Burnett AdelardBathUniversals 1995

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Adelard of Bath’s Doctrine on Universals

and the Consolatio Philosophiae of Boethius

Charles Burnett

In 1106 a certain ‘Athelard, son of Fastrad’, witnessed a charterdrawn up at the Abbey of Bath. Other documents from Bath fromaround this date mention ‘Athelardus’ as the steward—an honorary ti-tle indicating a high official position—in the Bishop of Bath’s householdand his name is attested in charters of 1130 and 1135x1139. This Ade-lard was the author of a number of Latin works which can be grouped

into two broad categories. First come translations from Arabic of workson arithmetic, astronomy, astrology and talismans. The style of thesesuggests that he worked with an arabophone, perhaps Petrus Alphonsiwho is known to have been in England, and in particular in the westernpart of the country. Secondly, there are his literary works: an exhorta-tion to the study of the liberal arts, a book on hawking, and texts onnatural science (or the science of the lower world) and cosmology (thescience of the higher world) and calculating on an abacus. Three of these are addressed to a ‘nephew’ who takes an active role in the debatein the works on hawking and on natural science. The text on cosmology,probably his last composition, was addressed to the young prince who

was destined to become Henry II. It may be dated to 1149. From anec-dotes in his literary writings we know that Adelard studied in Tours,took his (English) students to Laon and met the Queen of France. Hevisited the South of Italy and Sicily, Cilician Armenia and the NormanPrincipality of Antioch. There is, however, no corroborating evidenceoutside his works for any of his own statements about his life exceptconcerning his residence in Bath and his holding lands in Wiltshire.1

It was not the Arabic-Latin translations of Adelard or his literaryworks on scientific topics that first interested scholars of the modern pe-

1For Adelard’s life and works see Adelard of Bath: An English Scientist and Arabist

of the Early Twelfth Century , ed. C. Burnett, Warburg Institute Surveys and Texts,

14, London, 1987.

1



2 Charles Burnett

riod, but rather his short protreptic work, De eodem et diverso, whichis the only text in which he debates logical matters. Amable Jourdain(the historian of Aristotelianism) first drew attention to the work in1819, and Barthelemy Haureau devoted a whole chapter to the text inhis Histoire de la philosophie medievale of 1850. This interest resultedin the fact that the De eodem et diverso was the first work of Adelard’sto receive a critical edition in modern times—that of Hans Willner in1903.2 Willner included a detailed study of the text in his edition,which allowed the great historian of scholasticism, Josef Reiners, to givea prominent position to Adelard’s doctrine in his Der aristotelische Re-

alismus in der Fr¨ uhscholastik .3 After that, Adelard’s other works wererediscovered and editions of them were made, and continue to be madeup to the present time. Attention shifted onto Adelard’s contributionto the history of science through his translations of Euclid’s Elements

and the first complete set of astronomical tables from the Arabic.

It is only recently that scholars have again taken note of Adelard’sposition on logic and the question of universals. The debate now hasa much richer texture than it had a hundred years ago, thanks to ourmore detailed knowledge of the manuscripts. In particular, the suc-cessive stages of the medieval exposition of Boethius’s commentaries onPorphyry’s Isagoge have been mapped out and the positions on this mapof great figures such as Roscelin of Compiegne, William of Champeauxand Peter Abelard have been noted.4 It is not my intention in thisarticle to compare Adelard’s doctrine with that of any of his medievalcontemporaries, but rather to point out to what degree his theory canbe understood in reference to Boethius’s words. But I do not mean theBoethius of the commentaries on the Isagoge; rather, the Boethius of

2Beitrage zur Geschichte der Philosophie des Mittelalters, IV. 1, M unster i. W.,1903. The present author is preparing a new edition and translation of this text,with the help of Pedro Mantas Espana. Citations and translations are from this newedition, but with references to the page numbers of Willner’s text.

3Aachen, 1907.4See, in particular, Y. Iwakuma, ‘ “Vocales” or Early Nominalists’, Traditio, 47,

1992, pp. 37–111, C. J. Mews, ‘A Neglected Gloss on the Isagoge by PeterAbelard’, Freiburger Zeitschrift f¨ ur Philosophie und Theologie, 31, 1984, pp. 35–55, ‘St Anselm and Roscelin: Some New Texts and Their Implications’, Archives

d’histoire doctrinale et litteraire du moyen age, year 1991, pp. 55–98, and ‘The Trini-tarian Doctrine of Roscelin of Compiegne and Its Influence: Twelfth-Century Nom-inalism and Theology Re-Considered’ (forthcoming); and the articles in Vivarium ,

30, 1992.



Adelard of Bath’s Doctrine on Universals 3

the Consolatio Philosophiae.First, a brief summary of Adelard’s doctrine on universals. The De

eodem et diverso is divided into two parts. The first part takes the formof a debate between the personifications of Philocosmia, the lover of theworld, and Philosophia, the lover of wisdom, who defend the realms of the senses and of reason, respectively. Philosophia naturally wins thedebate and the second half of the text is devoted to the description of her handmaidens, the seven liberal arts. The liberal arts are describedschematically with lists of terms from the standard texts, rather likerevision notes for exams. So in the case of dialectic, as the third of theliberal arts, Adelard does little more than summarise passages from theCategories and Boethius’s De differentiis topicis. It is in the first partof the De eodem et diverso that logic plays a much more important—indeed a dominant—role, and it is in a section of this part that historiansof philosophy have been interested.

The section in question occurs as Philosophia’s reply to Philocos-

mia’s accusation that even the greatest of philosophers do not agreewith each other.5 I paraphrase my translation of the section:

‘You say that Plato says that genus and species exist outside sensi-ble objects, Aristotle that they are only in sensibles. We solve thisapparent disagreement in the following way. Genus and species arealso the names of subject things, for you give the names genus,species and individual to the same essence, but in different re-spects. For when philosophers wish to deal with things in respectto their being subject to the senses, being different from eachother and countable, they call them individuals (e.g., Socrates,

Plato etc.). But when the same individuals are considered moreprofoundly, i.e., not in respect to differing from each other individ-ually, but in respect to sharing the same term (vox )6 ‘man’, theycall them a species. When the same individuals are consideredwith respect only to the fact that they are denoted by the term‘animal’, they call them a genus. In considering the species theyforget the individual but do not deny its existence; and the same istrue when they consider the genus. For the term ‘animal’ appliedto a thing connotes a substance with animation and sensation;the term ‘man’ connotes all that and, in addition, rationality and

5The Latin text is given in the Appendix below.6

An exact translation of ‘vox’ is difficult; Constant Mews would prefer ‘utterance’.



4 Charles Burnett

mortality; ‘Socrates’ however, connotes all that with the additionof separating that object as an individual from other objects by aparticular set of accidents.’

Having described how genus, species and individual are all recognizablein the same object, Adelard goes on to show how the degree to whichthey are recognized depends on the capacity of the observer:

‘Consideration of the object as an individual is easy, even for thosewho have not learnt philosophy. Consideration of the species, onthe other hand, is difficult even for those initiated into philosophy’ssecrets. For people rely on their eyes for discerning things, andthese give information about the accidents and individual featuresof the object, but it is difficult to go from here to observing the‘nota’ which is independent of these accidents, and which is, infact, the species shared by all the objects.’

Adelard then inserts a typical witty anecdote, presumably from his ownclass-room experience:

‘When the subject was universals, one [student] looked up into thesky and said: “Who can show me where they are?” ’.

But Adelard then continues to look at the problem from the point of view of the perceiver:

‘In the case of mortals imagination gets in the way of reason,as if it envies the rational faculty. But the divine mind knows

things directly without the entanglement of imagination becauseeverything was simple in the divine mind (called here ‘Noys’, i.e.,νoυς ) before being clothed in its multifarious forms.’

Adelard then has Philosophia coming back to the original argument:

‘So, Aristotle says that genus and species do not exist except insensible objects precisely because in each sensible object you cansee genus, species and individual. But we can only use imagina-tion to see the genus and species [and therefore we do not knowthem as they are], whereas Noys knows genus and species directly.Hence Plato prefers to say that genus and species exist outside the

sensibles, i.e., in Noys.’




The clue to the understanding of this passage, as Willner alreadyhinted in his edition, is not the commentaries on the Vetus logica (theAristotelian logical texts that Boethius had translated from Greek), butrather a section of Boethius’s Consolatio Philosophiae. From this sectionAdelard draws the solution to the problem of universals in terms of thedifferent capacities of the beholder. The clue to this source is providedby the differentiation Adelard makes between the role of imagination andthe role of reason. In the last part of the fifth book of the Consolatio,as a culmination of his argument for the providence of God, Boethiusdescribes four different levels of perception which correspond to fourdifferent levels of creation. The lowest level employs only sense and isthat of molluscs and other unmoving animals; the next level employsimagination and is that of animals who can take flight from what theyfear and run towards what they desire; after that comes reason whichis the province of humankind alone among animals; and finally there isintellect which is what God uses.

Adelard applies the first three of these levels of perception to man.The uneducated common man can only use his senses, and these giveonly information concerning individuals. Those who can use imagina-tion can, in some way, discern the species and the genera. But imag-ination itself can be a snare that prevents the reason from operatingeffectively. Only Noys knows things as they are. Noys is Adelard’sequivalent of ‘intellect’. It is described here as ‘the divine mind’, and,as stated in another passage in De eodem ,7 is a function of the humansoul in its perfect state. When turning to the knowledge of Noys Ade-lard uses the terms ‘matter and form’ rather than individual, species andgenus, and it is clear that he ranks matter with the individual material

object and the species and genus with forms. With this substitution of terms the argument is exactly parallelled in Cons. Phil. V, pr. 4:

7Ed. Willner, pp. 9–10: ‘Rerum conditor optimus omnia ad sui similitudinemtrahens quantum eorum natura patitur, animam mente quam Graeci noyn vocant,exornavit. Hac ipsa dum in sua puritate est, tumultu exteriore carens, plane utitur’(‘The supremely good Creator of things, drawing all things into His likeness—as faras their nature permitted—adorned the soul with mind, which the Greeks call ‘noys’.The soul uses this with clarity when she is in her pure state, lacking any disturbancefrom outside’); cf. also ibid., p. 28: ‘Unde factum est ut sapiens quidam vir, subtilitatementis elatus . . . illud quod anima in suae divinitatis thesauro a principio possederatelicere satagebat’ (‘Hence it happened that a certain wise man . . . was able to elicitwhat his soul had possessed from the beginning in the treasury of her own divinity

[and invented geometry]’).



6 Charles Burnett

‘For sense has no power outside matter, imagination gazes at theuniversal species [cf. Adelard: ‘cum speciem intueri nituntur’],reason takes in the simple form [cf. Adelard: ‘simplicem notam’],but intelligence, as if surveying everything from above, havingunderstood the form, also judges all things that exist, and it un-derstands them in the same way as it understands the form itself which could be known to no other faculty. For it knows the uni-versal of the reason, the picture (‘figura’) of the imagination and

the sensible material object, not using reason nor imagination northe senses, but with one flash of the mind, seeing everything, soto speak, in a formal way [Adelard also uses the words ‘nota’,‘forma’, ‘cognoscere’, ‘mens’, and his ‘distincte cognoscere’ recallsBoethius’s ‘diiudicare’].’8

Boethius goes on to explain how the reason defines the universal(what Adelard would call the genus and the species), giving as his ex-

ample of a universal ‘homo est animal bipes rationale’; and how imag-ination is able to picture things even when they are no longer beingperceived. He concludes the section with a restatement of that fact thatall things are known according to the capacity of the knower.

Boethius’s prime objective in this argument is to show how theknowledge of God differs from that of man, so that He is able to know‘everything at once’ (‘cuncta simul’), while man can only know thingsas they succeed each other in time. Adelard’s objectives are different.He wishes to prove that men in themselves have different capacities. Hecollapses Boethius’s range of creatures (from molluscs to God) into theone species, man. It is man who can choose to use the senses only, or to

rise from that to using the imagination too, or to use reason which tran-scends both. The contrast between the benefits of using the senses andusing reason is, in fact, the leitmotif of the first part of the De eodem

et diverso. Philocosmia is the advocate of the senses. Her handmaidensare personifications of things which gratify the senses: riches, power,

8Consolatio Philosophiae, V. pr. 4, ed. K. Buchner, Heidelberg, 1960, p. 105:‘Neque enim sensus aliquid extra materiam valet vel universales species imagina-tio contuetur vel ratio capit simplicem formam, sed intellegentia, quasi desuperspectans, concepta forma, quae subsunt, etiam cuncta diiudicat, sed eo modo quoformam ipsam quae nulli alii nota esse poterat comprehendit. Nam et rationis univer-sum et imaginationis figuram et materiale sensibile cognoscit nec ratione utens necimaginatione nec sensibus, sed illo uno ictu mentis formaliter, ut ita dicam, cuncta

prospiciens.’




honour, fame and pleasure, and she emphasizes the sensual aspect of their appeal.

Of riches she says ‘do not listen to what I say about riches but trustin your own eyes, whose very purpose is to make judgements’.9 Of the

personification of pleasure, she says: ‘She rules over our senses in such away that they prefer to serve her alone. She has taught people to feaston scent—smeared with ointments and garlanded with flowers; she hastold them to taste honeyed and Bacchic drafts; she has ordered the eyesto thirst after gold and gems and everything else that is beautiful; shehas opened the ears of animate beings to all the sounds of harmonicmodulation, which the Greeks call ‘symphonies’; finally, lest any part of the body should not serve pleasure, she has covered the whole surfaceof the body with the enticements of touch.’10

The point about the senses is that they allow you to deal with indi-vidual, material, objects, or, as Philocosmia says, things (‘res’), whereas

reason deals only with empty words. Philocosmia curses those who‘put into one species these things which you see before you’, and con-cludes her imprecation with the statement that ‘the philosopher, byusing words, deprives the world of the beauty of things.’11 Philocosmia,a champion of Epicurus,12 can only consider things from the point of view of whether they give pleasure (and pleasure is entirely sensual).Thus, in her peroration, she states that philosophy can give pleasure toone sense only: i.e., the hearing. And when the words stop you find youare left with nothing.13

Philosophia’s reply falls into two parts. The first is a justification of reason (including the portion analysed above); the second is an attackon the senses. To take the second first. Here Adelard shows his true

9Ed. Willner, pp. 5–6: ‘Sed non mihi, immo oculis propriis crede, qui et ideosingulis dati sunt ut de his iudicarent’.

10Ibid., p. 9: ‘Haec ita sensibus nostris praeest ut ei soli servire malint. Haec enimunguentis oblitos, floribus redimitos odoratu pasci docuit; haec melleos Bacchiosquelatices gustare admonuit; haec auro ac gemmis ceterisque rerum formis insitire ocu-los iussit; haec universis tinnitibus rata modulatione consonantibus, quos Graecisymphonias vocant, aures animantium adhibuit; haec demum ne qua pars corporisvoluptati non serviret, illecebros tactus toti superficie corporis subtexit’.

11Ibid., p. 7: ‘Haec quoque quae cernis, cum sint diversa creata, / contexens, unamcolligat in speciem / . . . Dum verbis rerum tollit ab orbe decus.’

12Ibid., p. 9: ‘Epicurus, vir quidam et sapiens et nobis familiaris’.13Ibid., p. 9: ‘Nec in illi in qua modo torpebas inani philosophiae amplius osciteris.

Est enim in verbis solis, et ea dum audiuntur tantum delecant’.



8 Charles Burnett

inclinations as a natural scientist. For his ‘proof’ of the deception of the senses parallels discussions of finding out the properties of materia

medica in medical works translated from Arabic into Latin in SouthernItaly in the late eleventh century. Adelard describes how each of thesenses in turn can be deceived by an object which looks, feels and smellslike a fig. The medical writers conclude that only taste, in that itpenetrates to the very substance of the material (say, a fruit), can trulytell you what that fruit is.14 Adelard’s conclusion too is that one hasto resort to ‘breaking the fig open with the teeth’ to discover whetherit is really a fig, but dismisses this way of ‘knowing’ something as beingmore appropriate to a dog than a man. The second argument is thatthe senses prevent the reason from functioning properly, a point madeat the beginning of the De eodem too, when Adelard describes how heescaped from the din of the city to a quiet place by the river Loire wherehe could concentrate on ‘re-reading in his mind’ a discussion he had hadwith his master in Tours.

The first part of Philosophia’s defence takes up precisely the ‘verba’which Philocosmia had accused philosophers of prefering to things.These words as ‘voces’, as we have already seen, are the designationsof the individual, the species and the genus. Following the Platonicway of looking at things, which Adelard is clearly most in sympathywith, the species and the genera are the forms and matters of thingsexisting in Noys which belongs both to God and to the human soul inits perfect state. Described in another respect, these are the ‘causes’ of the things (res) that Philocosmia makes so much of, and ‘the beginningsof the causes’. Thus the criticism of ‘empty words’ is turned around tosuch an extent that the words, or terms, themselves, become the causes

and the beginnings from which all sensible objects derive. The way onereaches a genus from an individual, a form from the material object, anda cause from the thing itself, is through the deductive activity of thereason, which also operates in the other direction: reason both dividesand composes. This ‘alternating path’ is described in more explicitterms in the section on dialectic in the second half of the De eodem .The verses following the prose passage of the Consolatio Philosophiae

just quoted, provide the source. Here reason is described as ‘the forcethat sees individual objects and divides what it recognizes, and also puts

14See C. Burnett, ‘The Superiority of Taste’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld

Institutes, 54, 1991, pp. 230–8.




together again what it divides, and choosing this alternating path nowpushes its head to the heights, now descends into the lowest parts.’15

Adelard adds to Boethius’s ‘alternating path’ of reason an analogy of his own devising, that of the procedure on an abacus whereby one cancheck whether the product of multiplying two numbers is correct, bydividing that same product. Adelard’s text on the abacus is probablyone of his earliest works, presumed contemporary with the De eodem .

The same verses of the Consolatio that provide a parallel for the al-ternating path of reason provided Adelard in his work on natural science,the Quaestiones naturales, with the very words in which he refutes theStoic view of vision being caused ‘by sensations and images imprintedon the minds like letters on the page’16 and Adelard follows Boethiusin advocating the alternative doctrine that the stimulus for recognizingwhat we see comes from the mind itself (though Adelard puts this in amuch more detailed way than Boethius, using medical sources). This isa necessary conclusion from the fact that reason is superior and priorto the senses.

The influence of the doctrine and the terms of this section of Boe-thius’s Consolatio philosophiae on Adelard’s work is, therefore, quiteexplicit. But the Consolatio as a whole is important for Adelard. Itprovides the literary form of the first part of the De eodem , alternatingprose argument with philosophical poetry. Boethius’s consoler, LadyPhilosophy, appears in a vision (not a dream) just as Philosophia andPhilocosmia appear to Adelard on the banks of the Loire,17 and bothworks seek to cure the mind’s anguish through the study of philosophy.Boethius’s ambition was to reconcile Plato and Aristotle, as Adelarddoes, but in both the Consolatio and De eodem , the sympathy for Plato

is clearly stronger. It is, therefore, not surprising that Adelard shouldadapt the words of Boethius’s Philosophia to solving the problem of

15See Appendix.16Quaestiones naturales, q. 23, ed. M. Muller, Beitrage zur Geschichte der Philoso-

phie des Mittelalters, 31. 2, Munster i. W., 1934, p. 28: ‘Secunda igitur de visusecta a Stoicis relata est, formas scilicet exteriores ad ipsam usque animam accedere,eique more cerae insigniri. Unde Boethius in Philosophica Consolatione: ‘Quondamporticus attulit / obscuros nimium senes, / qui sensus et imagines / e corporibusextimis / credant mentibus imprimi, / ut quondam celeri stilo / mos est aequorepaginae / impressas figere notas’. This is a literal quotation of Boethius, Consolatio

Philosophiae, V, m. 4, until the last line, which reads in Boethius: ‘paginae / quaenullas habeat notas, / pressas figere litteras.’

17

See Appendix.



10 Charles Burnett

universals.There is, however, a twist to the tale of the conflict of ‘things’ and

‘words’ in the De eodem . When Philosophia has refuted one by onePhilocosmia’s criticism of reason and its ‘empty words’, her auditor —i.e., Adelard himself—wishes to try his own hand in debate. He describesthe genesis of the human soul, how it is reduced from its original perfectstate by being incorporated into the body and becoming subject to thedeceptions of the senses. She is in thrall to the burden of ‘things’. Andwhat is her remedy? Nothing other than words. She realised that shewas in danger of becoming corrupted by corporeal things, and that shecould not rely on her memory. She therefore wrote down (‘committed tothe memory of the written text’) all the teachings of philosophy whilstshe was still able to do so, so that when she began to realise that shewas being corrupted, she could re-read what she had written and berestored to the truth. These writings are the text-books of the sevenliberal arts whose contents are sketched in the second half of the De

eodem et diverso.18

So words have conquered things! I leave it to the historians of logic todecide whether this preoccupation in Adelard’s work with the differencebetween ‘things’ and ‘words’ and his use of the word ‘vox’, for the termdescribing the individual, species and genus, reflects the lively discussionof contemporary logicians, one group of which were called the ‘vocales’19.

Warburg Institute, UK.

18Ed. Willner, pp. 16–17. The most significant phrases are the following: ‘ . . . animain corporis carcere vinculis oppressa, unum inter universa remedium est quo eadem sesibi reddit domumque reducit: doctrinae videlicet huius philosophiae artesque quasvocant liberales. Nam et has ipsa eadem quondam tota apud se a devio errore libera,prudentia suae subtilitatis elicuit, litteralique memoriae non satis vocibus credens,mandari iussit, ut per eas lumen suum, si quando hebetaretur, refulgeret, metuensid quod deinde, non fallax praenuntia, sibi accidere sensit.’

19See Iwakuma, ‘ “Vocales” ’, n. 4 above. I am very grateful to the participants of the seminar on Medieval Philosophy convened by Shimizu Tetsuro at Za o in August,1994, for their discussion of this paper, and to Constant Mews for his authoritativeadvice. This article complements the very perceptive account of the literary influencesof Boethius’s Consolatio Philosophiae, by Pierre Courcelle: ‘Adelard de Bath et la“Consolation” de Boece’, in Kyriakon: Festschrift Johannes Quasten , ed. P. Granfield

and J. A. Jungmann, 2 vols, Munster i. W., 1970, II, pp. 572-5.




Appendix: Parallel Passages

1. Adelard and Boethius on Universals, Sense,Imagination and Reason

Boethius, Consolatio Philosophiae, V. pr. 4, ed. K. Buchner, Heidelberg,1960, pp. 104–6.

Adelard, De eodem et diverso, ed. Willner, Munster i. W, 1903, pp.11–1220 :

Amat enim et compositio divisionem et divisio compositionem, dumutraque alteri fidem facit. Unde si quid in digitis et articulis abaci nume-ralibus ex multiplicatione creverit, id utrum recte processerit, divisioneeiusdem summae probatur.

Quod autem unus ea extra sensibilia, alter in sensibilibus tantum

existere dixit, sic accipiendum est. Genus et species—de his enim sermoest—etiam rerum subiectarum nomina sunt. Nam si res consideres,eidem essentiae et generis et speciei et individui nomina imposita sunt,sed respectu diverso. Volentes etenim philosophi de rebus agere se-cundum hoc quod sensibus subiectae sunt, secundum quod a vocibussingularibus notantur et numeraliter diversae sunt, individua vocarunt,scilicet Socratem, Platonem, et ceteros. Eosdem autem altius intuentes—videlicet non secundum quod sensualiter diversi sunt, sed in eo quodnotantur ab hac voce ‘homo’, speciem vocaverunt. Eosdem item inhoc tantum quod ab hac voce ‘animal’ notantur, considerantes, genusvocaverunt. Nec tamen in consideratione speciali formas individuales

tollunt, sed obliviscuntur, cum a speciali nomine non ponantur; necin generali speciales oblatas intelligunt, sed inesse non attendunt, vocisgeneralis significatione contenti. Vox enim haec ‘animal’ in re illa notatsubstantiam cum animatione et sensibilitate; haec autem ‘homo’ totumillud, et insuper cum rationalitate et mortalitate; ‘Socrates’ vero illudidem addita insuper numerali accidentium discretione. Unde vel doc-trina non initiatis patet consideratio individualis; specialis certe nonmodo litterarum profanos verum etiam ipsius arcani conscios admodumangit. Assueti enim rebus discernendis oculos advertere, et easdem lon-gas vel latas altasque conspicere, nec non unam aut plures esse, undique

20The texts are taken from the forthcoming edition and translation of De eodem

et diverso, by C. Burnett (with P. Mantas Espana).



12 Charles Burnett

circumscriptione locali ambitas percurrere, cum speciem intueri nitun-tur, eisdem quodammodo caliginibus implicantur. Nec ipsam simplicemnotam sine numerali aut circumscriptionali discretione contemplari, necac simplicem specialis vocis positionem ascendere queunt. Inde quidamcum de universalibus ageretur, sursum inhians, “quis locum earum mihiostendent?” inquit. Adeo rationem imaginatio perturbat et quasi in-vidia quadam subtilitati eius se opponit. Sed id apud mortales. Divinaeenim menti quae hanc ipsam materiam tam vario et subtili tegmine for-marum induit, praesto est, et materiam sine formis et formas sine aliis,immo et omnia cum aliis sine irretitu imaginationis distincte cognoscere.Nam et antequam coniuncta essent, universa quae vides in ipsa noy sim-plicia erant. Sed quomodo et qua ratione in ea essent, id et subtiliusconsiderandum et in alia disputatione dicendum est. Nunc autem adpropositum redeamus.

Quoniam igitur illud idem quod vides et genus et species et indi-viduum sit, merito ea Aristoteles non nisi in sensibilibus esse propo-

suit. Sunt etenim ipsa sensibilia quamvis acutius considerata. Quoniamvero ea, in quantum dicuntur genera et species, nemo sine imaginationepresse pureque intuetur, Plato extra sensibilia, scilicet in mente divina,et concipi et existere dixit. Sic viri illi licet verbis contrarii videantur,re tamen idem senserunt.

2. The ‘Alternating Path’ of Reason

Cons. Phil ., V, m. 4, lines 18-23:

Quae vis singula perspicit

aut quae cognita dividit?

Quae divisa recolligitalternumque legens iter

nunc summis caput inserit,

nunc decedit in infima?

De eodem , ed. Willner, p. 22:

. . . nobilissimum illud iter alternans ut nunc ab individuis per media adgeneralissimum proprietates expoliando, immo obliviscendo ascendat,nunc a generalissimo eodem gradu singula formis suis retexens, adindividua usque descendat. (cf. also the beginning of the passage quoted

in 1 above).




3. The Vision

Cons. Phil ., I. pr. 1:

Haec dum mecum tacitus ipse reputarem querimoniamque lacrimabilemstili officio signarem, astitisse mihi supra verticem visa est mulierreverendi admodum vultus oculis ardentibus . . .

De eodem , ed. Willner, p. 5:

Itaque cum soli relectioni sententiae illius operam darem, cunctis extracessantibus, duas mulieres unam a dextra aliam a sinistra et aspexi etadmiratus sum.

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Burnett AdelardBathUniversals 1995