natural verities alone could be grasped by human understanding; the supernatural or revealed truths (the dogmas) were beyond proof and scientific cognition.  To submit them to research was not only an impossible task, but Thomas stigmatised every effort in this direction as heresy, fondly believing that he had once and for all safeguarded the position of faith.  But more resolute and profound thinkers, although not in so many words attacking the authority of the Scriptures, and leaving Thomas’ border-line unquestioned, found the unfathomable truths not in ecclesiastical tradition but in their own souls, thus investing “faith” with a new meaning, unassailable by criticism.

The idea of drawing a line between perceivable or rational truths and imperceivable or divine truths, is fraught with the burning question as to the limits of human knowledge, a question which to this day remains unanswered.  In the course of time the limits were extended in favour of imperfect knowledge (but the character of the unknowable was problematised and questioned).  While Thomas was still convinced of the possibility of proving the existence of a God by the power of the human intellect, Duns Scotus removed the problem of the existence of a God and the immortality of the soul from the domain of science, and made both propositions a matter of faith.  William of Occam, more uncompromising than Duns Scotus, maintained the absolute impossibility of acquiring knowledge of supernatural things, and taught—­on this point, too, anticipating Kant—­that objective knowledge acquired through the senses should precede abstract knowledge.  The last conclusion of nominalism was thus arrived at, the existence of universal conceptions, or universals, supposed to exist outside material things—­the curse of the Platonic inheritance—­declared to be impossible, and reality conceded to the individual only.  Roscellinus, the founder of this doctrine, had still been content to deny the existence of the conception of “deity,” leaving the individual persons, Father, Son and Holy Ghost, as real individuals, untouched.

We see from the foregoing that the universally derided scholasticism travelled along the whole line of modern thought:  from the “realism” of Thomas, which leaves the universals as yet unassailed by doubt and occupying the very heart of knowledge, past the first and, to our view, very modest doubts of the nominalists, to the agnosticism of Bacon, Duns and Occam.

With the new position of decided nominalism the foundation was prepared for the experimental sciences on the one hand, and mysticism on the other.  For the conclusion that things supernatural are a closed book to us may have two results:  on the one hand, the rejection of the transcendental and the victory of science; on the other, the need to descend into the profoundest depths of the universe and the soul, and grasp by intuition what common sense does not see.