The men who first became impressed with the importance of this problem, gave extreme answers to it, sometimes crassly denying the real existence of universals, but more often hailing them as antecedent and all-permeating realities. If Roscellinus took the former position, a pupil of his, William of Champeaux, held the extreme opposite view, when both he and the twelfth century were still young. One may, however, bear in mind that as the views of the older nominalist are reported only by his enemies, so our knowledge of William’s lucubrations comes mainly from the exacerbated pen of Peter Abaelard. William held apparently “that the same thing, in its totality and at the same time, existed in its single individuals, among which there was no essential difference, but merely a variety of accidents.”[459] Abaelard appears to have performed a _reductio ad absurdum_ upon this view that the total genus exists in each individual. He pointed out that in such case the total genus _homo_ would at the same time exist in Socrates and also in Plato, when one of them might be in Rome and the other in Athens. “At this William changed his opinion,” continues Abaelard, “and taught that the genus existed in each individual not _essentialiter_ but _indifferenter_ or [as some texts read] _individualiter_.” Which seems to mean that William no longer held that the total genus existed in each individual actually, but “indistinguishably,” or “individually.” And the students flocked away with Abaelard, _he_ also says; and William fled the lecture chair. William and Peter; shall we say of them _arcades ambo_? This would be but a harmless depreciation of Abaelard, in the face of the universal and correct tradition as to his epoch-making intellectual progressiveness. Indeed it might be well to let the phrase sound in our ears, just for the reminder’s sake, that Abaelard was, like William, a man of logic, although far more expert both in manipulating the dialectic processes and in applying them to theology.