in the philosophical theory of the ’art.’ Traces of conceptualism there certainly are long before Abailard’s time. We may find them in the ninth century in the
glosses of Heric of Auxerre, if not in Rabanus Maurus :
min the eleventh the doctrine reappears in Berengar of
Tours. But Abailard, though not the creator, was not
the less the principal organiser and, for his own age, the
founder of the school which lies intermediate between
those of his two first masters. The system which he
produced, if it was eclectic, was certainly nearer nominal
ism than realism : he conceded in fact the affirmations of
both sides while denying the correctness of their negations.
The main tenet of the nominalists, the absolute existence
of the individual, he accepted; but he did not rigidly
limit existence to that which is open to the senses. Genera .
and species, the categories and predicables, he refused
indeed to endow with essence as things ; they had no
actual existence apart from the individual : nor was the
universal, as William of Champeaux held, contained in
its entirety within the particular. The process was the
other way; it was from the particular that we arrived
at the general by an effort of thought. On the other
hand if the universals, if abstractions of all sorts, were
the creations of the intellect, they were also its necessary
creations ; they were therefore so far real that the human
mind could not do without them. In the same way
Abailard found no difficulty in the universalia ante rem,
the universals considered as anterior to the sensible world ;
since universals might equally be conceived in relation to
the mind of God as to our own. The Platonic world of
ideas was thus to be understood as existing in God s
creative thought.[1]
Abailard’s conceptualism was probably the most reason-
- ↑ See generally Remusat 2. 119 sqq., Haureau 1. 380 sqq., Schaar- schmidt, Johannes Saresberiensis 319 sqq. The exposition of the two former writers, as well as that of Cousin, vol. 2 160-197, is partly vitiated by the stress they lay on the treatise De generibus et speciebus, the authorship of which is more than doubtful. [See Prantl, 2. 114n. 49, 144 n. 148.]
