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 et astronomicarum Institutionum Guilielmi Hirsaugiensis olim Abbatis Libri tres, which was printed at Basle in 1531, quarto, is textually the same book with the Περὶ Διδάξεων sive Elementorum Philosophiae Libri IV, printed among the works of n Bede in the Basle edition of 1563, folio. This Περὶ Διδάξεων, however, although it is actually quoted as Bede's, and as a possible source of an opinion of Abailard, by so accomplished a scholar as o Charles de Rémusat, has been generally recognized as the work of William of Conches, certainly since the publication of p Oudin's Commentarius de Scriptoribus Ecclesiasticis, and of the q twelfth volume of the Histoire littéraire 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 Sitzungsberichte, ubi supra, p. 20, n. 55 from Dieterici, Die Naturanschauung und Naturphilosophie der Araber im zehnten Jahrhundert, p. 162; Berlin 1861.
- ↑ Jourdain claims the discovery in the Notices et Extraits des Manuscrits, 20 (2) 43, n. 1. The Histoire littéraire impartially describes the same work under the head both of Honorius (vol. 12. 178 sq.) and of William of Conches. M. Hauréau, Singularités historiques et littéraires 243, supposes that the original ascription of the work to Honorius by the editors of the Maxima Bibliotheca Patrum was a mere guess: this is improbable.
