In Abaelard’s time men had already studied grammar, the grammar of the Latin tongue, and the quasi-grammar of rearrangement and first painful learning of the knowledge which it held. They had studied logic too, its simpler elements, those which consist mainly in a further clearing up of the meanings of language. Some men--Anselm of Canterbury--had already made sudden flights beyond grammar, and out of logic’s pale. And the labour of logical and organic appropriation, with some reconstruction of the ancient material, was to go on in this first half of the twelfth century, when Hugo of St. Victor lived as well as Abaelard. Progress by means of dialectic controversy, and first attempts at systematic construction, mark this period intellectually. Abaelard lived and moved and had his being in dialectic. The further interest of Theology was lent him by the spirit of his time. Through the medium of the one he reasoned analytically; and in the province of the other he applied his reasoning constructively, using patristic materials and the fragments of Greek philosophy scattered through them. Thus Abaelard, a true man of the twelfth century, passes on through logic to theology or metaphysics. For the completeness of his logical knowledge he lived and worked twenty or thirty years too soon. He was unacquainted with the more elaborate logical treatises of Aristotle, to wit, the _Prior_ and _Posterior Analytics_, the _Topics_, and _Sophistical Elenchi_. The sources of his own treatises upon Dialectic are Porphyry’s Introduction, Aristotle’s _Categories_ and _De interpretatione_, and certain treatises of Boëthius.[462] A first result of the elementary and quasi-grammatical character of the sources of logic upon which he drew, is that the connection between logic and grammar is very plain with him. Note, for example, this paragraph of his, the substance of which is drawn from Aristotle’s _Categories_: “But neither can substances be compared,[463] since comparison relates to attribute, and not to substance; so it is shown that comparison lies not as to nouns, but as to their attributes. Thus we say _whiter_ but not _whitenesser_. Much more are substances which have no attribute (_adjacentiam_) immune from comparison. More or less cannot be predicated of nouns (_nomina substantiva_). For one cannot say _more man_ or _less man_, as _more_ or _less white_.”[464]