With what must have been a mock humility, Abélard went down the river each day with the crowd of monks and clerks to receive instruction in rhetoric from the new Prior of St. Victor’s. Deutsch remarks, with Teutonic gravity, that we do not read of a reconciliation between the two. Nor do we find that Abélard had been ‘converted’ to the spirit of Robert of Arbrissel or Bernard of Clairvaux during his retirement at Pallet. Abélard, now nearly thirty years of age, could have taught William the art of rhetoric with more profit than he himself was likely to derive from William’s _prælectiones_. His obvious aim was to break William’s connection with Paris and with Notre Dame. The high and gentle spirit of these latter days, that studies the feelings of an antagonist, and casts aside an ambition that would lead over the fallen fame of a fellow-man, did not commend itself to the mediæval mind. And so the contest ran on, until at length a new rumour was borne over the roads and into the schools of Europe. The ‘pillar of doctors’ was broken—had fallen beyond restoration. Guillaume de Champeaux had changed his doctrine on the question of universals. Swiftly the story ran over hill and dale—they were days when the words of masters outstripped the deeds of kings and the fall of dynasties: the champion of realism had so far yielded to Abélard’s pressure as to modify his thesis materially. For long years he had held that the universal was _essentially_ one and the same in all its individuals; now he admitted that it was only _indifferently_, or _individually_, identical.[7] The death of King Philip was a matter of minor interest to a world that brooded night and day over the question of genera and species. [7] The reader would probably not be grateful for a long explanation of the meaning of the change. It amounted to a considerable approach of William’s position towards that of Abélard.