By some means this form was associated with matter; in fact, matter was only known as associated with form.  If, then, God, by an instantaneous act, created matter and gave it form according to the dimensions of the matter, innocent ignorance might infer that there was, in the act of God, one world-soul and one world-matter, which He united in different proportions to make men and things.  Such a doctrine was fatal to the Church.  No greater heresy could be charged against the worst Arab or Jew, and Thomas was so well aware of his danger that he recoiled from it with a vehemence not at all in keeping with his supposed phlegm.  With feverish eagerness to get clear of such companions, he denied and denounced, in all companies, in season and out of season, the idea that intellect was one and the same for all men, differing only with the quantity of matter it accompanied.  He challenged the adherent of such a doctrine to battle; “let him take the pen if he dares!” No one dared, seeing that even Jews enjoyed a share of common sense and had seen some of their friends burn at the stake not very long before for such opinions, not even openly maintained; while uneducated people, who are perhaps incapable of receiving intellect at all, but for whose instruction and salvation the great work of Saint Thomas and his scholars must chiefly exist, cannot do battle because they cannot understand Thomas’s doctrine of matter and form which to them seems frank pantheism.

So it appeared to Duns Scotus also, if one may assert in the Doctor Subtilis any opinion without qualification.  Duns began his career only about 1300, after Thomas’s death, and stands, therefore, beyond our horizon; but he is still the pride of the Franciscan Order and stands second in authority to the great Dominican alone.  In denying Thomas’s doctrine that matter individualizes mind, Duns laid himself open to the worse charge of investing matter with a certain embryonic, independent, shadowy soul of its own.  Scot’s system, compared with that of Thomas, tended toward liberty.  Scot held that the excess of power in Thomas’s prime motor neutralized the power of his secondary causes, so that these appeared altogether superfluous.  This is a point that ought to be left to the Church to decide, but there can be no harm in quoting, on the other hand, the authority of some of Scot’s critics within the Church, who have thought that his doctrine tended to deify matter and to keep open the road to Spinoza.  Narrow and dangerous was the border-line always between pantheism and materialism, and the chief interest of the schools was in finding fault with each other’s paths.