Not without a struggle was he brought to side with the Nominalists. Musing, when a boy, in the Rosenthal, near Leipzig, he debated long with himself,--"Whether he would give up the Substantial Forms of the Schoolmen." Strange matter for boyish deliberation! Yes, good youth, by all means, give them up! They have had their day. They served to amuse the imprisoned intellect of Christendom in times of ecclesiastical thraldom, when learning knew no other vocation. But the age into which you are born has its own problems, of nearer interest and more commanding import. The measuring-reed of science is to be laid to the heavens, the solar system is to be weighed in a balance; the age of logical quiddities has passed, the age of mathematical quantities has come. Give them up! You will soon have enough to do to take care of your own. What with Dynamics and Infinitesimals, Pasigraphy and Dyadik, Monads and Majesties, Concilium Ægyptiacum and Spanish Succession and Hanoverian cabals, there will be scant room in that busy brain for Substantial Forms. Let them sleep, dust to dust, with the tomes of Duns Scotus and the bones of Aquinas! The "De Principio Individui" was the last treatise of any note in the sense and style of the old scholastic philosophy. It was also one of the last blows aimed at scholasticism, which, long undermined by the Saxon Reformation, received its _coup de grace_ a century later from the pen of an English wit. "Cornelius," says the author of "Martinus Scriblerus," told Martin that a shoulder of mutton was an individual; which Crambe denied, for he had seen it cut into commons. 'That's true,' quoth the Tutor, 'but you never saw it cut into shoulders of mutton.' 'If it could be,' quoth Crambe, 'it would be the loveliest individual of the University.' When he was told that a _substance_ was that which is subject to _accidents_: 'Then soldiers,' quoth Crambe, 'are the most substantial people in the world.' Neither would he allow it to be a good definition of accident, that it could be present or absent without the destruction of the subject, since there are a great many accidents that destroy the subject, as burning does a house and death a man. But as to that, Cornelius informed him that there was a _natural_ death and a _logical_ death; and that though a man after his natural death was incapable of the least parish office, yet he might still keep his stall among the logical predicaments....