[116] P. 3, line 25ff. “Hanc autem epistolam ‘De eodem et diverso’ intitulavi, quoniam videlicet maximam orationis partem duabus personis, philosophiae scilicet atque philocosmiae attribui, una quarum eadem, alter vero diversa a principe philosophorum appellatur.” Adelard fails to explain why the title is not De eadem et diversa, as his explanation might seem to require.
[117] Quest. nat., cap. 49; De eodem et diverso, p. 33.
[118] In both treatises Adelard regards the stars as divine animals, as we have seen, and refers to the same partition of the head among the mental faculties in both (Quest. nat., cap. 18; De eodem, p. 32) but there is nothing to indicate which passage is prior.
CHAPTER XXXVII
WILLIAM OF CONCHES
His relation to his time—Early life—Writings—Philosophia: general character—Contemporary education—Good and bad demons—Astronomy and astrology—Extent of the influence of the stars—Science and religion—Letter of William of St. Thierry to St. Bernard—Extent of William’s retraction in the Dragmaticon—Reassertion of previous views—No denial of science—William’s future influence—Appendix I. Editions and Manuscripts of the Original and of the Revised Version of the Work of William of Conches on Natural Philosophy.
“... rejoicing not in the many but in the probity of the few, we toil for truth alone.”
—Philosophia (1531) p. 28.
His relation to his time.
Practically contemporary with Adelard of Bath and associated like him with members of the English royal line was William of Conches,[119] of whom we shall treat in the present chapter. Like Adelard also he withdrew from the schools of Gaul after teaching there for a time—longer apparently than Adelard; like Adelard he followed the guidance of reason and took an interest in natural science; like him he employed the dramatic dialogue form in his works. John of Salisbury, who studied grammar under William of Conches and Richard Bishop (l’Évêque) from about 1138 to 1141,[120] represents those masters as successors to the thorough-going educational methods and humanistic ideals of Bernard of Chartres; but adds that later, when men “preferred to seem rather than be philosophers, and professors of the arts promised to transmit all philosophy to their hearers in less than three or two years’ time, overcome by the onslaught of the unskilled multitude, they ceased teaching.”[121] William then seems to have entered the service of Geoffrey Plantagenet, to whom as duke of Normandy as well as count of Anjou we find William addressing his Dragmaticon or Dramaticus, which takes the form of a dialogue between them. It thus was written at some time between 1144 and 1150, the period when Geoffrey was duke of Normandy.[122] His son, the future Henry II of England, was in Normandy from 1146 to 1149, when William appears to have been his tutor.[123] In the Dragmaticon William praises Geoffrey for training his children “from a tender age” in the study of literature,[124] and before the boy was made duke of Normandy by his father in 1150 at the age of seventeen William prepared for his perusal a collection of moral extracts from such classical Latin authors as Cicero, Seneca, Juvenal, Horace, Lucan, and Persius, entitled De honesto et utili.[125] The last we hear of William seems to be in 1154, under which date Alberic des Trois Fontaines,[126] a thirteenth century chronicler, states that he had attained a great reputation. He might well have lived on for some time after that date, since his former associate, Richard Bishop, was archdeacon of Coutances at the time John of Salisbury wrote the Metalogicus in 1159, and survived to become bishop of Avranches in 1171, dying only in 1182. One infers, however, from John’s account that William was no longer living in 1159.