The Problem of Individuality. The problem of individuation was a favorite one with Scotus. While Scotus agrees with Thomas as to the threefold existence of the universal, the individual and not the universal isthe ultimate fact. The individual cannot be deduced from the universal, nor can it be constituted by the quantitative determinations of matter. It is already individualized and substantialized. Form, not matter, individualizes. The definite individual form, the “thisness” (hæcceitas), is the ultimate fact. The individual can only be verified as actual fact. The individual is irreducible, and no further explanation can be made than to say that it is an individual. Thus the inquiry into the Principium individuationis has no meaning.
After Duns Scotus. The church failed to canonize Scotus; for though he claimed to be its most faithful son, he taught the dangerous doctrine of freedom of the individual will. His doctrine also marks the beginning of empirical investigation of nature and the decadence of formal logic. Although a most faithful follower of the church, he brought scholasticism to the point where it no longer served the church. The result was ultrarationalism—not what Scotus intended. But when revelation no longer rests upon rational ground, and when there exists by its side a philosophical science whose basis is rational, it is only a question of time when revelation shall lose its authority for men. When philosophy passed from Scotus to Ockam, Ockam’s conception of the individual as the ultimately real and of the unrationality of revelation gave him the old name of nominalist. This is a misnomer, for the doctrine of Ockam is quite different from the nominalism of Roscellinus. The temper of the time was different from those days when Roscellinus followed upon Anselm, for the superior minds were now turning away from orthodoxy. Disciples of both Thomas and Scotus were becoming nominalists. It was an epoch when scholasticismwas being discredited by the universities, when theology was less a study in the curricula, when religion was being superseded by magic, when there were rival claimants for the Pope’s chair, when there was strife between the church and the state. The spirit of the age was toward nominalism in every form. The command, in 1339, to the University of Paris not to use Ockam’s works shows how powerful had become his following during his lifetime. Dominicans and Augustinians went over in crowds to nominalism. This beginning of nominalism betrays the growth of European national life, modern languages, art, and the sciences. It shows the beginning of Protestantism in all departments. The church attempted to crush it in the way that it had crushed Roscellinus. But this nominalism had too deep root.
William of Ockam (1280–1349): Life and Teaching. Ockam was called Doctor Invincibilis. He was born in Ockam, England, and studied at Oxford, where he probably had Scotus as a teacher. After teaching in Paris (1320–1325), he left Paris and joined the opponents of the temporal power of the Pope. He was imprisoned at Avignon, but escaped to the court of Louis of Bavaria, where he died. To Louis he made his celebrated promise, “If you will defend me with your sword, I will defend you with my pen.” He has been called “the first Protestant.”
The nominalism of Ockam was more complex than that of Roscellinus, and yet it was essentially a tendency to simplification by discarding all metaphysics and psychology as useless. “Ockam’s razor” was the nickname of his philosophy. He regarded concepts as subjective signs or “terms” of actual facts. Hence hisphilosophy was also called terminism. There was also in it a naturalistic tendency which was the result of the scientific studies of the Aristotelian Arabians. With these logical and naturalistic motives were united the Augustinian doctrine of the will. These were the three factors of a nominalism that felt the conviction of the importance of the inner life as well as the need of an extended investigation of nature.
It is, moreover, no accident that Ockam was conservative, for he belonged to the Franciscans, the most conservative of the monastic bodies. This nominalism was a reaction against scholasticism, in order to strengthen the supernatural character of dogma. Ockam felt that scholasticism had waxed too great—that under the guise of serving religion it had virtually subordinated religion. The reactionary Franciscans proclaimed the entire separation of religion and philosophy in order to make room for faith. Faith could be purified only by renouncing scholasticism. The temporal power must be given up by the church, the state and the church must be separated. No new knowledge about faith can be obtained. The dogma must be left impregnable, even though scientifically men become skeptics.
Consistent, therefore, was it for this movement to disjoin entirely the parts of the twofold truth. Scotus had almost crowded out natural theology; Ockam completed the work of Scotus. Scholasticism or natural theology is a rubbish-heap of hypotheses. The church should abandon speculation and emphasize faith. It should return to the simplicity and holiness of the Apostolic church. Ockam was devoted to the true upbuilding of the church and was a follower of St. Francis. It was his love for the church that madehim take sides against her pretensions to temporal power.
Ockam was the natural precursor of his fellow countryman John Locke, and the English empirical school. Individual things have the reality of original Forms, for they come to us intuitively. Our ideas are only signs of them. This is a relation of the “first intention.” As individual ideas are related to individual things, so general ideas are related to individual ideas. This is the relation of the “second intention.” The general idea referring thus indirectly to an individual thing is therefore arbitrary and capricious. Real science deals with things intuitively observed; rational science only with the relations between ideas. Nevertheless real science deals only with an inner world, even if its material is intuitively known. Intuitions are only representatives of the real world. How much less real must the world of rational science then be, since it presupposes these inner intuitions of real science. The universal, therefore, has no reality. It is a name, a sign of many things, a term. Only the individual is real.
After Ockam. William of Ockam was the last schoolman. When his doctrine of terminism was united with Augustine’s powerful doctrine of the will,—forming an extreme individualism,—the glimmering of the dawn of modern times appears. The movement was made still stronger by the study of the history of development psychologically, and it became a kind of idealism of the inner life. Already, too, there were beginning investigations in natural science, based upon empirical study. Modern subjectivism was at hand; scholasticism had run its course. The representatives of the scholastic philosophy of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuriesforgot the principle of the Classic Schoolmen and became mere commentators of the leaders of the tradition to which they belonged. Their verbal subtleties were too refined to be understood. The efforts of Nicolas Cusanus to bring secular science under a system of scholastic mysticism only promoted the modern movement. Cusanus therefore belongs to the next period, and of him we shall subsequently hear.