No More Learning

Of these only those become distinct (distincta) and perfect on which the will, which in this process is determined by nothing
Scotus alsn t. paches at thp same ti"nTp~ that the will strengthens in their intensity these ideas which it raises from the confused to the distinct condition, and that the ideas to which the will rlnps not, apply it. splf ultimately cease to
exist, on account of their weakness.
In addition to these psychological arguments, we find appearing
in the controversy appeals to the authority of Anselm and Aristotle on the one side, and to that of Augustine on the other, and further a series of other arguments. These are in part of a purely dia lectical nature. Such is the case when Thomas claims that the verum toward which the intellect aims is higher in rank than the bonum toward which the will strives, and when Scotus doubts the authority for this gradation ; and so again when Thomas expresses the opinion that the intellect apprehends the pure, single conception of the good, while the will is concerned only with the special
empirical forms assumed by the good, and when Henry of Ghent and Scotus, exactly reversing this statement, develop the thought that the will is always directed only toward the good as such, while the understanding has to show in what the good consists in a particular case. With such variations the matter was later tossed to and fro a great deal, and Johannes Buridan is an example of those who stand undecided between determinism and indeterminism.
For the latter view speaks responsibility, for the former the prin ciple that every event is necessarily determined by its conditions.
Other arguments which become interwoven in the controversy trench upon the more general domains of the conceptions of the world and of life.
2. To this class belongs, first of all, the transfer of the question of the relative rank of will and intellect to God. The extreme intellectualism of the Arabians had, in Averroes, excluded the faculty of will from the Supreme Being, in accordance with the Aristolelian motif, that every act of will implies a want, a state of
further, hxes Its attention.
1 Whose view in thi* respect Richard of Middletown »l<" completely adopted.
332 Mediaeval Philosophy : Second Period. [Part III
imperfection and dependence; on the contrary Avicebron, who ex ercised a strong influence upon Duns Scotus, had defended the religious principle that the world was created by the divine will, and in a similar line of thought William of Auvergne had main tained the originality of the will as existing side by side with the intellect in the essence of God and in his creative activity. These antitheses were now continued in the controversy between Thomism and Scotism.
Thomas, indeed, as a matter of course, recognises the reality of the divine will, but he regards it as the necessary consequence of the divine intellect, and as determined in its content by the latter. God creates only what in his wisdom he knows to be good ; it is neces sarily himself, i. e. the ideal content of his intellect, that forms the object of his will ; he necessarily wills himself, and in this consists the freedom, determined only by himself, with which he wills indi vidual things. Thus the divine will is bound to the divine wisdom, which is superior to it.
But just in this the opponents of Aquinas see a limitation of
omnipotence which does not comport with the conception of the ens realissimum. A will seems to them sovereign, only if there is for it no kind of determination or restriction. God created the world, according to Scotus, solely from absolute arbitrary will ; he might have created he had so willed, in other forms, relations, and conditions and beyond this his completely undetermined will, there are no causes. The will of God with its undetermined crea tive resolves the original fact of all reality, and no further ques tions must be asked as to its grounds, — even as the decision made by the will of finite being with its liberum arbitrium indifferentice, when placed before given possibilities, creates in every instance a new fact which cannot be understood as necessary.
The sharpest formulation of this antithesis comes to light in the fundamental metaphysical principles of ethics. On both sides the moral law naturally regarded as God's command. But Thomas teaches that God commands the good because good, and recognised as good by his wisdom Scotus maintains that good only because God has willed and commanded and Occam adds to this that God might have fixed something else, might have fixed even the opposite as the content of the moral law. For Thomas, therefore, goodness the necessary consequence and mani festation of the divine wisdom, and Eckhart also says that "be neath the garment of goodness " the essential nature of God veiled; intellectualism teaches the perseXtas boni, the rationalty of the good. For intellectualism, morals philosophical discipline
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;
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it is
is
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it is
is
a
is
;
it, if
Chap. 2, § 26. ] Will and Intellect : Thomism, Scotism. 333
whose principles are to be known by the "natural light. " "Con science " (synteresis ') is a knowledge of God sub ratione boni. With 8cotus and_Occam, on the contrary, the good cannot he a" object of natural knowledge, for it might have been otherwise than it is : it ia determined not by reason, but by groundless will. Nothing, so
t'lerre d'Ailly teaches with extreme consistency, is in itself, or per se, sin; it is only the divine command and prohibition which make anything such, — a doctrine whose range is understood wheu we reflect that, according to the view of these men, God's com mand becomes known to man only through the mouth of the
Church.
It is also closely connected with this that theology, which for
Tli' un;is still remained a " speculative " science, became with his opponents, as has been already indicated above (§ 25, 3), a " prac tical " discipline. Albert had already made intimations of this sort, Richard of Middletown and Bonaventura had emphasised the fact that theology deals with the emotions ; Boger Bacon had taught that while all other sciences are based on reason or experience, theology alone has for its foundation the authority of the divine will: Duns Scotus completed and fixed the separation between theology and philosophy by making it a necessary consequence of his metaphysics of the will.
4. The same contrast becomes disclosed with like distinctness in the doctrines of the final destiny of man, of his state in eternal blessedness. The ancient Otatpia, the contemplation of the divine majesty, free from will and from want, had in Augustine's teaching formed the ideal state of the pardoned and glorified man, and this ideal had been made to waver but little by the doctrines of the ear lier Mystics. Now it found new support in the Aristotelian intel- lectualism, in accordance with which Albert thought that man, in so far as he is truly man, is intellect. The participation in the divine being which man attains by knowledge is the highest stage of life which he can reach. On this account Thomas, too, sets the dianoetic virtues above the practical, on this account the visio dicinee essentia, the intuitive, eternal vision of God, which is removed beyond all that is temporal, is for him the goal of all human striving. From this vision follows eo ipso the love of God, just as every determinate
» This word (written also tinderetis, tclnderetit) has, since Albert of Boll- ttldt, occasioned much etymological cudgelling of brains. Since, however, among the later physicians of antiquity (Sext. Emp. ) rijpi^n appears as a technical term for "observation," it mny be that ffinr^pij^it, which is attested in the fourth century, originally signified "self-observation" in analogy with the Neo- Platonic usage in cvnir^rn or turtUritu (cf. p. 234), and thus tuck on the ethico- religious sense of "conscience" (cox$cientia).
&34 Mediceval Philosophy : Second Period. [Part IH
state of the will is necessarily attached to the corresponding state of the intellect. Just this tendency of Thomisra was given its most beautiful expression by Dante, the poet of the system. Beatrice is the poetic embodiment of this ideal, for all time.
Meanwhile a counter-current manifests its force on this point also. Hugo of St. Victor had characterised the supreme angel choir by love, and the second by wisdom ; and while Bonaventura regarded contemplation as the highest stage in the imitation of Christ, he emphasised expressly the fact that this contemplation is identical with "love. " Duns Scotus, however, taught with a decided polemi cal tendency that blessedness is a state of the will, and that, too, of the will directed toward God alone ; he sees man's last glorification, not in contemplation, but in love, which is superior to contemplation, and he appeals to the word of the Apostle, " The greatest of these is love. "
Hence as Thomas regarded the intellect, and Duns Scotus the will, as the decisive and determining element of man's nature, Thomas could hold fast to Augustine's doctrine of the gratia irresisti- bilis, according to which revelation determines irresistibly the intel lect and with it the will of man, while Duns Scotus found himself forced to the "synergistic" view, that the reception of the oppm- tion of divine grace is to a certain extent conditioned bv the free will of the individual. So the great successor of Augustine, with strict logical consistency, decided against the Augustiman doctrine of pre destination.
5. On the other hand, the intellectualism of Thomas develops its extreme consequences in German Mysticism, whose founder, Eckhart, is entirely dependent upon the teacher of his Order in the con- ceptional outlines of his doctrine. 1 Eckhart goes far beyond his master only in the one respect that as a much more original person ality he is unwearied in his effort to translate the deep and mighty feeling of his piety into knowledge, and thus urged on by his inner nature he breaks through the statutory restrictions before which Thomas had halted. Convinced that the view of the world given in the religious cousciousness must be capable of being made also the content of the highest knowledge, he sublimates his pious faith to a speculative knowledge, and in contrast with the pure spirituality of this he looks upon the Church dogma as only the external, temporal symbol. But while this tendency is one that he shares with many
1 Cf. S. Denifle in the Archiv fur Litterat. - u Kult. -Oesch. d. M. -A. ,ll. 417 ff. So far, therefore, as Eckhart was really to be the "Father of German speculation," this speculation had its source in Thomas Aquinas and his teacher Albert.
Chap. 2, § 26. ] Will and Intellect : Eckhart. 335
other systems, it is his peculiarity that he does not wish to have the inmost and truest truth kept as the privilege of an exclusive circle, but desires rather to communicate it to all people. He believes that the right understanding for this deepest essence of religious doctrine is to be found precisely in connection with simple piety,' and so he throws down from the pulpit among the people the finest conceptions constructed by science. With a mastery of language that marks the genius he coins Scholasticism into impressive preach ing, and creates for his nation the beginnings of its philosophical modes of expression, —beginnings which were of determining in fluence for the future.
But in his teaching the combined mystical and intellectualistic elements of Thomism become intensified by the Neo-Platonic ideal ism, which had probably reached him through the medium of Scotus Erigena, to the last logical consequence. Being and knowledge are one, and all that takes place in the world is in its deepest essence a knowing process. The procedure of the world forth out of God is a process of knowledge, of self-revelation, — the return of things into God is a process of knowledge, of higher and higher intuition. The ideal existence of all that is real — so at a later time said
Nicolaus Cusanus, who made this doctrine of Eckhart's his own — is truer than the corporeal existence which appears in space and time.
The original ground of all things, the deity, must therefore lie beyond Being and knowledge ; * it is above reason, above Being ; it has no determination or quality, it is " Nothing. " But this "deity "
(of negative theology) reveals itself in the triune God,5 and the God who is and knows creates out of nothing the creatures whose Ideas he knows within himself; for this knowing is his creating. This process of self-revelation belongs to the essence of the deity, it is hence a timeless necessity, and no act of will in the proper sense of the word is required for God to produce the world. The deity, as productive or generative essence, as '■ un-natured Nature " [or Nature that has not yet taken on a nature], is real or actual only by knowing and unfolding itself in God and the world as produced
1 (i. -rnian Mysticism is thus connected with the more general phenomenon, that the fast increasing externalisation which seized upon the life of the Church in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries drove piety everywhere into paths that lay outside the Church.
* Evidently the same relation that subsisted in the system of Plotlnus between lb* fr and the mvt, a relation in which thought and Being were held to coincide. ' The distinction between deity and God (diiinitm and deut) was made dla-
Jectically by Gilbert de la I'nrree in connection with the controversy over uni versal* and its relations to the doctrine of the Trinity.
336 Mediaeval Philotophy : Second Period. [Part III.
reality, as natured Nature. 1 God creates all — said Nicolaus disa rms — that is to say, he is all. And on the other hand, according to Eckhart, all things have essence or substance only in so far as they are themselves God ; whatever else appears in them as phenomena, their determination in space and time, their " here " and " now " (" Hie " und " Nu," hie et nunc with Thomas), is nothing. 1
The human soul, also, is therefore in its inmost nature of the divine essence, and it is only as a phenomenon in time that it possesses the variety of " powers " or " faculties " with which it is active as a member of the natura naturata. That inmost essence Eckhart calls the " Spark," s and in this he recognises the living point at which the world-process begins its return.
For to the "Becoming" corresponds the reverse process, the "Anti-becoming" (" Entwerden"), the disappearing. And this, too, is the act of knowledge by means of which the things which have been made external to the deity are taken back into the original Ground. By being known by man the world of sense finds again its true spiritual nature. Hence human cogni tion, with its ascent from sense perception to rational insight,* consists in the "elimination " (" Abscheiden ") of plurality and mul tiplicity; the spiritual essence is freed from its enveloping husks. And this is man's highest task in the temporal life, since knowledge is the most valuable of man's powers. He should indeed be also active in this world, and thus bring his rational nature to assert itself and gain control, but above all outer action, above the right eousness of works which belongs to the sphere of sense, stands first the "inner work," cleanness of disposition, purity of heart, and above this in turn" stands retirement or "decease" (Abgeschieden- heit) and "poverty of soul, the complete withdrawal of the soul from the outer world into its inmost essence, into the deity. In the act of knowing it reaches that purposelessness of action, that action not constrained by an end, that freedom within itself, in which its beauty consists.
But even this is not perfect so long as the knowing process does not find its consummation. The goal of all life '« *h» knowledge of
1 On the terms natura naturans and natura naturata, which were probably brought into use by Averroism (cf. § 27, 1), cf. H. Siebeck, Archiv f. Gesch. d. Phil, III. 370 ff.
1 Accordingly without accepting the dialectical formulas, Eckhart treats the Thomistic doctrine of Ideas quite in the sense of the strict Realism of Scotus Erigena. He speaks slightingly of the Nominalists of his time as "little masters. "
* Also the *'Gemtithe" or Synteresis = scintilla contcientia;.
* The single stages of this process are developed by Eckhart according to the Thomistic- Augustinian scheme.
Chap. 2, $ 27. ] Problem of Individuality. 337
God, but knowing is Being ; it is a community of life and of Being with that which is known. If the soul would know God, it must be God, it must cease to be itself. It must renounce not only sin and the world, but itself also. It must strip off all its acquired knowledge, and all present knowing of phenomena ; as the deity is " Nothing," so it is apprehended only in this knowledge that is a not-knowing — docta ignorantia, it was later called by Nicolaus ; and as that " Nothing " is the original ground of all reality, so this not- knowing is the highest, the most blessed contemplation. It is no longer an act of the individual, it is the act of God in man ; God begets his own essence within the soul, and in his pure eternal nature the " Spark " has stripped off all its powers through which it
works in time, and has effaced their distinction. This is the state of supra-rational knowing when man ends his life in God, — the state, of which Nicolaus of Cusa said, it is the eternal love (charitas), which is known by love (amore) and loved by knowledge.
§ 27. The Problem of Individuality.
The doctrine of German Mysticism, which had arisen from the deepest personal piety and from a genuine individual need felt in a life whose religion was purely internal, thus runs out into an ideal of exaltation, of self-denial, of renunciation of the world, in the p res e nee of which everything that is particular, every individual reality, appears as sin or imperfection, as had been the case in the ancient Oriental view. In this thought the contradiction that was inherent la the depths of~the Augusiinlan system (cf. p. 287) bccanie
fully developed and immediately palpable, and it thus becomes evident that the is eol'latonic intellectualism, in whatever form it appeared from the time of Augustine to that of Master Eckhart, was in itself alone always necessarily inclined to contest the metaphysical self- subsistence of the individual, while the other party maintained this self-subsistence as a postulate of the doctrine of the will. Accord ingly, when in connection with the increase of intellectualism the untversalistic tendency increased also, the counter-current was neces sarily evoked all the more powerfully, and the same antithesis in motives of thought which had led to the dialectic of the controversy over universals (cf. p. 289) now took on a more real and metaphys ical form in the question as to the ground of evidence in individual
beings (principinm individuationis) .
r. Tne stimulus for this was furnished by the far-reaching conse
quences to which universalism and intellectualism had led among the Arabians. For the Arabians, in interpreting the Aristotelian
338 Mediaeval Philosophy : Second Period. [Part in
system, had proceeded in the direction which had been introduced in antiquity by Strato (cf. p. 179 f. ), and which among the later com mentators had been maintained chiefly by Alexander of Aphrodisias. This direction was that of naturalism, which would fain remove from the system of the Stagirite even the last traces of a metaphys ical separation between the ideal and the sensuous. This effort had become concentrated upon two points : upon the relation of God to the world, and upon that of the reason to the other faculties. In both these lines the peculiar nature of the Arabian Peripatetic doc trine developed, and this took place by complicated transformations of the Aristotelian conceptions of Form and Matter.
In general, we find in this connection in the Andalusian philoso phy a tendency to make matter metaphysically self-subsistent. It is conceived of, not as that which is merely abstractly possible, but as that which bears within itself as living germs the Forms peculiar to and brings them to realisation in its movement. At the same time Averroes, as regards particular cosmic processes, held fast to the Aristotelian principle that every movement of matter by which
realises out of itself lower Form, must be called forth by higher Form, and the graded series of Forms finds its termination above in God, as the highest and first mover. The transcendence of God could be united with this view, as the doctrine of Avicebron shows, only matter were regarded as itself created by the divine will. But on the other hand, this same Jewish philosopher, pro ceeding from the same presuppositions, insisted that with the excep tion of the deity, no being could be thought of otherwise than as connected with matter, that accordingly even the spiritual Forms need for their reality matter in which they inhere, and that finally the living community of the universe demands single matter as basis for the entire realm of Forms. The more, however, in the system of Averroes, matter was regarded as eternally in motion within itself, and as actuated by unity of life, the less could the moving Form be separated from realiter, and thus the same divine All-being appeared on the one hand as Form and moving force (natura naturans), and on the other hand as matter, as moved world
(natura natnrata).
This doctrine with regard to matter, that one in nature, is
informed within, and ~ts~ eternally in mutton of ttSilf, became ex tended with Averroism as an extremely naturalistic interpretation of the philosophy of Aristotle. It now became reinforced by those consequences of dialectical Realism- which compelled the view that God, as the ens generalissimum, the only substance, and that in~ qividual things are but the more or less transient Forms in which
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it
it
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a
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Chap. 2, § 27. ] Problem of Individuality : Averroe's. 339
this single substance becomes realised (cf. § 23). The Amalricans thus teach that God is the one single essence {essentia) of all things, and that creation is only an assuming of form on the part of this divine essence, a realising, completed in eternal movement, of all possibilities contained in this one single matter. David of Dinant1 establishes this same pantheism with the help of Avicebron's con ceptions, by teaching that as " hyle " (j. e. corporeal matter) is the substance of all bodies, so mind (ratio — mens) is the substance of all souls ; that, however, since God, as the most universal of all es sences, is the substance of all things whatever, God, matter, and mind are, in the last resort, identical, and the world is but their self-realisation in particular forms.
? ~. But the metaphysical self-subsistence of the individual mind was involved in doubt by yet another line of thought. Aristotle had made the vovs, as the everywhere identical rational activity, join the animal soul '• from without," and had escaped the difficul ties of this doctrine because the problem of personality, which emerged only with the Stoic conception of the i}yi/iovuc6V, did not as yet lie within the horizon of his thought. But the commenta tors, Greek and Arabian, who developed his system did not shrink before the consequences that resulted from it for the metaphysical value of mental and spiritual individuality.
In the thought of Alexander of Aphrodisias we meet, under the name of the "passive intellect" (cf. p. 150), the capacity of the in dividual psyche to take up into itself, in accordance with its whole animal and empirical disposition, the operation of the active reason, and this inteUectus agens (agreeably to the naturalistic conception of the whole system) is here identified with the divine mind, which is •till thought only as "separate Form" (inteUectus separatus). But with Simplicius, in accordance with the Neo-Platonic metaphysics, this , inteUectus agens which realises itself in man's rational knowledge has already become the lowest of the intelligences who rule the sub lunary world. ' This doctrine finds an original development in the thought of Averroes. * According to his view, the inteUectus passivus is to be sought in the individual's capacity for knowledge, a capacity which, like the individual himself, arises and perishes as Form of the individual body ; it has validity, therefore, only for the injT vidual, ai'd for that which concerns the particular. The inteUectus
1 Following the Liber de Cautii and the pseudo-Boethian treatise De Vno «( Unit ate ; cf. B. Haureau in the Mimoires de VAcad. det Itueript. , XXIX. (1877),
and also A. Jundt, Histaire du Pantheisme Populaire au M. -A. (Pari*, 1876). 'The no-called "Theology of Aristotle" identifies thin k>« with the \d-,ox.
for particular*, see E. Renan, Av. et VAv. , II. $ <l H. •Cf. principally his treatise De Anhmr Healitiidiiie.
,V*^ p\j»\
340 Mediaeval Philosophy : Second Period. [Part III.
agens, on the contrary, as a Form existing apart from empirical in dividuals and independent of them, is the eternal generic reason of the human race, which neither arises nor perishes, and which con tains the universal truths in a manner valid for all. It is the sub stance of the truly intellectual life, and the knowing activity of the individual is but a special manifestation of it. This (actual) knowing activity (as intellectus acquisitus) is indeed in its con tent, in its essence, eternal, since in so far it is just the active rea son itself ; on the contrary, as empirical function of an individual knowing process, it is as transitory as the individual soul itself. The completest incarnation of the active reason has, according to Averroes, been given in Aristotle. 1 Man's rational knowing is, then, an impersonal or supra-personal function : it is the individual's {Temporal participation in the eternal generic reason. This latter is the unitary essence which realises, itsplf in *V"> mneft Ynlligble activi-
^ties of personality.
Intimations of this pan-psychism occasionally appear in the train
of Neo-Platonic Mysticism at an earlier period in Western literature ;
as an outspoken and extended doctrine it by the side of appears
Averroism about 1200 ; the two are everywhere named in conjunc tion at the first when the erroneous doctrines of the Arabian Peripatetic thought are condemned, and it is one main effort of the Dominicans to protect Aristotle himself from being confused with this doctrine. Albert and Thomas both write a De Unitate Intellectus against the Averroists.
3. Pan-psychism encounters with Christian thinkers an oppo- sition in which the determining factor is the feeling of the meta physical value of personality, — the feeling which had been nour ished by Augustine. This is the standpoint from which men like William of Auvergne and Henry of Ghent oppose Averroes. And this is also the real reason why the main systems of Scholasticism — in diametrical contrast with Eekhart's Mysticism — did not allow the "Realism which was inherent in the intellpctualistin bases of their metaphysics to come to complete development. TJiomism was here in the more difficult case, for it maintained indeed, follow ing Avicenna's formula (cf. p. 299), that universals, and therefore also the genus " soul," exist only " individualised," i. e. in the indi vidual empirical examples as their universal essence (quidditas), but it ascribed to them, nevertheless, metaphysical priority in the divine mind. It was therefore obliged to explain how it comes
1 And with this the unconditional recognition of the authority of the Stagirite is theoretically justified by Averroes.
Chap. 2, § 27. ] Problem of Individuality : Thotnism, Scotism.
341
about that this one essence as universal matter presents itself in such manifold forms. That is to say, it asked after the pbincipium iNDrviDUATiONis, and found it in the consideration that matter in space and time is quantitatively determined (materia signata). In the capacity of matter to assume quantitative differences consists the possibility of individuation, i. e. the possibility that the same Form (e. g. humanity) is actual in different instances or examples as indi vidual substances. Hence, according to Thomas, pure Forms (sepa ratee sive subsistentes) are individualised only through themselves ; that is, there is but one example which corresponds to them.
Every angel is a genus and an individual at the same time. The inherent Forms, on the contrary, to which the human soul also belongs in spite of its subsistence (cf. p. 324), are actual in many examples, in
accordance with the quantitative differences of space and time which their matter presents.
This view was opposed by the Franciscans, whose religious and metaphysical psychology had developed in intimate relation with AugUBtlne'8 teaching. In their thought, first the individual soul, and then, with a consistent extension in general
metaphysics, individual beings in general, are regarded as self-subsisting realities. They rejected the distinction of separate and inherent Forms.
Bonaventura, Henry of Ghent, and still more energetically Duns Scotus, maintained, following Avicebron, that even intellectual Forms have their own matter, and Scotus teaches that the " soul " is not individualised and substantialised only after, and by means of, its relation to a definite body, as Thomas had taught, but that it is already in itself individualised and substantialised. On this point Scotitm shows a discord which had evidently not come to notice in the mind of its author. It emphasises on the one hand, in the strongest manner, the Reality of the universal, by maintaining the unity of matter (materia primo-prima) quite in the Arabian sense, and on the other hand it teaches that this universal is only actual by being realised by the series of Forms descending from the uni versal to the particular, and ultimately by means of the definite individual Form (haecceita*) . This individual Form is therefore for Duns Scotus an original fact; no farther question as to its ground is permissible. He designates individuality (lx>th in the sense of individual substance and in that of individual occurrence) as the contingent (contingens) ; that is, as that which is not to be deduced from a universal ground, but is only to be verified as actual fact. For him, therefore, as for his pi-P. lprpsanr Roper Rarnn, the inquiry for the principle of inHiviHmtitr" H? "-> pining • H»a indi vidual is the " last " Form of all reality, by means of which alone
342 Mediaeval Philosophy : Second Period. [Part III.
universal matter exists, and the question rather is, how, in presence of the fact that the individual being with its determined torm is the only Reality, one can still speak of a Reality of universal " naturesT71
from this noteworthy limitation of the doctrine of Scotus it becomes explicable that while some of its adherents, as for example Francls~~of Mayron, proceeded from it to extreme Realism, it sud denly changed with Occam into the renewed of the nominalist)*: thesis, that OnlyTTie" individual is real and that the universal is but a product of comparative thought.
4. The victorious development which Nominalism experienced in the second period of mediaeval philosophy rests upon an extremely peculiar combination of very different motives of thought. In the
epths of this stream of development ia dominant the Anfpistinian momentoi feeling, which seeks to see thfl proper metaphysical value secured to the individual personality; in the main philosophical current the anti-. r/iatonic tendency of the Aristotelian theory of knowledge, now just becoming Known, asserts itself, throwing its intluence toward conceding the value of "first substance" to the empirical individual only ; and on the surface plays a logico-gram- nratical schematism, which has its origin in the first operation of the Byzantine tradition of ancient thought. 2 All these influences become concentrated in the impassioned, impressive personality of William of Occam.
In their exposition of the doctrine of concepts and its application to the judgment and syllogism, the text-books of "modern" logic, as type of which that of Petrus Hispanus may serve, lay an impor tant emphasis upon the theory of "supposition" in a manner which is not without its precedent in antiquity. 3 According to this theory a class-concept or term (terminus) may, in language, and, as was then supposed, in logic also, stand for the sum of its species, and a species-concept for the sum of all its individual examples (homo = omnes homines), so that in the operations of thought a term is employed as a sign for that which it means. Occam develops Nom inalism in the forms of this Terminism* (cf. pp. 325 f). Individual
1 This method for the solution of the problem of universals, peculiar to Duns Scotus, is usually called Formalism.
3 In fact, we may see in the working of the text-book of Michael Psellos the first impetus of that accession of ancient material of culture which the West received by way of Byzantium, and which later in the Renaissance became definitely united with the two other lines of tradition that came, the one by way of Rome and York, the other by way of Bagdad and Cordova.
8 The reader need only be reminded of the investigations of Philodemus on signs and things signified (p. 162 ; cf. also p. 198).
* Cf. K. Prantl in the Sitz. -Ber. der Munch. Acad. 1864. II. a 58 ff.
Chap. 2, § 27. ] Problem of Individuality : Terminism. 348
things, to which Occam, following Scotus, concedes the Reality of original Forms, are represented in thought by us intuitively, without the mediation of species intelligibiles ; but these ideas or mental rep resentations are only the " natural " signs for the things represented. They have only a necessary reference to them, and have real simi larity with them as little as any sign " is necessarily like the object designated. This relation is that of first intention. " But now as individual ideas stand for (supponunt) individual things, so, in thought, speech, and writing, the " undetermined " general ideas of abstract knowledge, or the spoken or written words which in turn express these general ideas, may stand for the individual idea. This "second intention," in which the general idea with the help of the word refers no longer directly to the thing itself, but primarily to the idea of the thing, is no longer natural, but arbitrary or according to one's liking (ad placitum instituta). 1 Upon this distinction Occam rests also that of real and ratiotial science : the former relates imme diately or intuitively to things, the latter relates abstractly to the
immanent relations between ideas.
It is clear, according to this, that rational science also presupposes
" real " science and is bound to the empirical material presented in the form of ideas by this real science, but it is also clear that even " real " knowledge apprehends only an inner world of ideas, which may indeed serve as " signs " of things, but are different from things themselves. The mind — so Albert had incidentally said, and Nico- laus Cusanus at a later time carried out the thought — knows only what it has within itself; its knowledge of the world, terministic Nominalism reasons, refers to the inner states into which its living connection with the real world puts it. As contrasted with the true essence of things, teaches Nicolaus Cusanus, who committed himself absolutely to this idealistic Nominalism, human thought possesses only conjectures, that only modes of representation which corre spond to its own nature, and the knowledge of this relativity of all positive predicates, the knowledge of this non-knowledge, the docta ignorantia, the only way to go beyond rational science and attain to the inexpressible, signless, immediate community of knowledge
with true Being, the deity.
jn spite of this far-reaching epistemological restriction, the
real vital energy of Nominalism was directed toward the develo;t- ment of natural science and its results during the fourteenth ami fifteenth centuries remained very limited, the essential reason for this
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844 Mediceval Philosophy : Second Period. [Part III
was that the scholastic method with its bookish discussion of authori ties, which had now attained full perfection, controlled absolutely later as well as earlier the prosecution of science, and that the new ideas forced into this form could not unfold freely, — a phe nomenon, moreover, which continues far into the philosophy of the Renaissance. For all that, Duns Septus and Occam gave the chief impetus to the movement in which philosophy, taking- jfra p]apa beside the metaphysics whose interests ha. <l hitherto been essentially religious, made itself again a secular science of concrete, actual fact, ana placed itself with more and more definite consciousness upon the basis of empiricism. When Duns Scotus designated the hcecceitas or original individual Form, as contingent, this meant that it was to be known, not by logical deduction, but only by actual verification as fact ; and when Occam declared the individual being to be the alone truly Real, he was thereby pointing out to " real science " the way to the immediate apprehension of the actual world. But in this point the two Franciscans are under the influence of Roger Bacon, who with all his energy had called the science of his time from authorities to things, from opinions to sources, from dialectic to experience, from books to Nature. At his side in this movement stood Albert, who supported the same line of thought among the Dominicans, knew how to value the worth of original observation and experiment, and gave brilliant proof in his botanical studies of the independence of his own research. But strongly as Roger Bacon, following Arabian models, urged quantitative determinations in observation, and mathematical training, the time was not yet ripe for natural research. Attempts like those of Alexander Nekkam (about 1200), or those of Nicolaus d'Autricuria, at a later time (about 1350), passed away without effect.
The fruitful development of empiricism during this period was only in the line of psychology. Under the influence of the Arabs, especially of Avicenna and of the physiological optics of Alhacen, investigations concerning the psychical life took on a tendency directed more toward establishing and arranging the facts of expe rience. This had been begun even by Alexander of Hales, by his pupil, Johann of Rochelle, by Vincent of Beauvais, and especially by Albert; and in the system of Alfred the Englishman (Alfred de Sereshel, in the first half of the thirteenth century) we find a purely physiological psychology with all its radical consequences. These stirrings of a physiological empiricism would, however, have been repressed by the metaphysical psychology of Thomism, if they had not found their support in the Augustinian influence, which held fast to the experience which personality has of itself, as its
Chap. 2, § 27. ] Problem of Individuality : Nicolaut Ctuanut. 345
highest principle. In this attitude Henry of Ghent, especially, came forward in opposition to Thomism. He formulated sharply the standpoint of inner experience and gave it decisive value, particu larly in the investigation of the states of feeling. Just in this point, in the empirical apprehension of the life of feeling, the theory of which became thus emancipated at the same time from that of the will and that of the intellect, he met support in Roger Bacon, who, with clear insight and without the admixture of meta physical points of view, distinctly apprehended the difference in principle between outer and inner experience.
Thus the r*"Tiarkf'>'>1'> wait ""g""^, that pawly thtaMtJaal lajapoe developed inopposition to intellectualistic Thomism, and in connec- tion with the Augustinian doctrine of the self-certainty of person- altry; This self-knowledge was regarded as the most certain fact of " real science," even as it appeared among the nominalistic Mystics such as Pierre d'Ailly. Hence " real science " in the departing Middle Ages allied itself rather to active human life than to Nature ; and the beginnings of a " secular " science of the inter-relations of human society are found not only in the theories of Occam and Marsilius of Padua (cf. p. 328), not only in the rise of a richer, more living, and more " inward " writing of history, but also in an empirical consideration of the social relations, in which a Nicolas dCOresme,1 who died 1382, broke the path.
6. The divided frame of mind in which the departing Middle Ages round itself, between the original presuppositions of its thought and these beginnings of a new, experientially vigorous rtmrchj finds nowhere a more lively expression than in the phil- OBOpEy of Nicolati* Cusaniis, which is capable of so many interpre-_ tationsl Seized in every fibre of his being by the fresh impulse of the time, he nevertheless could not give up the purpose of arrang ing his new thoughts in the system of the old conception of the world.
This attempt acquires a heightened interest from the conceptions which furnished the forms in which he undertook to arrange his thoughts. The leading motive is to show that the individual, even in his metaphysical separateness, is identical with the most uni versal, the divine essence. To this end Nicolaus employs for the first time, in a thoroughly systematic way, the related conceptions of the infinite and thefinite. All antiquity had held the perfect to be that which is limited within itself and had regarded only indefinite possibility as infinite. In the Alexandrian philosophy,
Cf. concerning him W. Roncher, Ztiuxhr- f. SlaaUv>i*tt**cknn, 1863, 306 fl.
346 Mediceval Philosophy : Second Period. [Part 111
on the contrary, the highest being was stripped of all finite at tributes. In Plotinus the "One" as the all-forming power is provided with an unlimited intensity of Being on account of the infinity of matter in which it discloses itself ; and also in Christian thought the power, as well as the will and the knowledge of God, had been thought more and more as boundless. Here the main additional motive was, that the will even in the individual is felt as a restless, never quiet striving, and that this infinity of inner ex
perience was exalted to a metaphysical principle. But Nicolaus was the first to give the method of negative theology its positive ex pression by treating infinity as the essential characteristic of God in antithesis to the world. The identity of God with the world, required as well by the mystical view of the world as by the naturalistic, received, therefore, the formulation that in God the same absolute Being is contained infinitely, which in the world presents itself in finite forms.
In this was given the farther antithesis of unity and plurality. The infinite is the living and eternal unity of that which in the finite appears as extended plurality. But this plurality — and Gusanus lays special weight on this point — is also that of opposites. What in the finite world appears divided into different elements, and only by this means possible as one thing by the side of another in space, must become adjusted and harmonised in the infinitude of the divine nature. God is the unity of all opposites, the coin- cidentia oppositorum. 1 He therefore, the absolute reality in which all possibilities are eo ipso realised (possest, can-is), while each of the many finite entities in itself only possible, and real or actual only through him.
Among the oppositions which are united in God, those between him and the world, — that is, those of the infinite and the finite, and of unity and plurality, — appear as the most important. In consequence of this union the infinite at the same time finite in each of his manifestations in phenomena the unitary dens implicitus at the same time the deus explicitus poured forth into plurality
290). God the greatest (maximum) and at the same time also
Nicolaus also designates his own doctrine, in contrast with opposing sys tems, as a coincidentia oppositorum, since aims to do justice to all motives of earlier philosophy. Cf. the passages in Falckenberg, op. cit. , pp. 60 ff.
Thomas expressed the same thought as follows God the only necessary being, i. e. that which exists by virtue of its own nature thought which is to be regarded as an embodiment of Anselm's ontological argument, cf 23, 2), while in the case of all creatures, essence (or quidditas — whatness) really separate from existence in such way that the former in itself merely possible and that the latter added to as realisation. The relation of this doctrine to the fundamental Aristotelian conceptions, actus and potentia, obvious.
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Chaf. 2, § 27. ] Problem of Individuality : Nicolaus Cusanun. 847
the smallest (minimum). But, on the other hand, in consequence of this union it follows also that this smallest and finite is in its own manner participant in the infinite, and presents within itself, as does the whole, a harmonious unity of the many.
Accordingly, the universe is also infinite, not indeed in the same sense in which God is infinite, but in its own way; that unlimited in space and time (interminatum, or. privitively infinite). But a certain infinity belongs likewise to each individual thing, in the sense that in the characteristics of its essence carries within itself also the characteristics of all other individuals. All
in all: omnia ubique. In this way every individual contains within itself the universe, though in limited form peculiar to this individual alone and differing from all others. In omnibus partibua relucet totum. Every individual thing is, rightly and fully known, a mirror of the universe, — thought which had already been ex pressed incidentally by the Arabian philosopher Alkendi.
Naturally this particularly true in the case of man, and in his conception of man as microcosm Nicolaus attaches himself ingeniously to the terrainistic doctrine. The particular manner in which other things are contained in man characterised by the ideas which form in him signs for the outer world. Man mirrors the universe by his " conjectures," by the mode of mental repre sentation peculiar to him (cf. above, 343).
Thus the finite also given with and in the infinite, the individ ual with and in the universal. At the same time the infinite necessary in itself; the finite, however (following Duns Scotus), absolutely contingent, t'. e. mere fact. There no proportion between the infinite and the finite even the endless series of the finite remains incommensurable with the truly infinite. The deri vation of the world from God incomprehensible, and from the knowledge of the finite no path leads to the infinite. That which
real as an individual empirically known, its relations and the oppositions prevailing in are apprehended and distinguished
the understanding, but the perception or intuition of the infinite unity, which, exalted above all these opposites, includes them all within itself, possible only by stripping off all such finite know edge, by the mystical exaltation of the docta ignorantia. Thus tin elements which Cusanus desired to unite fall apart again, even in the very process of union. The attempt to complete the mediaeval philosophy and make perfect on all sides leads to its inner disintegration.
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PART IV.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE RENAISSANCE.
J. E. Erdmann, Vertuch einer unssenschaftlichen DarsMlung der Getchichtt der neueren Philotophie. 3 pts. , in 6 Tola. Riga and Leips. 1834-63.
H. Ulrici, Getchichte und Kritik der Prineipien der neueren Philotophie. 2 Tola. Leips. 1845.
Kuno Fischer, Getchichu der neueren Philotophie. 4th ed. Heidelb. 1897 ff. [Eng. tr. of Vol. L, Dttcartet and Hit School, by J. P. Gordy, N. Y. 1877. ]
Ed. Zeller, Getchichte der deuttchen Philotophie teit Leibniz. 2d ed. , Berlin, 1876.
W. Windelband, Getchichte der neueren Philotophie. 2 vols. Leips. 2d ed. 1899. K.