To the consternation of the Church, and even of his own order, Thomas, following closely his masters, Albert and Aristotle, asserted that the soul was measured by matter.  “Division occurs in substances in ratio of quantity, as Aristotle says in his ‘Physics.’  And so dimensional quantity is a principle of individuation.”  The soul is a fluid absorbed by matter in proportion to the absorptive power of the matter.  The soul is an energy existing in matter proportionately to the dimensional quantity of the matter.  The soul is a wine, greater or less in quantity according to the size of the cup.  In our report of the great debate of 1110, between Champeaux and Abelard, we have seen William persistently tempting Abelard to fall into this admission that matter made the man;—­that the universal equilateral triangle became an individual if it were shaped in metal, the matter giving it reality which mere form could not give; and Abelard evading the issue as though his life depended on it.  In fact, had Abelard dared to follow Aristotle into what looked like an admission that Socrates and Plato were identical as form and differed only in weight, his life might have been the forfeit.  How Saint Thomas escaped is a question closely connected with the same inquiry about Saint Francis of Assisi.  A Church which embraced, with equal sympathy, and within a hundred years, the Virgin, Saint Bernard, William of Champeaux and the School of Saint-Victor, Peter the Venerable, Saint Francis of Assisi, Saint Dominic, Saint Thomas Aquinas, and Saint Bonaventure, was more liberal than any modern State can afford to be.  Radical contradictions the State may perhaps tolerate, though hardly, but never embrace or profess.  Such elasticity long ago vanished from human thought.

Yet only Dominicans believe that the Church adopted this law of individualization, or even assented to it.  If M. Jourdain is right, Thomas was quickly obliged to give it another form:—­that, though all souls belonged to the same species, they differed in their aptitudes for uniting with particular bodies.  “This soul is commensurate with this body, and not with that other one.”  The idea is double; for either the souls individualized themselves, and Thomas abandoned his doctrine of their instantaneous creation, with the bodies, out of nothing; or God individualized them in the act of creation, and matter had nothing to do with it.  The difficulty is no concern of ours, but the great scholars who took upon themselves to explain it made it worse, until at last one gathers only that Saint Thomas held one of three views:  either the soul of humanity was individualized by God, or it individualized itself, or it was divided by ratio of quantity, that is, by matter.  This amounts to saying that one knows nothing about it, which we knew before and may admit with calmness; but Thomas Aquinas was not so happily placed, between the Church and the schools.  Humanity had a form common to itself, which made it what it was.