'pantheism of Chartres', was taken up by Thierry's successors, though it never rose to be a formal heresy.
The greatest of all the masters of Chartres, Gilbert de Ia Porree, was likewise a pupil of Bernard. He took over almost in its entirety Bernard's teaching on universals, but endeavoured to amalgamate Plato and Aristotle, joining together Aristotle's conception of a universal as that which by nature is predicated of many things (quod natum est de pluribus praedicari) with Bernard's conception of nativae formae. His chief contribution to epistemology and metaphysics was a distinction derived ultimately from Boethius between substance (quod est, that which is) and subsistence (quo est, that by which a thing exists). Universals are subsistences but not existing substances; subsistences play the part of forms to the substances. The understanding abstracts or collects (colligit) the universal, which is but which does not subsist (quod est sed non substat), from particular things which both are and subsist (sunt et substant). To this was added the doctrine of eternal ideas in God, and the whole formed a strong metaphysical realism, though the mental process of knowing was by abstraction from particulars, not by
4Plato"s Meno was translated in the twelfth century, but did not become widely read.
intuition of the ideas. To this opinion John of Salisbury adhered in general, while remaining without a decided opinion on many points where doubt was permissible through disagreement among authorities.
With Gilbert de la Porree the topic of universals reached its fullest exposition and ceased for a time to occupy the interests of the schools. What may be called the Aristotelian-Boethian period had come to an end. The logicians, using what they could of Aristotle and the Aristotelian writings of Boethius, had come, in the person of Abelard, very near to the position of Aristotle himself, metaphysics apart. The