* * * * *
Good and bad men are each less so than they seem.
April 30. 1830.
NOMINALISTS AND REALISTS.—BRITISH SCHOOLMEN.—SPINOSA.
The result of my system will be, to show, that, so far from the world being a goddess in petticoats, it is rather the Devil in a strait waistcoat.
* * * * *
The controversy of the Nominalists and Realists was one of the greatest and most important that ever occupied the human mind. They were both right, and both wrong. They each maintained opposite poles of the same truth; which truth neither of them saw, for want of a higher premiss. Duns Scotus was the head of the Realists; Ockham,[1] his own disciple, of the Nominalists. Ockham, though certainly very prolix, is a most extraordinary writer.
[Footnote 1: John Duns Scotus was born in 1274, at Dunstone in the parish of Emildune, near Alnwick. He was a fellow of Merton College, and Professor of Divinity at Oxford. After acquiring an uncommon reputation at his own university, he went to Paris, and thence to Cologne, and there died in 1308, at the early age of thirty-four years. He was called the Subtle Doctor, and found time to compose works which now fill twelve volumes in folio. See the Lyons edition, by Luke Wadding, in 1639.
William Ockham was an Englishman, and died about 1347; but the place and year of his birth are not clearly ascertained. He was styled the Invincible Doctor, and wrote bitterly against Pope John XXII. We all remember Butler's account of these worthies:—
"He knew what's what, and that's as high
As metaphysic wit can fly;
In school divinity as able
As he that hight Irrefragable,
A second Thomas, or at once
To name them all, another Dunse;
Profound in all the Nominal
And Real ways beyond them all;
For he a rope of sand could twist
As tough as learned Sorbonist."
HUDIBRAS. Part I. Canto I. v. 149.