good. In the creation as in the government of the world, God knows no other law, no other rule, no other principle, than his own freedom. And it is because he is free to exempt us, in case he so desires, from carrying out any particular law of the moral code that the Church in turn has the right to grant dispensations. If God is not absolutely free in this matter, as he is in all things; if he is, as Thomas of Aquin claims, a being absolutely determined in his will by his supreme wisdom, what becomes of the right of indulgences? Like God, man is free; the Fall did not deprive him of free-will; he has formal freedom, i. e., he may will or not will; and he has material freedom, i. e., he can will A. or will B. (freedom of choice or indifference).

These doctrines, though diametrically opposed to St. Augustine's, could not be disagreeable to the Church, the Pelagian tendencies of which they reflected and encouraged. But they concealed a danger, and the Church, which failed to canonize Duns Scotus, seems to have appreciated it. By his emphatic affirmation of individual liberty, the subtle doctor proclaimed a new principle, an anti-authoritative power, which grew from century to century, and finally led to the emancipation of the religious conscience and the downfall of ecclesiastical tradition as the su preme authority in matters of faith and conscience. So, too, on the subject of universals, Duns Scotus approaches nominalism and empiricism, though striving to remain true to the realistic and rationalistic system upheld by the Church. All his sympathies are, at bottom, for the individual; for the will is his principle; and though reason is common to all, the will is what characterizes the individual. The question of individuation is his favorite problem. His contemporary, Henry Goethals,1 following the example of William of Champeaux, regarded the principle of individu

1 1217-1293. Quodlibeta theologica, Paris, 1518; Summa theol., Paris, 1520 Ferrara, 1616.

ation as a mere negation; while St. Thomas based it on matter (the non-being). Duns Scotus, however, declares it to be a positive principle, and gives it the name of hæcceitas. The individual is, according to him, the sum of two equally positive and real principles: the quidditas (the universal, or the type common to the individuals of one and the same species) and the hæcceitas, the principle of the individuality or of the difference of individuals. The quidditas has no reality apart from the hæcceitas, nor the hac ceitas apart from the quidditas. Reality is found in the union of the two principles, of the ideal and the real, that is, in the individual.

By his doctrines of individual liberty and hæcceitas Duns Scotus paves the way for the nominalism of his disciple Occam. His doctrine of accidental creation hastens the rupture between science and the authoritative rationalism of the Church, and the advent of modern empiricism; for if the laws of nature and the moral law itself are contingent, all science and morality itself depend on experience as their only basis. To place the will in the first rank in metaphysics and reason in the second, means to subordinate reasoning to the methods of observation and experience. Duns Scotus not only hastens the breach between science and dogma; but, the breach seems to be already made when, in his Quæstiones subtilissima, he rejects innate ideas, and declares the proof of the immortality of the soul and of the existence of God to be impossible from the standpoint of science.

B. NOMINALISTIC PERIPATETICISM

§ 41. Reappearance of Nominalism. Durand, Occam,
Buridan, D'Ailly

The distance from the conceptualism of Vincent of Beau vais, Thomas of Aquin, and Duns Scotus to nominalism is

not great. Indeed, the semi-realism of Duns Scotus resembles the doctrine of Roscellinus more closely than that of Champeaux. WILLIAM DURAND of Saint-Pourçain,' first a disciple of St. Thomas, then influenced by the doctrines of Scotus, comes still nearer to nominalism in formulating the following thesis: To exist means to be an individual. Finally, the Franciscan WILLIAM of OCCAM, the precursor and fellow-countryman of John Locke, openly antagonizes realism as an absurd system. According to the realists, he says, the universal exists in several things at once; now the same thing cannot exist simultaneously in several different things; hence the universal is not a thing, a reality (res), but a mere sign that serves to designate several similar things, a word (nomen); and there is nothing real except the individual.3

Scepticism is the necessary consequence of nominalism, which has already been outlined in § 33. Science has for its object the general, the universal, the necessary. The science of man, let us say in the spirit of Plato, does not deal with Peter for the sake of Peter, or with Paul for the sake of Paul; it studies Peter and Paul in order to know what man is. It is the universal man, the species man, whom it seeks in the individual. The same is true of all sciences. Now, if the universal is a mere word having no objective reality, and if the individual alone is real, then there can be no anthropology, nor any science.

1 Born in Auvergne, died 1332, Bishop of Meaux. Comment. in mag. sentent., Paris, 1508; Lyons, 1568.

* Died 1343. Quodlibeta septem, Strasburg, 1491; Summa totius logices, Paris, 1488; Oxford, 1675; Quæstiones in libros physicorum, Strasburg, 1491; Quæstiones et decisiones in quatuor lib. sent., Lyons, 1495; Centilogium theol., Lyons, 1496; Expositio aurea super totam artem veterem, Bologna, 1496. [Cf. W. A. Schreiber, Die politischen und religiisen Doctrinen unter Ludwig dem Baier, Landshut, 1858; Prantl, Geschichte der Logik, Vol. III., pp. 327-420. - TR.]

& Occam, In l. I. sententiarum, dist. 2, question 8.

ation as a mere negation; while St. Thomas based it on matter (the non-being). Duns Scotus, however, declares it to be a positive principle, and gives it the name of hæcceitas. The individual is, according to him, the sum of two equally positive and real principles: the quidditas (the universal, or the type common to the individuals of one and the same species) and the hæcceitas, the principle of the individuality or of the difference of individuals. The quidditas has no reality apart from the hæcceitas, nor the hæc ceitas apart from the quidditas. Reality is found in the union of the two principles, of the ideal and the real, that is, in the individual.

By his doctrines of individual liberty and hæcceitas Duns Scotus paves the way for the nominalism of his disciple Occam. His doctrine of accidental creation hastens the rupture between science and the authoritative rationalism of the Church, and the advent of modern empiricism; for if the laws of nature and the moral law itself are contingent, all science and morality itself depend on experience as their only basis. To place the will in the first rank in metaphysics and reason in the second, means to subordinate reasoning to the methods of observation and experience. Duns Scotus not only hastens the breach between science and dogma; but, the breach seems to be already made when, in his Quæstiones subtilissima, he rejects innate ideas, and declares the proof of the immortality of the s and of the existence of God to be impossible fro standpoint of science.

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