Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 17.djvu/776

718 OCCAM old scholastic realism, the rise of the theological scepticism of the later Middle Ages, the great contest between pope and emperor which laid the foundations of modern theories of government, and the quarrel between the Roman curia and the Franciscans which showed the long-concealed an tagonism between the theories of Hildebrand and Francis of Assisi ; and he shared in all these movements. The common account of his philosophical position, that he reintroduced nominalism, which had been in decadence since the days of Roscellinus and Abelard, by teaching that universals were only flatus vods, is scarcely correct. The expression is nowhere found in his writings. He revived nominalism by collecting and uniting isolated opinions upon the meaning of universals into a compact system, and popularized his views by associating them with the logical principles which were in his day commonly taught in the universities. He linked the doctrines of nominalism on to the principles of the logic of Psellus, which had been intro duced into the West in the Summulse of Peter of Spain, and made them intelligible to common understandings. His philosophical teaching contains little that was new ; and all the details of nominalism had been taught by writers who preceded him. The problem of mediaeval philosophy, however differently stated, was the same question which faces modern thinkers. How comes it that things which are seen as separate individual objects can be thought of in classes, and so science created ? What underlies the possibility of using common nouns when everything appre hended by the senses is a separate subsisting phenomenon 1 Realism solved the problem by supposing something in rerum natura which actually corresponded to the class, and whose proper name was the common noun ; nominalism explained that the logical faculties of the mind grouped individuals by its own powers, and that universals were creations of the mind which thought. The three chief positions in the nominalist solution of the possibility of a common knowledge were all the common property of scho lastic thinkers before Occam s day. It had been currently taught (by ^Egidius and by Antonius Andreas) that the principal use of universals, whatever they were in them selves, was to serve as logical predicates, and in this way bring a variety of subjects together, or, in other words, group individual things in a class. Many of the schoolmen (Walter Burleigh, Durandus, ifec.) declared that this logical function of universals Avas the one thing about them that deserved notice and constituted their essential nature. Durandus and others had asserted that all that universals did was in this logical fashion to bring together several individual objects in such a way that they could be denoted by the same common term. These propositions really ex haust the essential doctrines of nominalism, and they were all stated and were the common property of scholastic philosophy before Occam s time. What he did was to make nominalism simpler by introducing a way of putting the theory suggested by the Byzantine logic. Psellus and his followers explained many difficulties in logic by showing that in speech words were used like the figures of arithmetic or the signs of algebra. There is no reason why x should mean four sheep except the will of the algebraist who starts with that assumption. In the same way, there is no reason why the word " triangle " should stand for the thought it expresses, or the thought for the infinitude of individual triangles ; but by suppositio the one is used for the other, and we can reason with word or thought just as the algebraist can do with his signs. Universals, said Occam, bore the same relation to the infinite number of individuals that signs do to the things signified. The universal, be it a thought or a word, is nothing but a sign which by suppo sitio is beforehand taken to denote a number of individual things, and is thus the common noun denoting them all. This way of explaining community of knowledge and of defending nominalism went a good deal deeper, and became a theory of knowledge which led Occam into what was called theological scepticism. Most of the adherents of the mystical schools of the Middle Ages held that the doc trines of the church were isolated truths, each of which was to be received by a species of enthusiastic intuition, and were incapable either of systematic arrangement in a body of divinity or of being intelligibly comprehended by the mind. Before Occam appeared, mystics taught a theory of theological scepticism which declared that the truths of the Christian faith were to be taken on trust, although the reason might find logical flaws in each one of them. Occam made this theological scepticism almost a commonplace by basing it on his theory of knowledge. All knowledge, he taught, contained a double inadequacy, which arose from the needs of thinking and of expressing thought in language. Words were but signs, inadequate representations of the thoughts they stood for, and the thoughts themselves were inadequate symbols used by sup positio instead of the individual objects which they repre sented. The real individual thing was apprehended by a vis intuitiva, in sense, vision, or touch, &c., but, when the mind begins to think or to argue, error may creep in, for thoughts are inadequate expressions, stereotyped aspects, and words are only signs of signs. Theological knowledge is like all other knowledge, theological argumentation has the inadequacy that belongs to every process of thought. The Centilogium Theologicum usually appended to Occam s Commentary on the Sentences of Peter the Lombard contains a consistent application of this theory of knowledge to theo logical dogmas, every one of which is shown to be irrational, but at the same time true in the vision of faith. The most interesting application of his method, however, is to be found in the Tractatus de Sacramento Altaris, in which, while accepting as a matter of faith the mediaeval doctrine of the real presence, Occam shows that a much more rational theory might be propounded, and actually sets forth a theory of the Eucharist which was afterwards adopted almost verbatim by Luther, and which is now known as consubstantiation. Occam was best known during his lifetime and in the succeeding centuries for the part he took in the prolonged contest between Louis of Bavaria and the papal curia. Louis had been legally elected emperor of Germany, but the pope, who claimed that his power to crown gave him the right to veto any election, refused to acknowledge Louis, and espoused the cause of his rival. The contest was prolonged during more than a quarter of a century, and its interest lies chiefly in the writings of a group of men who, sheltered at Munich, published their views on the relations between civil and religious authority, and on the rights of nations. The most remarkable of the many publications which this controversy called forth was undoubtedly the Defensor Pads of Marsilius of Padua, which appeared in 1324 or 1326, and which was the pre diction of the modern, as Dante s De Monarchia (1311- 13) was the epitaph of the mediaeval state. Occam published several treatises in which, Avhile he confines him self more to the details of the controversy going on before him, there are evident traces of sympathy with the opin ions of Marsilius. Pope Clement VI. has left on record that Marsilius " was taught his errors by and got them from " William of Occam ; if this be true, the Italian jurist must have had private intercourse with the great English schoolman, for all Occam s genuine writings on the contro versy appeared after the Defensor Pads. In the Opus nonaginta dierum (1330-33), and in its successors, the Tractatus de dogmatibus Johannis XXII. papse (1333-34), the Compendium errorum Johannis XXII. papse, (1 335-38),