Why was this point so “very grave”?  Not because it was mere dialectics!  The only part of the story that seems grave today is the part that Abelard left out; the part which Saint Bernard, thirty years later put in, on behalf of William.  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 case with theologians—­and so obvious that it could not have troubled a scholar of fifteen.  William stated a settled doctrine as old as Plato; Abelard interposed an objection as old as Aristotle.  Probably Plato and Aristotle had received the question and answer from philosophers ten-thousand years older than themselves.  Certainly the whole of philosophy has always been involved in the dispute.

The subject is as amusing as a comedy; so amusing that ten minutes may be well given to playing the scene between William and Abelard, not as it happened, but in a form nearer our ignorance, with liberty to invent arguments for William, and analogies—­which are figures intended to serve as fatal weapons if they succeed, and as innocent toys if they fail—­such as he never imagined; while Abelard can respond with his true rejoinder, fatal in a different sense.  For the chief analogy, the notes of music would serve, or the colours of the solar spectrum, or an energy, such as gravity—­but the best is geometrical, because Euclid was as scholastic as William of Champeaux himself, and his axioms are even more familiar to the schoolboy of the twentieth, than to the schoolman of the twelfth century.

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.

William of Champeaux, lecturing on dialectics or logic, comes to the question of universals, which he says, are substances.  Starting from the highest substance, God, all being descends through created substances by stages, until it reaches the substance animality, from which it descends to the substance humanity:  and humanity being, like other essences or substances, indivisible, passes wholly into each individual, becoming Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, much as the divine substance exists wholly and undivided in each member of the Trinity.