Little has changed except
the vocabulary and the method. The schools knew that their society
hung for life on the demonstration that God, the ultimate universal,
was a reality, out of which all other universal truths or realities
sprang. Truth was a real thing, outside of human experience. The
schools of Paris talked and thought of nothing else. John of Salisbury,
who attended Abelard's lectures about 1136, and became Bishop of
Chartres in 1176, seems to have been more surprised than we need be at
the intensity of the emotion. 'One never gets away from this question,'
he said. 'From whatever point a discussion starts, it is always led
back and attached to that. It is the madness of Rufus about Naevia;
"He thinks of nothing else; talks of nothing else, and if Naevia did
not exist, Rufus would be dumb."'
... "In these scholastic tournaments the two champions started from
opposite points:--one from the ultimate substance, God,--the
universal, the ideal, the type;--the other from the individual,
Socrates, the concrete, the observed fact of experience, the object
of sensual perception. The first champion--William in this instance--
assumed that the universal was a real thing; and for that reason he
was called a realist.
Pages:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25