Even Francis Bacon, who was deeply indebted to Aristotle, never extricated himself from the tangle of form, cause and law¹.
Now this was a great argument, no empty dispute; the bones of dead controversies cumber the ground, but no controversy was empty which moved profoundly the minds and passions of men : both for ecclesiastical and secular thought the dispute was grave. While realism was essential to the Church-for instance, on realist grounds St Anselm defended the medieval doctrine of the Trinity against Roscellinus; the Church herself
while in Met. Z, and elsewhere, the primary existent is the form. The inconsistency is, however, more apparent than real; for in the Categories it is the individual so far as he represents his natural kind which is primarily oxistent, whilst the form which in the Metaphysics is primarily existent occurs only in the individual. This terse appreciation is one of my many debts to Dr Jackson.
1 It were almost to be desired, for our own lucidity, that we could get rid of the words cause and law, and use language significant of order only. Aristotle's influence has weighed heavily in favour of studying "Causcs" rather than sequences; thus it is hard to clear our own minds, and impossible to clear the minds of our pupils, of a genetic notion of causation- that an effect comes, as it were, from the womb of its causes. Even Ockham taught as if causes contained their effects. Mr Marshall (West. Rev. loc. cit.) is of opinion that Roger Bacon by his "non oportet causas investigare" intended to confine scientific thought to the relations of phenomena.
