ing some device by which artificial wings may beat the air in the manner of a flying bird."
Occam, Roger Bacon, these are the early precursors of a great movement in Europe away from "Realism" towards reality. For a time the older influences fought against the naturalism of the new Nominalists. In 1339 Occam's books were put under a ban and Nominalism solemnly condemned. As late as 1473 an attempt was made to bind teachers of Paris by an oath to teach Realism.[1] It was only in the sixteenth century with the printing of books and the increase of intelligence that the movement from absolutism towards experiment became massive, and that one investigator began to co-operate with another.
Throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries experimenting with material things was on the increase, items of knowledge were being won by men, but there was no inter-related advance. The work was done in a detached, furtive, and inglorious manner. A tradition of isolated investigation came into Europe from the Arabs and a considerable amount of private and secretive research was carried on by the alchemists, for whom modern writers are a little too apt with their contempt. These alchemists were in close touch with the glass and metal workers and with the herbalists and medicine-makers of the times; they pried into many secrets of nature, but they were obsessed by "practical" ideas; they sought not knowledge, but power; they wanted to find out how to manufacture gold from cheaper materials, how to make men immortal by the elixir of life, and such-like vulgar dreams. Incidentally in their researches they
- ↑ This gives a wrong impression about Nominalism, that it was banned in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The contrary is the case. The attempt of 1339 came to nothing; that of 1473 was belated and unsuccessful. Except Wycliffe, there is no considerable thinker of these centuries, so far as I know, who is not Nominalist. The triumph of Nominalism was no unmixed benefit. Its insistence on study of the individual was indeed favourable to natural science; and Harnack says that it led to good work in psychology. But its nescience about Universals led to obscurantism in theology. Wycliffe as a Realist could hold that God acted secundum rationes exemplares, by certain and known universal rules; the Nominalists reduced God to inscrutable omnipotence. They went on to add that He could therefore only be known at all by the miraculous intervention of the mass through the priesthood. Their scepticism about Universals thus overleapt itself, and fell on the other side, into obscurantist ecclesiasticism.—E. B.
