about which the twelfth century cared very little, while it cared
deeply about the essence of classes! Science has become too complex
to affirm the existence of universal truths, but it strives for
nothing else, and disputes the problem, within its own limits,
almost as earnestly as in the twelfth century, when the whole field
of human and superhuman activity was shut between these barriers
of substance, universals, and particulars. Little has changed except
the vocabulary and the method. The schools knew that their society
hung for life on the demonstration that God, the ultimate universal,
was a reality, out of which all other universal truths or realities
sprang. Truth was a real thing, outside of human experience. The
schools of Paris talked and thought of nothing else. John of Salisbury,
who attended Abélard's lectures about 1136, and became Bishop of
Chartres in 1176, seems to have been more surprised than we need be at
the intensity of the emotion. 'One never gets away from this question,'
he said. 'From whatever point a discussion starts, it is always led
back and attached to that. It is the madness of Rufus about Naevia;
"He thinks of nothing else; talks of nothing else, and if Naevia did
not exist, Rufus would be dumb."'

... "In these scholastic tournaments the two champions started from
opposite points:--one from the ultimate substance, God,--the
universal, the ideal, the type;--the other from the individual,
Socrates, the concrete, the observed fact of experience, the object
of sensual perception. The first champion--William in this instance--
assumed that the universal was a real thing; and for that reason he
was called a realist. His opponent--Abélard--held that the
universal was only nominally real; and on that account he was
called a nominalist. Truth, virtue, humanity, exist as units and
realities, said William. Truth, replied Abélard, is only the sum of