The Supposed Autographa of John the Scot

Moreover, if I is Johannes, he does not understand his own text. In De Divisione Naturae i. 49 (Migne P.L. cxxii, 491 A) we read:
Omnium hominum una eademque ουσια est. Omnes enim unam participant essentiam, ac per hoc, quia omnibus communis est, nullius proprie est. Corpus autem commune omnium hominum non est. Nam unusquisque suum proprium possidet corpus, non et ουσιαν. Igitur communis est, et corpus commune non est.
This passage forms part of one of the enlargements of I . In it he writes omnis for omnes , and Non et ουσιαε igitur communis est for non et ουσιαν. Igitur communis est . These are understandable errors for any scribe, but not for the author of the work, to make. Others occur elsewhere in the Insular hand; I have not recorded many, but I made no systematic search.

Our last resort, if we are still to look for the autograph of John the Scot in the various hands of Reims, is to suppose that, if not i 1 , it is i 2 . This is indeed the hand that Traube believed was the author's; it happened that almost all of the photographs taken for Traube contain enlargements by i 2 and not by i 1 . Yet if i 2 is Johannes, why does that hand never correct the sections assigned to i 1 ? Of the two, i 1 seems more free, more individual, more like an author's, unless that author be also a calligraphist. But if we imagine that i 1 is Johannes, why does he never appear in the sections assigned to i 2 ?
After all is said and done, the great value of Traube's discovery remains. It is positive that the enlargements in the manuscripts were made at the direction of the author himself. They present to the modern editor of the De Divisione Naturae the fascinating task of distinguishing the different revisions, and of following the growth of the subject in Johannes' mind. The best way, I believe, would be to print on the left-hand page the enlarged form of the text, for that is the form in which the author wished his work to be known to posterity. On the right-hand page, the briefest form, the nearest approach to his original draft, might be given, with indication, in the critical apparatus, of the successive stages by which the final text was reached. Possibly further research may reveal O , or even the hand of Johannes himself. For the present, we at least have accessible—if the contents of the libraries of Reims and of Laon are accessible—the material for preparing a highly accurate and well-nigh unique edition of one of the masterpieces of medieval philosophy.