and churchmen, till they were revived in the schools of Alcuin and Charlemagne.
Philosophy soon passed into scholasticism, and was confined to the dogmas of the Church; and throughout the Middle Ages we find two great hostile camps among the Schoolmen—the Realists and Nominalists—each fighting under the shadow of a great name; Plato being the first (said Milton) "who brought the monster of Realism into the schools," in his doctrine of Ideas, so sharply criticised by Aristotle. The question at issue between these two parties was whether Universals had a real and substantial existence, subject to none of the change and decay which affects particulars, or whether (as the Nominalists argued) they were merely general names expressive of general notions.
Early in the thirteenth century came a reaction from the East in favour of Aristotle. His writings (which had escaped destruction by the merest accident) had been translated as early as the fifth century into Syriac and Arabic; the Jews had translated them into Latin; and the conquests of the Arabs in Spain had brought them to the knowledge of the Schoolmen. Averroes, the greatest of Arabian commentators, looked upon Aristotle as the only man whom God had suffered to attain perfection, and as the source of all true science. He died in A.D. 1198, Just before the rule of the Moors in Spain came to an end; but "Averroism," with its pantheistic tenets, long survived its founder.
Albert of Bollstadt, Provincial of the Dominican order in Germany, "the universal doctor" (who bears a kind of half-mythical reputation as Albertus Magnus),
