renounce his Realism and also his chair, and accept a distant bishopric.
William was conquered by a mere stripling; but that stripling could have
overthrown a Goliath of controversy, not with a sling, but with a
giant's sword.

Abélard having won a great dialectical victory, which brought as much
fame as military laurels on the battlefield, established himself at St.
Geneviève, just outside the walls of Paris, where the Pantheon now
stands, which is still the centre of the Latin quarter, and the
residence of students. He now applied himself to the study of divinity,
and attended the lectures of Anselm of Laon. This celebrated
ecclesiastic, though not so famous or able as Anselm of Canterbury, was
treated by Abélard with the same arrogance and flippancy as he had
bestowed on William of Champeaux. "I frequented," said the young
mocker, "the old man's school, but soon discovered that all his power
was in length of practice. You would have thought he was kindling a
fire, when instantly the whole house was filled with smoke, in which not
a single spark was visible. He was a tree covered with thick foliage,
which to the distant eye had charms, but on near inspection there was no
fruit to be found; a fig-tree such as our Lord did curse; an oak such as
Lucan compared Pompey to,--_Stat magni nominis umbra_."

What a comment on the very philosophy which Abélard himself taught! What
better description of the scholasticism of the Middle Ages! But original
and brilliant as was the genius of Abélard, he no more could have
anticipated the new method which Bacon taught than could Thomas Aquinas.
All the various schools of the mediaeval dialecticians, Realists and
Nominalists alike, sought to establish old theories, not to discover new
truth. They could not go beyond their assumptions. So far as their
assumptions were true, they rendered great service by their inexorable