In the _Quaestiones naturales_ Adelard of Bath gives vent to his scorn for the mentality that blindly accepts beliefs merely because they have the weight of authority behind them. In an extraordinary passage he expresses these ideas thus (as translated and paraphrased by Professor Haskins[570]): “‘It is hard to discuss with you,’ Adelard tells his nephew [in the dialogue form of the _Quaestiones naturales_], ‘for I have learned one thing from the Arabs under the guidance of reason; you follow another halter, caught by the appearance of authority, for what is authority but a halter?’... ‘If reason is not to be the universal judge, it is given to each to no purpose.’[571]... While plants spring from the earth by God’s will, this does not act without a reason.[572] Human science must first be listened to ... and ‘only when it fails utterly should there be recourse to God’ as an explanation.”[573] William of Conches shows the same spirit where he insists that God acts reasonably and not capriciously. He writes: “I am aware that some people assert, ‘Though we do not know how this happens to be so, we know that God can make it so.’ Wretched ones! What is more craven than to talk in that way! Because God can do something is no sign that he actually does it, nor any reason why he should do it, nor any reason why it is useful that it should be done. For God does not do whatever he can do. To employ a rustic expression: ‘God can make a calf out of a tree trunk,’ but does he ever do so?”[574] William apparently, unlike Theodoric, thought that we are justified in avoiding irrational deductions from Scripture by an appeal either to an allegorical interpretation or—what is even more surprising at a time when the word of authority was usually regarded as all-sufficient—to one’s own intellect: “We may begin our reasoning from the authority of a master, but it should be perfected by our own intellect.”[575] CONCEPT OF NATURAL LAWS