This is then the matter in question; it is of great interest, and is founded upon a much higher opposition than any the ancients knew of. Roscelinus made universal conceptions arise only from the necessities of language. He maintained that ideas or universals, like Being, life, reason, are in themselves nothing but mere abstract notions or generic names, which, as such, have in and for themselves no universal reality of their own: that which has Being and life is found in the individual alone. Against these assertions arguments are brought forward by which one can see that the manner in which the Christian world was taken as basis, often became in the highest degree ridiculous. For instance, Abelard reproaches Roscelinus for having asserted that no thing has parts, that only the words which denote the things are divisible. Abelard proved that according to Roscelinus, Christ did not eat a real part of the broiled fish, but only a part—I do not know which—of the word “broiled fish,” since according to him there were no parts—which interpretation would be preposterous and highly blasphemous.[37] Our way of reasoning from “healthy human understanding,” is not much better. b. WALTER OF MORTAGNE. Walter of Mortagne (d. 1174) aimed at the union of the particular and the universal, saying that the universal must be individual, that universals must be united with individuals in accordance with their essence.[38] In later times the two rival factions were known to fame as Thomists, from the Dominican Thomas Aquinas, and Scotists, from the Franciscan Johannes Duns Scotus. Nevertheless, the original question as to whether universal notions have reality, and, if so, to what extent they have it, underwent a great variety of modifications and gradations, just as the opposing parties received very various names. Nominalism, in its crude form, declared universal notions to be mere names, which have reality only in speech, and it ascribed reality to individuals alone; Realism followed the exactly opposite course of attributing reality only to universals, while it considered that what distinguished individual things was an accident only or a pure difference. Neither of these two theories was correct in the manner of passing from the universal to the particular. There were some, however, among the Schoolmen who grasped the true conception that individuation, the limitation of the universal, and indeed of what is most universal, Being and entity, is a negation. Others said that the limit is itself something positive, but that it is not one with the universal by union with it, for it rather stands in a metaphysical connection with it, that is, in a connection such as that which binds thought with thought. This implies that the individual is only a clearer expression of what is already contained in the general conception; so that these conceptions, in spite of their being divided into parts and differentiated, still remain simple; Being or entity,