Thomists, became nominalist after all; as did those once pious realists the Augustinians and Cistercians. Setting aside then the extreme nominalists, who would have dissolved thought by declaring all creatures to be so individual as to be incomparable,—“pulverising existence into detached particulars,” as some one has put it—and that names of kinds are mere nouns, or indeed mere air (“flatus vocis”), the prevalent nominalists were content to deny to ideas, forms, principles, or abstractions any other existence than as functions of the human mind—as subjective conceptions. For Ockham, says Hauréau, an idea was but a modality of the thinking subject. Abstractions then for these thinkers were but mental machinery for analysis of the concrete. Aristotle was as obscure and inconsistent in his language herein, and often elsewhere, as he was profound and scrupulous; but when his works came to be studied as a whole, and in the original tongue, the influence of his method, rather than the close consistency of his language, told against realism: virtually he was a conceptualist, and he found reality, where Plato denied it, in the particular object of sense[15]. Even Francis Bacon, who was deeply indebted to Aristotle, never extricated himself from the tangle of form, cause and law[16]. Now this was a great argument, no empty dispute; the bones of dead controversies cumber the ground, but no controversy was empty which moved profoundly the minds and passions of men: both for ecclesiastical and secular thought the dispute was grave. While realism was essential to the Church—for instance, on realist grounds St Anselm defended the medieval doctrine of the Trinity against Roscellinus; the Church herself claimed a real existence apart from the wills of successive generations of individual and variable men; she taught that Man had fallen not only in many or all individual cases, but as a kind having a real existence[17], and again that in the Mass there is change of hypostasis[18]—while then realism was essential to the Faith, yet if forms pre-exist (“ante rem”) then the acts of God must be predetermined—“fatis” non “avolsa voluntas”; or if forms are only “in re” God must be form, living in each and every act and thing, which is Pantheism (“materia omnium Deus”): an impersonal conception and a dissolution of dogma which the Church must and did abhor. “Pessimus error”—there is the abyss, cried Albert, avoiding it by dialectical juggles. Erigena, the brilliant prophet and protestant[19] of the first period of the scholastic philosophy, was virtually a pantheist after the pattern of Parmenides[20]; as Spinoza was the last great realist. David of Dinan again was such a pantheist, though luckily for him the Church did not find it out till he was dead; and he was martyred only in his bones. Indeed the great Robert of Lincoln barely escaped the accusation of pantheism under the wing of Augustine. The heresies of