born at Ockham in Surrey in 1280, and, after studying at Oxford, went to
the University of Paris. He lived in stirring times, and took a prominent
part in the great controversies which agitated the fourteenth century.
Pope John XXII. ruled at Avignon, a shameless truckster in ecclesiastical
merchandise, a violent oppressor of his subjects, yet obliged by force of
circumstances to be a mere subject of the King of France. The Emperor
Ludwig IV. ruled in Germany in spite of the excommunication pronounced
against him by the Pope. Many voices were raised in support of Louis
denouncing the assumptions of the occupant of the Papal See. Marcilius of
Padua wrote his famous _Defensor Pacis_ against Papal pretensions, and our
author, William of Ockham, issued his still more famous _Defence of
Poverty_, which startled the whole of Christendom by its vigorous
onslaught on the vices of the Papacy and the assumptions of Pope John. The
latter ordered two bishops to examine the work, and the "Invincible
Doctor" was cast into prison at Avignon. He would certainly have been
slain, had he not contrived to effect his escape, and taken refuge at the
court of the German emperor, to whom he addressed the words, "_Tu me
defendas gladio, ego te defendam calamo_." There he lived and wrote,
condemned by the Pope, disowned by his order, the Franciscans, threatened
daily with sentences of heresy, deprivation, and imprisonment; but for
them he cared not, and fearlessly pursued his course, becoming the
acknowledged leader of the reforming tendencies of the age, and preparing
the material for that blaze of light which astonished the world in the
sixteenth century. His works have never been collected, and are very
scarce, being preserved with great care in some of the chief libraries of
Europe. The scholastic philosophy of the fourteenth century, the disputes
between the Nominalists and the Realists, in which he took the part of the
former, the principle that "entities are not to be multiplied except by
necessity," or the "hypostatic existence of abstractions," have ceased to
create any very keen interest in the minds of readers. But how bitterly