His opponent--Abelard--held that the
universal was only nominally real; and on that account he was
called a nominalist. Truth, virtue, humanity, exist as units and
realities, said William. Truth, replied Abelard, is only the sum of
all possible facts that are true, as humanity is the sum of all
actual human beings. The ideal bed is a form, made by God, said
Plato. The ideal bed is a name, imagined by ourselves, said
Aristotle. 'I start from the universe,' said William. 'I start from
the atom,' said Abelard; and, once having started, they necessarily
came into collision at some point between the two."
In this "Story of My Misfortunes" Abelard gives his own account of
the triumphant manner in which he confounded his master, William,
but as Henry Adams says, "We should be more credulous than
twelfth-century monks, if we believed, on Abelard's word in 1135,
that in 1110 he had driven out of the schools the most accomplished
dialectician of the age by an objection so familiar that no other
dialectician was ever silenced by it--whatever may have been the
case with theologians-and so obvious that it could not have troubled
a scholar of fifteen. William stated a selected doctrine as old as
Plato; Abelard interposed an objection as old as Aristotle.
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