=Abelard’s Conceptualism. Universals exist in the Particulars.= Abelard formed the storm-centre of the strife over the technical relations between particulars and universals. His position has been misunderstood because he, the pupil and opponent both of Roscellinus and of William of Champeaux, fought each with the weapons of the other. He was repelled from pantheism, which appears to him to be the logic of realism, and he recoiled equally from the sensualistic outcome of nominalism. Universals are the indispensable forms of knowledge, and they must therefore have some existence in the nature of the things which we know. This existence consists of the similarity of the essential characteristic of things. This likeness is not a numerical identity, but a unity which makes our knowledge of the particular things possible. This likeness or similarity between things is the same as the types created by God. Thus the universal has no independent objective existence, and on the other hand it is not a mere word out of all relation to things. The universals exist in three ways: (1) they exist before the things only as Ideas in the mind of God; (2) they coexist with the things as the essential likenesses of things; (3) they exist after the things in the human mind, when it has knowledge of things. Abelard developed his theory only polemically and never worked it out systematically. On the technical side of this question the preceding lines of thought come into an unsystematic unity. His theory was accepted by the Arabian philosophers and is practically that of Aquinas and Duns Scotus. With Abelard the problem was not solved indeed, but it came to a preliminary stop in this statement――universals have an equal significance, _ante rem_ in the mind of God, _in re_ in nature, _post rem_ in human knowledge.