and monks, standing for contemplative, supernatural life.  The latter included all purely mental work, which more and more tended to concentrate itself upon religion and confine itself to the clergy.  In this way it came to be considered an utter disgrace for any man engaged in mental work to take any part in the institutions of civil life, and particularly to marry.  He might indeed enter into illicit relations, and rear a family of “nephews” and “nieces,” without losing prestige; but to marry was to commit suicide.  Such was the condition of things in the days of Abelard.

But while Platonism, with its real universals, was celebrating its ascetic, unearthly triumphs in the West, Aristotelianism, which maintains that the individual is the real, was making its way in the East.  Banished as heresy beyond the limits of the Catholic Church, in the fifth and sixth centuries, in the persons of Nestorius and others, it took refuge in Syria, where it flourished for many years in the schools of Edessa and Nisibis, the foremost of the time.  From these it found its way among the Arabs, and even to the illiterate Muhammad, who gave it (1) theoretic theological expression in the cxii. surah of the Koran:  “He is One God, God the Eternal; He neither begets nor is begotten; and to Him there is no peer,” in which both the fundamental dogmas of Christianity are denied, and that too on the ground of revelation; (2) practical expression, by forbidding asceticism and monasticism, and encouraging a robust, though somewhat coarse, natural life.  Islam, indeed, was an attempt to rehabilitate the human.

In Abelard’s time Arab Aristotelianism, with its consequences for thought and life, was filtering into Europe and forcing Christian thinkers to defend the bases of their faith.  Since these, so far as defensible at all, depended upon the Platonic doctrine of universals, and this could be maintained only by dialectic, this science became extremely popular,—­indeed, almost the rage.  Little of the real Aristotle was at that time known in the West; but in Porphyry’s Introduction to Aristotle’s Logic was a famous passage, in which all the difficulties with regard to universals were stated without being solved.  Over this the intellectual battles of the first age of Scholasticism were fought.  The more clerical and mystic thinkers, like Anselm and Bernard, of course sided with Plato; but the more worldly, robust thinkers inclined to accept Aristotle, not seeing that his doctrine is fatal to the Trinity.

Prominent among these was a Breton, Roscellin, the early instructor of Abelard.  From him the brilliant, fearless boy learnt two terrible lessons:  (1) that universals, instead of being real substances, external and superior to individual things, are mere names (hence Nominalism) for common qualities of things as recognized by the human mind; (2) that since universals are the tools and criteria of thought, the human mind, in which alone these exist, is the judge of all truth,—­a