"
These considerations troubled Abelard not at all. He was conscious
of a mind of singular acuteness and a tongue of parts, both of
which would do whatever he willed. Beneath all the tumultuous talk
of Paris, when he first arrived there, lay the great and unsolved
problem of Universals and this he promptly made his own, rushing in
where others feared to tread. William of Champeaux had rested on a
Platonic basis, Abelard assumed that of Aristotle, and the clash
began. It is not a lucid subject, but the best abstract may be
found in Chapter XIV of Henry Adams' "Mont-Saint-Michel and
Chartres" while this and the two succeeding chapters give the most
luminous and vivacious account of the principles at issue in
this most vital of intellectual feuds.
"According to the latest authorities, the doctrine of universals
which convulsed the schools of the twelfth century has never
received an adequate answer. What is a species: what is a genus or
a family or an order? More or less convenient terms of classification,
about which the twelfth century cared very little, while it cared
deeply about the essence of classes! Science has become too complex
to affirm the existence of universal truths, but it strives for
nothing else, and disputes the problem, within its own limits,
almost as earnestly as in the twelfth century, when the whole field
of human and superhuman activity was shut between these barriers
of substance, universals, and particulars.
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