Monte Cassino, who died before the year 1072, and who
had acquired it, together with the physical learning for
which he was famous, during a scholar s life of near forty
years in the Mohammadan east. It is certain that the
argument from design appears in Arabian philosophy
a century earlier,[1] but there is no hint that it occurs in
Constantine’s writings. William, it is added, was in Rome
in 1075, a few years after Constantine s death, and may
then have made the acquaintance with the latter s books,
which his own productions show him to have turned to
good account. We have, however, no information as to
the date at which William himself wrote the treatise ; and
an examination of the book will soon show us that it is
really later by a couple of generations than its supposed
date, and has only by a blunder been attributed to William
of Hirschau.
3. The little volume of Philosophicarum el astronomicarum Institutiomim Guilielmi Hirsaugiensis dim Abbatis Libri tres, which was printed at Basle in 1531, quarto, is textually the same book with the Ueol Aiddgecav sive Elementorum aopp. 2 . 311- Philosophiae Libri IV, printed among the works of n Bede in the Basle edition of 1563, folio. This Ileql Aiddgean , however, although it is actually quoted as Bede s, and as a possible source of an opinion of Abailard, by so accom- oAbeiard 2 . plished a scholar as Charles de Remusat, has been generally 223 n., 307 n. recogn i se( j as t he work of William of Conches, certainly p vol. 2. 1230. since the publication of P Oudin s Commentarius de Scrip- o PP. 457-462. toribus Ecdesiasticis, and of the a twelfth volume of the Histoire litteraire de la France. As long ago too as 1838 Charles Jourdain pointed out that the work in question existed also in the twentieth volume of the Lyons Maxima Bibliotheca Patrum the title De Philosophia Mundi, and under the name of Honorius of Autun ;[2] and neither
- ↑ See the passage cited in the Sitzun^sberichte, ubi supra, p. 20, n 55 from Dieterici, Die Natur- anschauung und Naturphilosophie der Araber im zehnten Jahrhun- dert, p. 162 ; Berlin 1801.
- ↑ Jourdain claims the discovery in the Notices et Extraits des Manuscrits, 20 (2) 43, n. J Histoire litteraire impartially de- scribes the same work under the head both of Honorius (vol. 12. 178 sq.) and of William of Conches. M. Haureau, Smgulantes nis-
