proper nature. This compound view, which was acceptable by reason alone—not by reflexion like the general names, nor by sensation like the common substances-was the grand realm of relation which combines the extreme surveys, and which gave the thinkers who came to compass it the appellation of Conceptualists.

But what, then, was comparatively the importance of these several surveys, and the occasion of the conflicts which kept them quarrelling for those long centuries?

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The importance was in all of them the latitude of human knowledge. The criterion of this knowledge was by the first placed in the senses, with the faculty of imagination as the medium of embodiment; by the second, in the sentiments or rather the reflexion with its reaction through volition, in the shape of names or language; by the third, in the contexture of rational relations, thus evolved between the counter impressions of sense and sentiment. The main foundation in the foremost survey was external and physical nature. In the next it was the internal or moral nature of man himself. the last, it reached the intermediate, complex, and solid nature which has its organ in the social system, and its operation in time or history-not in space nor in mere matter, like the two anterior views respectively. And the cause of these contentions, which continue even to this day to disorder the very sciences, was the monstrous absurdity of each of the schemes pretending to be the whole and exclusive truth; whereas this goal could even possibly have been attained but in the third system, and through the serial preparation and concurrence of the two preceding. Thus they would each pass its own fraction of a third part for the whole process, besides the still more grotesque oversight of all series and its progression.

But how were processes so vital to the being or progress of society to be maintained amid their warring movements, in this organical juxtaposition? Why, solely and simply by the organs known as races. The operations of the animal body are conducted with a like economy, by dispensation of special

functions to a diversity of organs, of which each attends, mechanically for the most part, but to its own, and yet all concur harmoniously in the main ends of the general system. They have, in fact, in physiology, been resolved to three general tissues, embracing all the other organs, great and small, of the whole system; and which tissues are called the cellular, the muscular, and nervous. And the analogues to these might be followed up into society.

For example, if we take the entire expanse of human history, its races may be set off loosely into three groups, or grades, corresponding respectively to the preceding principles. Thus, the primary or Asiatic group are theosophic, pantheistic, or hold in some or other rudimental way to Realism. The African group, which in the scheme of civilization comprised with the Egyptians, the Semites, and the Hellens, were on the contrary mythological, that is, verbal, Nominalistic. In fine, the European group came to inaugurate Conceptualism, though of course in the generic measure, and at first by institution. It is the import of the great spiritual system of Christianity.

So, to follow up the march from institution to philosophy, we must advance specifically into this supreme group of races which were to prosecute and to perfect upon the scale of Europe the general movement. They were, as stated, in order both of date and geography, the Roman or Italian, the Teutonic and the Celtic. We may now conceive the singular, though perhaps still unnoted, fact that the Realists, the Nominalists, and preeminently the Conceptualists, belonged respectively, so far as genuine in sect or blood, to these three races. A merely running verification can alone be here possible, selecting as test cases the most popularly famous.

The generalizing and concrete Romans, already Realist in their heathenism, and who never came to separate the Christian essences from the crude substances, re-established the Realism as the rule of their theology; as to this day with them the Italian unity is the sum and substance of their nationality. Not a step in organization has been made by the Italian king

dom, but the several constituent peoples cling to their old institutions. The only exceptions might be finance, which, as a matter of simple quantity, is reduced into a semblance of system even in England; and the exclusion of the papacy as spiritual power from their Realist regimen.

The Nominalist view was represented by the early heretics. They have accordingly all belonged to the African group of races; that is to say, Egyptian, or Semitic, or Greek, and who transmitted this part of protest to their western analogues the Teutons, in the latest and most fatal of those earlier errors which was Arianism. For this doctrine, in denying the divine essence of the Son, which was the import of his consubstantiality with the Father, did exactly as the Nominalists thought and acted toward the Realists. The Son, as different in name, must differ likewise in nature. The speculation thus far kept the received platform of theology, and to have strayed from it to metaphysics was precisely here the heresy. Indeed, the import of this word itself is, hesitation at received opinion.

But the procedure could attain philosophy in only the third stage, which would reconcile theology with free inquiry and personal conscience. This grand synthesis, vaguely outlined in the Asiatic group of races as by the Hindoo visionaries in their triune principle, and repeated at the corresponding close of the African with much less indistinctness in the triads of the Neoplatonists, must, with the Christian revelation of the great dcgma of the Trinity, have been resumed upon this positive basis in the guise of a new philosophy-to be inducted by the similarly third in order of the western races. This synthesis was Conceptualism; the philosophy, Scholasticism; and the founder of both was John Scotus Erigena.

It must be evident that, in this body of philosophy, when it attained to system, if not rather to a sort of logic, the Celtic race would be the main occasion as well as agents of the controversies. For its mission of synthesis would incessantly conduct it to interfere by turns with the extreme surveys to be harmonized by it; resting upon Realism to coerce Nominalism, and upon Nominalism to inflex Realism.

The corresponding races who, from their oppositely concrete purviews, could comprehend the contest but on the footing of theology—that is, of orthodoxy on the one side and heresy on the other-would merely react against their common assailant, and so make no substantial contribution to the system. If we add to these precautions a final mark for the respective doctrines, the reader will have ample means for verifying our indications, and through them for determining the precise position of Erigena, or of his race, which will be thus illustrated both by anterior and posterior history. The marks are, then, that Realism places universality in substances, while Nominalism will allow it but in personal notions or their names, and Conceptualism recognizes it but in the rational essences, which are both notional and substantive, while independent both of mind and matter.

According to the foremost of these tests, the Roman race does not offer one writer really native and original—from Boethius to Anselm, from St. Anselm to Acquinas, and from this doctor of the middle-ages to the late philosopher Geoberti -who was not in effect, if not profession also, a Realist. Only mongrels or imitators might appear to form exceptions. Thus Acquinas himself displayed some Nominalist leanings, from his servile adherence to Aristotelism; for the peripatetic school was the Greek prototype of this sect. On the other hand, St. Anselm, the classic type of Realism, sometimes pushes this impression to the verge of Nominalism; and this unconsciously or confusedly. For instance, in the celebrated contest with Roscellinus, he alludes to the persons of the Trinity in these terms:

"Qui mundum *** comprehendet quo modo plures personæ, quarum singula quæque est perfectus Deus, sunt Deus unus."

Now it is plain that the word "plurality" applies as normally to two or four or any higher number as it would do to three, and so that the writer attached no value to this special limit. But it is also very certain that, as well in logic as in orthodoxy, the position can be tenable but of the number three alone. For the relations between three persons or sub

stances compose an essence, a unity in diversity, an indivisible trinity, as do likewise in bodies simply physical the three dimensions. For length without breadth, or either without solidity are known to be but fictions of the mathematicians. The moral is, then, that Anselm viewed the Deity not as an essence but merely as a substance, in due conformity with Realism, and that he fell toward Nominalism in confounding trinity with mere plurality.

So the Teutons, down from their aggregate adoption of Arianism through the more conspicuous writers of all succeeding ages-from Rabanus Morus who was contemporary with Erigena and Gotchalk, a fellow Saxon who was the victim of his lash, along to Albertus Magnus, to William of Occam, to Luther, Locke, Leibnitz, and their followers-were all Nominalists. Opinions have been various as to certain of these cases; but the grounds of all such shiftings may be now reduced to rule; they will always be found in persons of mixed extraction or inferior calibre, who form the body of all sects, and take their sides from chance or interest. Even Albertus, for example, is sometimes classed as a Realist. But the appearance was a mere deference to his religious or Romish order, and which he colored by substantializing Aristotle's forms to the "second substances." Thus the tendency with him had been to merge the substance in the form; the Realism of his Roman creed in the Nominalism of his Gothic origin.

So, through a counter oscillation, Locke is sometimes. called a Conceptualist. But he was merely prudent in his Nominalism, as in all things. He was cautioned by the natural consequences of the doctrine in Hobbes, who made virtue, vice, and truth, to be nothing but mere words. This strict consistency of Hobbes, Leibnitz described as plus quam Nominalis. "Not content," he adds, "with the rest of the Nominalists to reduce universals to names or words, Hobbes affirms that the truth itself of the things consists in the names, and what is more, depends upon the human will." Horne Tooke derives the name itself from mere opinion, or