"I call God to witness," she wrote many years afterwards, "that if Augustus, the emperor of the world, had deemed me worthy of his hand, and would have given me the universe for a throne, the name of your concubine would have been more glorious to me than that of his empress: carius mihi et dignius videretur tua dici meretrix quam illius imperatrix.”

Gladly would Abelard have profited by this sublime passion; but he was a coward, and his heart trembled before Fulbert. He therefore endeavored to answer her arguments; and she, finding that his resolution was fixed-a resolution which he very characteristically calls a bit of stupidity, meam stultitiam-burst into tears, and consented to the marriage, which was performed with all secrecy. Fulbert and his servants, however, in violation of their oath, divulged the secret. Whereupon Heloise boldly denied that she was married. The scandal became great; but she persisted in her denials, and Fulbert drove her from the house with reproaches. Abelard removed her to the nunnery of Argenteuil, where she assumed the monastic dress, though without taking the veil. Abelard furtively visited her.* Meanwhile Fulbert's suspicions were roused, lest this seclusion in the nunnery should be but the first step to her taking the veil, and so ridding Abelard of all impediment. Those were violent and brutal times, but the vengeance of Fulbert startled even the Paris of those days with horror. With his friends and accomplices, he surprised Abelard sleeping, and there inflicted that atrocious mutilation, which Origen in a moment of religious frenzy inflicted on himself.

In shame and anguish Abelard sought the refuge of a cloister. He became a monk. But the intense selfishness of the man would not permit him to renounce the world without also forcing Heloise to renounce it. Obedient to his commands, she took the

*He adds "Nosti. . . quid ibi tecum mea libidinis egerit intemperantia in quadam etiam parte ipsius refectorii. Nosti id impudentissimè tunc actum esse in tam reverendo loco et summæ Virgini consecrato."-Epist. v. p. 69.

veil; thus once again sacrificing herself to him whom she had accepted as a husband with unselfish regret, and whom she abandoned in trembling, to devote herself henceforth without hope, without faith, without love, to her divine husband.

The gates of the convent closed forever on that noble woman whose story continues one of pure heroism to the last; but we cannot pause to narrate it here. With her disappearance, the great interest in Abelard disappears; we shall not therefore detail the various episodes of his subsequent career, taken up for the most part with quarrels-first with the monks, whose dissoluteness he reproved, next with theologians, whose hatred he roused by the "heresy" of reasoning. He was condemned publicly to retract; he was persecuted as a heretic; he had ventured to introduce Rationalism, or the explanation of the dogmas of Faith by Reason,-and he suffered, as men always suffer for novelties of doctrine. He founded the convent of Paraclete, of which Heloise was the first abbess, and on the 21st of April, 1142, he expired, aged sixty-three. "Il vécut dans l'angoisse et mourut dans l'humiliation," says M. de Rémusat, "mais il eut de la gloire et il fut aimé."

§ III. PHILOSOPHY OF ABELARD.

It would not be difficult to fill a volume with the exposition of Abelard's philosophy; indeed, in M. de Rémusat's work a volume and a quarter are devoted to the subject without exhausting it. But the nature of this History, and the necessities of space, equally force us to be very brief. Abelard's contributions to the development of speculation may all be reduced to two points: the question of Universals, and the systematic introduction of Reason as an independent element in theology, capable not only of explaining dogmas, but of giving dogmas of its own.

"The nature of genera and species has formed perhaps the longest and most animated, and certainly the most abstract controversy which has ever agitated the human mind," says M. de Rémusat, who adds, "that it is also one which now seems the

least likely to have interested men so deeply." The same will, probably, one day be said of the question of Immaterialism and Materialism, a logomachy as great, as animated, and as remote from all practical results, as that of Universals, but which, from its supposed relation to religious truths, has been made the great controversy of the schools. In our day there are few speculators who do not believe that important religious principles are indis'solubly connected with the doctrine of an immaterial principle superadded to, and in nowise identical with, the brain; and this in spite of the indisputable fact that the early Christian Fathers maintained the materiality not only of the soul, but of God himself;* in spite also of the many pious moderns of unimpeachable orthodoxy who held, and hold, the doctrines stigmatized as Materialism, and who think with Occam: "Experimur enim quod intelligimus et volumus et nolumus, et similes actus in nobis habemus; sed quod illa sint e formâ immateriali et incorruptibili non experimur, et omnis ratio ad hujus probationem assumpta assumit aliquod dubium."+

Although, therefore, the intense feeling stirred by the dispute respecting Universals appears incomprehensible to us, who consider the dispute to have been a logomachy, for the most part; we may render intelligible to ourselves how such a dispute came to be so important, by considering the importance now attached to the dispute respecting an "immaterial principle." Idle or important, it was the dispute of the Middle Ages; and M. Cousin is guilty of no exaggeration in saying "the whole Scholastic philosophy issued out of a phrase in Porphyry as interpreted by Boethius." Here is the passage: "Intentio Porphyrii est in hoc opere facilem intellectum ad prædicamenta præparare, tractando

* Tertullian wrote a work expressly to combat the immaterialism of Plato and Aristotle. One sentence will suffice to bear out what is said above respecting God: "Quis autem negabit Deum esse corpus, etsi Deus spiritus ?" M. Guizot, in his Leçons sur Hist. de la Civilisation en France, and M. Rousselot's Etudes sur la Philos. dans le Moyen Age, will furnish the reader with other examples.

+ We borrow the passage from Rousselot's Etudes, iii. 256.

de quinque rebus vel vocibus, genere scilicet, specie, differentia, proprio et accidenti; quorum cognitio valet ad prædicamentorum cognitionem."* In the phrase rebus vel vocibus he was understood to signify that things and words were mutually convertible; to discourse of one or of the other was indifferent; and the question turned upon this point: Does the word Genus, or the word Species, represent an actual something, existing externally,―or is it a mere name which designates a certain collection of individuals? The former opinion was held until Roscellinus attacked it, and brought forward the heresy of Nominalism with such force of argument that, although the heresy was condemned, the logic forced its way; and Abelard, when he attacked the doctrine of Realism, taught by William de Champeaux, borrowed so much of the Nominalist argument that until quite recently he has been called a Nominalist himself. That he was not a pure Nominalist is now clear; and M. Rousselot has even made out an ingenious case for him as a Realist. But, in truth, he was entirely neither; he was something of both; he was a Conceptualist. The pe culiarity of his doctrine consists in the distinction of Matter and Form applied to genus and species. "Every individual,” he says in a very explicit passage of the treatise De Generibus et Speciebus, printed by M. Cousin, "is composed of matter and form, i. e. Socrates from the matter of Man, and the form of Socratity; so Plato is of the same matter, namely that of man, but of different form, namely that of Platonity; and so of all other individual. men. And just as the Socratity which formally constitutes Socrates is nowhere but in Socrates, so the essence of man which sustains Socratity in Socrates, is nowhere but in Socrates. The same of all other individuals. By species therefore I mean, not that essence of man which alone is in Socrates, or in any other individual, but, the whole collection which is formed of all the

"The object of Porphyry in this work is to prepare the mind for the easy understanding of the Predicaments, by treating of the five things or words, namely, genus, species, difference, property, and accident; the knowledge of which leads to the knowledge of the Predicaments."

individuals of the same nature. This whole collection, although essentially multiple, by the Authorities is named one Species, one Universal, one Nature; just as a nation, although composed of many persons, is called one. Thus each particular essence of the collection called Humanity is composed of matter and form, namely the animal is matter, the form is however not one, but many, i. e. rationality, morality, bipedality, and all the other substantial attributes. And that which is said of man, namely that the part of man which sustains Socratity is not essentially the part which sustains Platonity, is true also of the Animal.* For the Animal which in me is the form of Humanity, cannot essentially be elsewhere; but there is in it something not different from the separate elements of individual animals. Hence, I call Genus the multitude of animal essences which sustain the individual species of Animal: the multitude diversified by that which forms Species. For this latter is only composed by a collection of essences which sustain individual forms; Genus, on the contrary, is composed by a collection of the substantial differences of different Species. The particular essence which forms the Genus Animal, results from a certain matter, essence of body, and substantial forms, animation and sensibility, which can only exist essentially there, although they take indifferently the forms of all species of body. This union of essences produces the universal named Animal Nature."

This passage will give the reader a taste of Abelard's quality when he is least tiresome from it we see clearly enough the kind of reality which he attributed to general terms, in opposition to the Nominalists, who taught that terms were only terms; he said they were terms which expressed conceptions, and these con

*We must subjoin the original: "Et sicut de homine dictum est, scilicet quod illud hominis quod sustinet Socratitatem, illud essentialiter non sustinet Platonitatem, ita de animali. Nam illud animal quod formain humanitatis quæ in me est, sustinet, illud essentialiter alibi non est, sed illi non differens est et singulis materiis singulorum individuorum animalis.”

De Generibus et Speciebus, p. 524.