ly 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 Abelard'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--Abelard--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 Abelard, is only the sum of
all possible facts that are true, as humanity is the sum of all
actual human beings. The ideal bed is a form, made by God, said
Plato. The ideal bed is a name, imagined by ourselves, said
Aristotle. 'I start from the universe,' said William. 'I start from
the atom,' said Abelard; and, once having started, they necessarily
came into collision at some point between the two."

In this "Story of My Misfortunes" Abelard gives his own account of
the triumphant manner in which he confounded his master, William,
but as Henry Adams says, "We should be more credulous than
twelfth-century monks, if we believed, on Abelard's word in 1135,
that in 1110 he had driven out of the schools the most accomplished
dialectician of the age by an objection so familiar that no other
dialectician was ever silenced by it--whatever may have been the