Such a thought would naturally take shape during the course of the following twelve months. The only indication that Abélard gives us is to the effect that William was well disposed towards him at first, though there is no foundation in recorded fact for the assertion that William invited the youth to his house, but they were gradually involved in a warm dialectical encounter. Abélard was not only a handsome and talented youth (which facts he candidly tells us himself), but he was a practised dialectician. The lectures of those untiring days lasted for hours, and might be interrupted at any moment by a question from a scholar. Moreover, William was principally occupied with dialectics, and it would be quite impossible—if it were desired—to instruct youths in the art of disputing, without letting them exercise their powers on the hosts of problems which served the purpose of illustration. Hence the young Breton must have quickly brought his keen rapier into play. The consciousness of power and the adolescent vanity of exhibiting it, both generously developed in Abélard, would prepare the way for ambition. Question and answer soon led on to a personal contest. But there was a stronger source of provocation, and here it will be necessary to cast a hurried glance at the great controversy of the hour. Cousin has said that the scholastic philosophy was born of a phrase that Boetius translated out of Porphyry. It is a good epigram; but it has the disadvantage of most epigrams—it is false. The controversy about _genera_ and _species_ is by no means of vital importance to the scholastic philosophy, as Abélard himself has said. However, there is much truth in the assertion that this celebrated controversy, as a specific question, may be traced entirely to Porphyry. Boetius was the chief author read in the early mediæval schools. Amongst other works they had his Latin translation of Porphyry’s _Introduction_ to Aristotle, and in one corner of this volume some roving scholastic had been arrested by the allusion to the old Greek controversy about _genera_ and _species_. To put it shortly: we have mental pictures of individual men, and we have also the idea of man in general, an idea which may be applied to each and all of the individual men we know. The grave problem that agitated the centuries was, whether not only the individual human beings who live and move about us, but also this ‘general man’ or species, had an existence outside the mind. The modern photographer has succeeded in taking composite photographs. A number of human likenesses are super-imposed on the same plate, so that at length individual features are blended, and there emerges only the vague portrait of ‘a man.’ The question that vexed the mediæval soul was, whether this human type, as distinct from the individual mortals we see in the flesh, had a real existence.