extracts which Cousin gives represent with trivial variants the identical text of the corresponding passages in the Dragmaticon, and the order of the thirty-five chapters is exactly the same. The two copies end with the same words.
The Tertia Philosophia contains ten chapters of which Cousin has printed the first. This is simply a set of extracts from the Dragmaticon. I take the sentences as they follow. Mundum . . . extra quern nihil est will be found in the Dragmaticon, ii. p. 41 ; Nota quod tempore Martii . . . moritur, in lib. iv. pp. 123 sq. ; Nota : dicit Constantinus . . . pessima, in lib. iv. pp. 127 sq.; Verbi gratia . . . iudica, in lib. iv. p. 128 ; Nota : in autumno . . . periclitantur homines, on the same page. Chapters ii. ix. from their headings correspond to passages in the fourth and fifth books of the Dragmaticon ; chapter x. to something near the beginning of the sixth. The extracts speak for them selves : the Tertia Philosophia is nothing more than a note-book of selections from the Dragmaticon.
Such are the ’valuable fragments’ from which later scholars have drawn. Beyond insignificant various readings they add nothing to what was already printed in a complete form in 1567.[1] William s original works therefore (excluding his glosses) are now reduced to two : the early Philosophia and the corrected edition of the same, the Dragmaticon. Is there a third to be added ?
9. The literary historians speak of a Magna de Naturis Philosophia by William of Conches as having been printed
- ↑ I have already stated, above 5, that the title Seeunda Philosophia is also borne by the complete Dragmaticon itself. The manuscripts thus entitled Dr. Reuter described as containing an entirely different work from Cousin’s Seeunda Philosophia, Geschichte der religiosen Aufklarung 2. 309 n. 30. What he quotes however certainly exists in the printed Dragmaticon, and I make no doubt that had Dr. Reuter read the manuscripts further he would have found all Cousin’s extracts there, as I have found them in the printed text. Moreover he misread Cousin, Ouvrages inedits d’Abelard, 669, and applied what the latter said of the Tertia Philosophia to the Seeunda. Here he was no doubt misled by M. Haureau, who speaks, p. 241, of part of the Seeunda Philosophia being borrowed directly from the Philosophia, book iv. The immediate source is incontestably the Dragmaticon, though the substance may often agree with that of the Philosophia. See preceding note.
