It were well to consider more specifically these two sides of Occam’s succession to Duns Scotus, shown in his acceptance and rejection of the master’s teaching. He followed him, of course, in emphasising the functions of the will; and accepted the conception of theology as practical, and not speculative, in its ends; and, like Duns, he distinguished, nay rather, severed, theology from philosophy, widening the cleft between them. If, with Duns, theology was still, in a sense, a science; with Occam it could hardly be called one. Although Duns denied that theology was to be controlled by principles drawn from metaphysics, he laboured to produce a metaphysical counterfeit, wherein theology, founded on revelation and church law, should present a close parallel to what it would have been, had its controlling principles been those of metaphysics. Occam quite as resolutely as his master, proves the untenability of current theological reasonings. More unreservedly than Duns, he interdicts the testing of theology by reason: and goes beyond him in restricting the sphere of rationally demonstrable truth, denying, for instance, that reason can demonstrate God’s unity, infinity, or even existence. Unlike Duns, he would not attempt to erect a quasi-scientific theology, in the place of the systems he rejects. To make up for this negative result, Occam asserted the verity of Scripture unqualifiedly, as Duns also did. With Occam, Scripture, revelation, is absolutely infallible, neither requiring nor admitting the proofs of reason. To be sure he co-ordinates with it the Law of Nature, which God has implanted in our minds. But otherwise theology, faith, stands alone, very isolated, although on the alleged most certain of foundations. The provinces of science and faith are different. Faith’s assent is not required for what is known through evidence; science does not depend on faith. Nor does faith or theology depend on scientia. And since, without faith, no one can assent to those verities which are to be believed (veritatibus credibilibus), there is no scientia proprie dicta respecting them. So the breach in the old scholastic, Thomist, unity was made utter and irreparable. Theology stands on the surest of bases, but isolated, unsupported; philosophy, all human knowledge, extends around and below it, and is discredited because irrelevant to highest truth.
Thus far as to Occam’s loyal and rebellious succession to the theology of Duns. In philosophy, it was much the same. He accepted his critical methods, but would not follow him in his constructive metaphysics. Although the older man was pre-eminently a metaphysician, the critical side of his intellect drew empiric processes within the sweep of its energies. Occam, unconvinced of the correspondence between the logic of concepts and the facts of the external world, seeks to limit the principles of the former to the processes of the mind. Accordingly, he rejects the inferences of the Scotian dialectic which project themselves outward, as proofs of the objective existence of abstract or general ideas. It is thus from a more thoroughgoing application of the Scotian analysis of mental processes, and a more thoroughgoing testing of the evidence furnished by experience, that Occam refuses to recognise the existence of universals save in the mind, where evidently they are necessary elements of thinking. Manifestly, he is striving very earnestly not to go beyond the evidence; and he is also striving to eliminate all unevidenced and unnecessary elements, and those chimeras of the mind, which become actual untruths when posited as realities of the outer world.
Such were the motives of Occam’s far from simple theory of cognition. In it, mental perceptions, or cognitions, were regarded as symbols (signa, termini) of the objects represented by them. They are natural, as contrasted with the artificial symbols of speech and writing. They fall into three classes; first, sense-perception of the concrete object, and thirdly, so to speak, the abstract concept representative of many objects, or of some ideal figment or quality. Intermediate between the two, Occam puts notitia intuitiva, which relates to the existence of concrete things. It serves as a basis for the cognition of their combinations and relationships, and forms a necessary antecedent to abstract knowledge. Notitia abstractiva praesupponit intuitivam.[667] Occam holds that notitia intuitiva presents the concrete thing as it exists. Otherwise with abstract or general concepts. They are signa of mental presentations, or processes; and there is no ground for transferring them to the world of outer realities. Their existence is confined to the mind, where they are formed from the common elements of other signa, especially those of our notitia intuitiva. “And so,” says Occam, “the genus is not common to many things through any sameness in them, but through the common nature (communitatem) of the signum, by which the same signum is common to many things signified.”[668] These universals furnish predicates for our judgments, since through them we conceive of realities as containing a common element of nature. They are not mere words; but have a real existence in the mind, where they perform functions essential to thinking. Indirectly, through their bases of notitiae intuitivae, they even reflect outer realities. “The Universal is no mere figment, to which there is no correspondence of anything like it (cui non correspondet aliquod consimile) in objective being, as that is figured in the thinker.”
It results from the foregoing argument, that science, ordered knowledge, which seeks co-ordination and unity, has not to do with things; but with propositions, its object being that which is known, rather than that which is. Things are singular, while science treats of general ideas, which are only in the mind. “It should be understood, that any science, whether realis or rationalis, is only concerned with propositions (propositionibus); because propositions alone are known.”[669]
It was not so very great a leap from the realism of Duns, which ascribed a certain objective existence to general ideas, to the nominalism, or rather conceptualism, of Occam, which denied it, yet recognised the real existence and necessary functions of universals, in the mind. The metaphysically proved realities of Duns were rather spectral, and Occam’s universals, subjective though they were, lived a real and active life. One feels that the realities of Duns’s metaphysics scarcely extended beyond the thinker’s mind. In many respects Occam’s philosophy was a strenuous carrying out of Duns’s teachings; and when it was not, we see the younger man pushed, or rather repelled, to the positions which he took, by the unsatisfying metaphysics of his teacher. History shows other rebounds of thought, which seem abrupt, and yet were consequential in the same dual way that Occam’s doctrine followed that of Duns. Out of the Brahmin Absolute came the Buddhist wheel of change; even as Parmenides was followed hard by Heraclitus. And how often Atheism steps on Pantheism’s heels!
Thus, developing, revising, and changing, Occam carried out the work of Duns, and promulgated a theory of knowledge which pointed on to much later phases of thinking. In his school he came to be called venerabilis inceptor, a proper title for the man who shook loose from so much previous thought, and became the source of so many novel views. He had, indeed, little fear of novelty. “Novelties (novitates) are not altogether to be rejected; but as what is old (vetusta), on becoming burdensome, should be abolished, so novelties when, to the sound judgment, they are useful, fruitful, necessary, expedient, are the more boldly to be embraced.”[670]
It is not, however, as the inceptor of new philosophies or of novel views on the relations between State and Papacy that we are viewing Occam here at the close of this long presentation of the ultimate intellectual interests of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. But rather as the man who represented the ways in which the old was breaking up, and embodied the thoughts rending the scholastic system; who even was a factor in the palpable decadence of scholastic thinking that had set in before his eyes were closed. For from him came a new impulse to a renewed overstudy of formal logic—with Thomas, for example, logic had but filled its proper rôle. Withdrawing from metaphysics the matter pertaining to the problem of universals and much more besides, Occam transferred the same to logic, which he called omnium artium aptissimum instrumentum.[671] This reinstatement of logic as the instrument and means of all knowledge was to be the perdition of emptier-minded men, who felt no difference between philosophy and the war of words. And in this respect at least the decadence of scholasticism took its inception from this bold and virile mind which had small reverence for popes or for the idols of the schools. We shall not follow the lines of this decay, but simply notice where they start.
In the growth and decline of thought, things so go hand in hand that it is hard to say what draws and what is drawn. In the scholastic decadence, the preposterous use of logic was a palpable element. Yet was it cause or effect? Obviously both. Scholasticism was losing its grasp of life; and the universities in the fourteenth century were crowded with men whose minds mistook words for thoughts; and because of this they gave themselves to hypertrophic logic. On the other hand, this windy study promoted the increasing emptiness of philosophy.
Likewise, as cause and effect, inextricably bound together, the other factors work, and are worked upon. The number of universities increases; professors and students multiply; but there is an awful dearth of thinkers among them. There ceases even to be a thorough knowledge of the scholastic systems; men study from compendia; and thereby remain most deeply ignorant, and unfecundated by the thoughts of their forbears. Cause and effect again! We can hardly blame them, when tomes and encyclopaedias were being heaped mountain high, with life crushed beneath the monstrous pile, or escaping from it. But whether cause or effect, the energies of study slackened, and even rotted, both at the universities and generally among the members of the two Student Orders, from whom had come the last creators—and perhaps destroyers—of scholasticism.
Next: the language of philosophy deteriorated, becoming turbid with the barbarisms of hair-splitting technicalities. Likewise the method of presentation lost coherence and clarity. All of which was the result of academic decadence, and promoted it.