SOURCE: Kenny, Anthony. “The Realism of the De Universalibus.” In Wyclif in His Times, edited by Anthony Kenny, pp. 17-29. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1986.

[In the following essay, Kenny explicates Wyclif's theory of universals as well as the notion of predication that underlies it.]

Wyclif has long been famous as a realist, but the precise content of his philosophical realism has never been exactly determined. The publication by Ivan Mueller of an edition of the De Universalibus (Oxford, 1985) gives the general reader, for the first time, an opportunity to take the measure of Wyclif's theory. The present article aims to single out some of the main themes of Wyclif's realism and to make them intelligible to those more familiar with contemporary than with scholastic philosophy. Passages from the De Universalibus will be identified by the abbreviation ‘U’ followed by chapter and line number. (The numbering is common both to Mueller's edition and to the simultaneously published translation by myself.)

Realism, for Wyclif, is above all a theory about the nature of universals; and the key to the understanding of universals is a grasp of the nature of predication. Everyone is familiar with the division of sentences into subject and predicate: in the sentence ‘Banquo lives’, ‘Banquo’ is the subject and ‘lives’ is the predicate; so too ‘dogs’ is the subject and ‘bark’ the predicate in ‘dogs bark’, or so at least a medieval grammarian would have been likely to say. This distinction is a distinction between bits of language: we are talking about terms and sentences, not about anything which terms or sentences might mean or represent or stand for. The word ‘Banquo’ is the subject of the sentence ‘Banquo lives’: it is a particular part of that sentence. But what about the man Banquo? Is he the subject of the sentence too? Well, if he is—and there are a number of idioms which make it natural to say so—he is not any part of the sentence in the way that the word ‘Banquo’ is. Banquo is the extralinguistic item for which the word ‘Banquo’ stands; he is what the sentence ‘Banquo lives’ is about, but he is not anything which that sentence contains (as it contains the word ‘Banquo’).

Wyclif, like everybody else, recognizes as the most obvious form of predication that in which subject and predicate are linguistic items, parts of sentences. The first philosophical sense which he attributes to the verb ‘predicare’ or ‘predicate’ is ‘the predication of one term of another’. ‘This’, he says ‘is the sense much talked about by modern writers, who think that there is no other.’ (U i.33.) But in fact, he says, this kind of predication is modelled on a different kind of predication, real predication, which is ‘being shared by or said of many things in common’ (U i. 35).

Real predication, then, is not a relationship between two terms, two bits of language. It is a relationship between the things in the world to which the linguistic items correspond. It is not the relationship between the subject-term ‘Banquo’ and the predicate-term ‘lives’, but the relationship between what the term ‘Banquo’ stands for, namely Banquo, and what it is in the world which corresponds to the term ‘lives’. But what is the extramental entity which corresponds to ‘lives’? Indeed is there anything in the world which corresponds to predicates? Wyclif's answer to the second question is that if not, then there is no difference between true and false sentences. His answer to the first question is his theory of universals.

Life is the universal which corresponds to the predicate ‘lives’. It is life which is shared by or said of many things in common. (The use of ‘said of’ should not mislead one into thinking that life is a linguistic entity, like the word ‘life’. That is not so, any more than the fact that Caesar is much spoken of means that Caesar is a piece of speech.) ‘It is in this manner’, Wyclif says, ‘that every actual universal is predicated of its inferiors in nature.’ (U i. 35.) Plants live and stones do not; plants are inferiors, and stones are not, of life, in the sense that plants come under life in a pyramid of classification of the things there are in the world, whereas stones do not come under that heading.

Wyclif's adversaries, the nominalists, deny that there is any such thing as real predication, anything in the world corresponding to the predicate of a true proposition. They object as follows: ‘Nothing is a subject or a predicate unless it is a part of a proposition. But things in the external world are not parts of propositions; therefore they are not predicates or subjects. Consequently no real universal is predicated.’ (U i. 80.)¹ But this objection, Wyclif retorts, depends on a misunderstanding of the nature of a proposition. Besides the written or spoken propositions, sentences which are linguistic entities, there are real propositions in the extralinguistic world. A real proposition is what a true sentence corresponds to, just as real predication corresponds to the predication of terms. Walter Burley is cited as authority for the thesis that ‘the truth on the side of reality, which God puts together from subject and predicate, is the real proposition’ (U i. 91).² Human beings put sentences together from verbal subjects and verbal predicates; it is God who puts together, from non-linguistic entities, the real proposition which makes the verbal sentence true.

If we look in modern philosophy for a terminology to correspond to the ‘real proposition’ of Burley and Wyclif, we find it in the sachverhalt of Husserl and the early Wittgenstein. The problems which arise from Wyclif's account of the real proposition are the same as those which arise from the theory of sachverhalt in the modern philosophers: what makes negative propositions true? What makes false propositions false? What makes the truth of true future and past-tensed propositions?

Wyclif adopts a number of traditional Aristotelian distinctions between types of predication. There is per se predication, as in ‘Socrates is human’, and per accidens predication as in ‘Socrates is white’. Subdivisions of per se predication are quidditative predication (as ‘Socrates is human’ or ‘Socrates is animal’) and qualitative predication (as ‘Socrates is rational’). Per accidens predication comes in nine types corresponding to the last nine of Aristotle's ten categories (U i. 40-74). For Wyclif, in all cases of real predication a subject says its predicate (thus ‘each man per se says the specific human nature which is the quiddity of each man’, U i. 44) and a predicate is said of its subject (thus ‘white is said of man’, U i. 67).

It is thus that Wyclif interprets familiar passages of Aristotle.

Thus, in the Categories, in the chapter on substance, he maintains that primary substance is not said or predicated of anything. But secondary substance, such as genera and species, is said or predicated of a subject, as will become clear. This is more easily understood about things signified than about their signs, and it is a sense of predication which must be carefully noted.³

(U i. 150-5.)

All this, while controversial, covers familiar ground. Less commonplace is Wyclif's threefold classification of real predication. (U i. 157-69.)

We must note carefully the three different kinds of predication, namely formal predication, essential predication and habitual predication. All such predication is principally in the real world. And this is why philosophers do not speak of false predication of signs, nor of negative predication, nor of predication about the past or the future, because that is not in the real world; only true predication is in the real world, though truly in the real world one thing is denied or removed from another, as man from donkey and similarly with other negative truths. But only that which is form is really predicated of a subject.⁴

Wyclif's definition of formal predication is not altogether easy to understand, but the examples he gives to illustrate this kind of predication—such as ‘man is an animal’ and ‘Peter is musical’—suggest that what he has in mind is the case where a predication is made true by the inherence of an appropriate form (whether substantial, as in the case of animality or accidental, as in the case of musicality) in a subject. Habitudinal predication, on the other hand, is not made true by the inherence of a form. The accidental form of size inhering in Socrates does not vary while, owing to the growth of Simmias, Socrates changes from being taller than to being smaller than Simmias. Similarly if Socrates is thought of by Wyclif, this does not, as such, involve any change taking place in Socrates. Habitudinal predication, Wyclif says, is ‘where a relationship of a kind attaches to a subject without making it as such strictly speaking changeable. Thus a thing can be thought of or loved, can cause various effects, can acquire place and location in time and many kinds of notional relations without as such being changed or changeable.’ (U i. 235-46.)⁵

But it is essential predication which is the hardest to understand, and the matter remains dark when Wyclif gives us the examples that are meant to illustrate what kind of thing he has in mind: ‘God is man’, ‘Fire is water’, ‘The universal is particular’. It is clear from the context that, in terms of Wyclif's theology, physics, and logic, each of these propositions is meant to be in some sense true.

Given the doctrine of the Incarnation, the theological example appears easier to understand than the others. Its truth clearly depends in some way on there being one person, Jesus, who is both God and man. But in fact Wyclif does not say this: he says that in essential predication the same essence is the subject and the predicate. And in the case of the physical example he explains that ‘the same essence which is at one time fire is at another time water’. And to explain the logical example he says, ‘in the same essence there inheres both being a man and being this man. And being a man is common to every man, and this is formally universal, while being this man is restricted individually to this essence’.⁶ (U i. 195-217.) The notion of ‘essence’ involved here is obscure, and clearly different from the standard medieval scholastic one. Anyone who could clarify it would do a great service to Wyclif scholars.

For Wyclif believes that the correct understanding of predication as he explains it will enable us to accept the realist definition of universals rather than the nominalist one. The realist definition of ‘genus’ is brief and clear: ‘Genus is what is predicated quidditatively of many things which differ in species’. The genus of animal is not a word, or symbol, but a reality: it is what is common to each animal, and is what is predicated—really predicated—of each animal quidditatively. (Quidditative predication, as contrasted with qualitative predication, tells you what kind of thing something is, as opposed to what properties or qualities it has.) ‘Not all modern logicians gathered together’, says Wyclif, ‘could improve a single word of the definition.’ (U i. 350.)

The modern logicians, or nominalists, since they do not accept real predication but only the predication of terms, are forced into terrible mazes when they try to define genus. They offer something like the following: a genus is a term or concept which is predicable (or whose counterpart is predicable) per se in the nominative quidditatively of many terms which signify things specifically distinct (U i. 857-60).⁷

For the realist, genus is an extra-linguistic reality; for the nominalist it is a term, an element of language, or a concept, an element of thought. The realist can say that genus is predicated, whereas the nominalist can only say it is predicable. Dogs are always animals, whether or not anyone is thinking or talking of animals; but it is only when someone is thinking or talking of animals that the term ‘animal’ is predicated. Moreover, if you take a single term such as the sound ‘animal’ produced by me at this moment—and if you are a nominalist keen to keep your ontology down to empirical particulars this is the only kind of thing you have a right to be talking about—then it is not true that it is even predicable of all animals. The sound would not last long enough to form part of all the different true sentences which would attribute animality to the various kinds of animal. That is why the nominalists have to add the rider ‘or whose counterpart is predicable’. Now it is essential to genus that it should be related to different species; it is essential to a nominalist definition of genus that this relationship should be a relationship to different terms, not different extramental realities. But the nominalist cannot say that the term is predicated of terms differing in species; the word ‘dog’ does not differ in species from the word ‘cat’. So the nominalist has to say that the terms signify things that are specifically distinct. But in doing so he checkmates himself: he is making specific difference something on the side of the things signified, not something belonging purely to the signs. But that is realism, not nominalism (U i. 355, 371).

For a consistent nominalist, Wyclif insists, substances do not resemble or differ in species, nor do they belong to any species; there cannot be any such thing as a species except as the product of a mind. But signs and thoughts are human creations; words and terms can change their meaning at their users' whim. If species therefore were signs or thoughts, we could change the species of anything simply by taking thought. ‘Thus any thing could belong to the species of anything; a man could belong to the species of donkey, simply through a change in the signification of terms.’ (U i. 389-91.)

Nominalism, according to Wyclif, is a ridiculous attempt to put the cart before the horse.

Neither the possibility nor the fact of assigning a term can cause extramental things to resemble each other more or less. The specific resemblance or difference between things is not the reason for the resemblance of extramental things; it is the other way round—in the first and principal place you have to look in the things themselves for the specific resemblances and differences, and only subsequently in the signs.⁸

(U i. 425-30.)

The nominalist's attempt to give an account of meaning without universals collapses under its own weight, containing its own refutation. The existence of universals is established by the refutation of the opposing view. But if there are universals, what kind of thing are they? Can the realist be sure that his own position, like that of the nominalist, will not turn out to be internally incoherent? It is to these questions that Wyclif devotes the major part of his treatise.

Drawing on Grosseste's commentary on the Posterior Analytics,⁹ Wyclif explains that there are five types of universal.

The first and foremost kind is the eternal notion or exemplar idea in God. The second kind is the common created notion in the superior causes, like the intelligences and the heavenly spheres. The third kind of universal is the common form rooted in its individuals. This, says Grosseteste, is what Aristotle's genera and species are. Fourthly, there is the universal which is the common form in its accidents, apprehended by the lowest form of intellect. There is a fifth kind of universal—signs and mental acts—which Grosseteste sets aside as irrelevant to his concerns.¹⁰

(U ii. 165-77.)

We may note in this fivefold scheme two points of agreement between Wyclif and his adversaries. The fifth kind of universal is one which nominalists and conceptualists accept: it is the only created kind of universal they are prepared to admit. The acceptance by Wyclif that the first and foremost kind of universal is a notion in the mind of God goes some way to meeting the conceptualists' claim that it is in the mind that universals have their home: but of course these universals of the first kind are prior to any human mind. From all eternity, in God's mind there is the thought of all he will or can make: these are the patterns and paradigms by which he creates, referred to by Wyclif, as by other Latin theologians, under the Greek word ‘Idea’.

The second kind of universal we may leave aside as being of interest only within the context of medieval Aristotelian cosmology. It is the third kind of universal over which the battle between realists and nominalists principally rages.

Unlike the divine Ideas, which exist eternally whether or not there is a created universe, the universals of this third kind are brought into existence by creation. These universals are the forms which are shared in common by all the individuals of a kind. This, Wyclif maintains, is what Aristotle meant by genera and species. Elsewhere he calls them metaphysical universals (U ii. 245).

Metaphysical universals are all universals: they are themselves instances of the universal ‘universal’. But this is something which it takes an abstractive intellect to grasp: a dog may perhaps have a grasp of caninity (in that it recognizes other dogs as beings of the same kind as itself) but it certainly cannot grasp that caninity is a universal. Hence, universals, considered as universals in relation to their contingent instantiations, have a universality which is introduced by the intellect. This appears to be what Wyclif means when he talks about the fourth kind of universal (‘the common form in its accidents, apprehended by the lowest form of intellect’), which he elsewhere calls logical universals (U ii. 245).

The fifth kind of universal, the kind accepted even by nominalists, might be called ‘grammatical universals’, though Wyclif does not seem to use exactly this expression. Logic, he says, is midway between grammar and metaphysics. Logic shares in the conditions of each, treating primarily of realities, since it is the route to metaphysics, and secondarily of signs, since it is the terminus of grammar (U ii. 108-11). Thus the logical universals come between metaphysical universals and grammatical universals. To grasp the logical universal is to realize the link between the metaphysical, extralinguistic universal, and its conceptualization in language. Logical universals, unlike metaphysical universals, presuppose created minds (U ii. 240-50).

In propounding this fivefold scheme Wyclif reveals himself as being a realist but not a Platonist. He is not a Platonist because he does not accept that there are any universals outside the divine mind which are independent both of the existence of individuals and of the existence of created minds. Metaphysical universals are independent of created minds, but they are not independent of the existence of individuals of particular kinds. Logical universals may be independent of the existence of individuals (such at least seems to be the case with the universal ‘chimaera’) but they are not independent of the existence of created minds. Because of these qualifications to his realism, Wyclif is able to present himself as being an orthodox Aristotelian.

It is true that there are many passages in Aristotle where universals are criticized, most famously the dictum of chapter fifteen of the first book of the Posterior Analytics, which read, in the version known to Wyclif, ‘goodbye to the universals, for they are monsters’.¹¹ But, Wyclif maintains, when Aristotle is attacking universals his target is never the metaphysical universals which are the third kind in the Grosseteste scheme. It is the ideal universals of the first class. Wyclif agrees that if such Ideas are regarded as self-subsistent substances, separate from God and from individuals, then they are superfluous monstrosities (U ii. 197). But none of Aristotle's arguments, he claims, are successful against ideal universals considered as notions in the mind of God. Wyclif is not quite sure whether Plato's own theory involved the superfluous monstrosities Aristotle attacked, or whether Aristotle had got his master's doctrine wrong. Wyclif himself, of course, did not know Plato at first hand. ‘But it seems to me more probable’, he said, ‘that Plato's view of ideas was sound and in accordance with our own sacred Scripture as Augustine testifies.’ (U ii. 200-3.)

On the positive side, Wyclif can point to many passages in Aristotle which favour realism about metaphysical universals. One of the clearest occurs in the chapter on substance in the Categories, where the Philosopher says that primary substance is not said or predicated of anything, but that secondary substance, such as genera and species, is predicated.¹² This, Wyclif argues, must be understood as meaning real predication; and the substance which is thus predicated is universal, the common natures which make individuals the kinds of things they are.

Now are these metaphysical universals prior or posterior to the relevant individuals (‘supposits’)? Wyclif's answer contains a distinction that is not at first sight obvious.

The universal of which Aristotle is speaking is the common nature rooted in its supposits. In this way, in the order of generation in which they cause the universals, the subjects come first. Universals, on the other hand, take precedence in the order of origin, in which, both formally and finally, they cause their supposits.¹³

(U ii. 235-40.)

What this seems to mean is this. There is no such thing as human nature until there are individual human beings: there is no Platonic Ideal Man outside the divine mind. In this sense the existence of human beings brings into existence the universal humanity. But when there are human beings it is their humanity which makes them human (causes them formally) and the point of the succession of human beings is the perpetuation of the human species (which therefore causes them finally).¹⁴

Such then, in broad outline, is Wyclif's theory of universals. How does he argue for its correctness? How does he argue for the existence of universals other than by criticizing nominalism?

The argument is essentially simple: Wyclif maintains that anyone who believes in objective truth is thereby already committed, whether they know it or not, to belief in real universals. The two beliefs are in fact two forms of the same belief: one a complex form and the other a non-complex form. If the only truths we knew were protocols of immediate experience, perhaps it would not be obvious that there must be universals; but for most of Wyclif's adversaries it is common ground that the mind knows at least some universal, abstract truths.

Since, therefore, we have to grant that there is a universal abstract truth of this kind, beyond the scope of a material sense-faculty to know, it must be concluded that there is a supra-sensible faculty, a kind of intellect, to consider it. And this is what philosophers call the agent intellect. To conceive the universal intention by abstracting from the phantasm, as the intellect does, is to perceive that every man resembles every other in being a man. And once the intellect has abstracted an everlasting eternal truth of this kind from perishable particulars, it sets itself the task of conceiving, in a non-complex manner, the name of the universal, whether specific or generic.¹⁵

(U. iii. 37-46.)

The point can be generalized. If the mind is aware that an individual A resembles an individual B, there must be some respect C in which A resembles B. But in seeing that A resembles B in respect C, the intellect is eo ipso seeing the C-ness of A and B; that is to say, it is conceiving C-ness, a universal common to A and B. Seeing that A is like B in respect of C is the very same thing as seeing the common C-ness; so what is indicated by the complex clause in the first expression must be the same as what is indicated by the abstract noun in the second. Universals, then, are just universal truths grasped in a non-complex manner, and anyone who can make judgements of likeness automatically knows what a universal is.

So someone who wants to be made acquainted with the quiddity of universals has to think confusedly and abstractly, by genus and species, of the same thing as he first thought of by means of a complex whose subject is the specific or generic term; thus the species of man is the same thing as there being a man, and the genus of animal is the same thing as being an animal. And each of these is common to its supposits.¹⁶

(U iii. 90-5.)

For Wyclif it is not enough to criticize nominalists or to offer this proof of the reality of universals. It is necessary also to provide answers to the conundrums by which nominalists seek to impugn the coherence of real universals. If we postulate a common humanity, must we also postulate a common personality, since every man is a person; and if so, does that mean that the whole human race is one person? (U viii. 8.) If you postulate something common to two human beings, are you set off on an infinite regress, like the one sketched by Plato's Third Man argument? (U ix. 9ff.) Can a universal be created or changed or brought into being in any way? (U xii. 145ff.) Can universals be annihilated? (U xiii. 3ff.)

Typical of the nominalist cavils which Wyclif has to answer is the following passage from the eleventh chapter of the treatise:

The human species is the subject of its own species and of other accidents. So too, then, it is characterised by them, e.g. it is created, it moves from place to place, it is multiplied in quantity, and so on with each of the accidental predicates. But if you grant this, many absurdities follow, as that the same thing is black and white, hot and cold. And, briefly, whatever predicate inheres in any man, inheres in the species of man, so that in one place it is most virtuous and most beautiful, in another most vicious and monstrous; it had more heads than Argus, eats more than Milo, is more procreative than Priapus, and so on.¹⁷

(U xi. 27-38.)

‘Many people’, Wyclif comments, ‘bring up ridiculous points when they are short of arguments’. But he makes a patient attempt to answer the difficulties, and to show how non-absurd and non-arbitrary answers can be given to these and similar trick questions. In dealing with the paradoxes he makes great use of the notion of essential predication.

Wyclif's realism is not a mere logical thesis and his devotion to universals sometimes takes on an almost mystical tone. Thus in answer to the objection that universals are superfluous unless they do something in the world, he replies, ‘It is clear, since universals regularly do what they ought to, that they do great service to their God, since he is Lord of them before he is Lord of individuals.’¹⁸ (U xi. 230-2.) Moreover, Wyclif believes that error about the nature of universals leads to all kinds of moral error. Here he enlists the support of Augistine's De Vera Religione, chapter nine.¹⁹

What everyone must principally love in his neighbour is that he is a human being, and not that he is his own son, or someone useful; for according to Augustine it is being a man which is what is common and is in an especial manner the work of God, since it precedes every particular human being, while being your son, or your mistress, is something you have brought about yourself.²⁰

(U iii. 115-20.)

Augustine may well be right that every Christian ought, as Wyclif says, to love his neighbour in his common nature and not primarily with an eye to private utility, kinship, or pleasure. But the argument that one should love the more universal rather than the more particular would lead to odd conclusions which Wyclif would surely not have accepted: for instance, that one should love one's fellows as fellow animals rather than as fellow men.

Wyclif is prepared to go so far as to say that all actual sin is caused by the lack of an ordered love of universals: because sin consists in preferring lesser good to greater good and in general the more universal good is the greater good.

Thus if proprietors who are devoted to particulars were more concerned that a well-ordered commonwealth should thrive, than that their kinsfolk should prosper, or their relations or the people linked to them by locality or some other individuating condition, then beyond doubt they would not press, in the disordered way they do, for their own people to be raised to wealth, office, prelacy and other dignities.²¹

(U iii. 152-8.)

In this passage we can see, in the young Wyclif, the logician linking hands with the reformer. Nominalism leads to selfishness, charity demands realism. ‘Intellectual and emotional error about universals is the cause of all the sin that reigns in the world.’ (U iii. 162-5.) In the whole history of philosophy has realism ever had a more enthusiastic champion than Wyclif?

Notes

1. Sed obicitur contra illud per hoc quod nihil est praedicatum vel subiectum, nisi pars propositionis. Sed res extra non sunt partes propositionis. Igitur non sunt praedicata vel subiecta. Et per consequens nullum universale ex parte rei praedicatur.

2. Veritas ex parte rei, quam Deus componit ex subiecto et praedicato, (est) realis propositio, ut ponit Magister Walterus Burleigh.

3. Ut in Praedicamentis, capitulo de substantia, ponit primam substantiam de nullo dici vel praedicari. Secundam vero substantiam, ut genera et species, dici vel praedicari de subiecto, ut patebit. Hoc melius intelligitur de signatis quam suis signis et iste sensus praedicationis cum diligentia est notandus. Cf. Aristotle, Categories, 5, 2^a 13.

4. Diligenter est notandum de triplici praedicandi manerie, scilicet de praedicatione formali, de praedicatione secundum esentiam et de praedicatione secundum habitudinem. Talis autem praedicatio principaliter est ex parte rei. Et hinc philosophi non loquuntur de falsa praedicatione signorum nec de praedicatione negativa, nec de praedicatione de praeterito vel de futuro, quia talis non est ex parte rei, sed solum vera praedicatio, licet vere ex parte rei una res negatur vel removeatur a reliqua, ut homo ab asino et sic de aliis veritatibus negativis. Solum autem illud quod est forma praedicatur realiter de subiecto.

5. Tertia est praedicatio secundum habitudinem ex qua secundum genus adveniente subiecto non oportet ipsum ut sic esse proprie mobile, ut contingit rem intelligi, amari, varie causare et acquirere sibi ubicationem, quandalitatem et quotlibet relationes rationis, sine hoc quod ipsum ut sic moveatur vel sit mobile.

6. Eidem essentiae inest esse hominem et esse istum hominem. Et esse hominem est commune omni homini et sic universale formaliter, sed isse istum hominem est individualiter appropriatum isti essentiae.

7. Genus est terminus vel conceptus qui—vel secum convertibilis—est per se praedicabilis in recto et in quid de multis terminis significantibus res distinctas specifice.

8. Cum nec impositio nec imponibilitas termini sit causa quare res extra magis aut minus conveniant—quod convenientia et differentia rerum fundantur essentialiter in rerum principiis et non in signis, ut praedicatio signorum vel eorum praedicabilitas non est causa convenientiae rerum exterarum sed econtra—oportet igitur scrutari in rebus ipsis convenientias et differentias specificas primo et principaliter, et consequenter in eorum signis.

9. Robertus Grosseteste, In Aristotelis Posteriorum Analyticorum Libros (Venice 1514; repr. Minerva GmbH, Frankfurt, 1966), i. 7, f. 8^v.

10. Primum et supremum genus est ratio vel idea exemplaris aeterna in Deo. Secundum genus est ratio communis creata in causis superioribus ut intelligentiis et orbibus caelestibus. Tertium genus universalium est forma communis fundata in suis individuis. Et illa, inquit Lincolniensis, sunt genera et species de quibus loquitur Aristoteles. Quarto forma communis in suis accidentibus, apprehensa ab intellectu infimo, est universale. Sed quintum modum universalium—pro signis vel actibus intelligendi—dimittit Lincolniensis ut sibi impertinens.

11. Analytica Posteriora, I. 15, 83^a 34-5.

12. Categories, 5, 2^a 13.

13. Universale de quo loquitur Aristoteles, est natura communis fundata in suis suppositis. Et sic praecedunt subiecta in via generationis, qua causant universalia. Econtra autem universalia praecedunt in via originis, qua formaliter et finaliter causant sua supposita.

14. This account seems to apply only to those universals which are natures, where we have a species propagated by natural generation.

15. Cum igitur sit dare talem veritatem universalem abstractam quam non est sensus materialis cognoscere, relinquitur quod sit dare virtutem supra sensum, ut puta intellectum, qui illam consideret. Et hoc est quod philosophi dicunt intellectuma gentem. A phantasmatibus abstrahendo concipere intentionem universalem ut intellectus est percipere quod omnis homo convenit cum quolibet in esse hominem. Et postquam abstraxerit a singularibus corruptibilibus huiusmodi perpetuam veritatem, imponit sibi ut incomplexe concipitur nomen universalis vel speciei vel generis.

16. Volens igitur manuduci in notitiam de quidditate universalium debet intelligere confuse et abstracte idem per genus et speciem quod intelligit primo per complexum, cuius subiectum est terminus specificus vel terminus generis, ut idem est species hominis et hominem esse, idem genus animalis et esse animal. Et utrumque illorum est commune suis suppositis.

17. Sicut igitur species humana subicitur proprio speciei et aliis accidentibus, sic denominatur eisdem, sicut creatur, movetur localiter, multiplicatur in quantitate et sic de quolibet praedicatis accidentibus. Sed, hoc dato, multiplicantur quotlibet inconvenientia, ut quod eadem res sit alba et nigra, calida et frigida. Et, breviter, quaecumque praedicatio inest alicui homini, inest speciei hominis, ut hic esset virtuosissima, pulcherrima, ibi viciosissima et monstrusissima, cum habet plura capita quam Argus, magis edula quam Milo, plus procretiva quam Priapus, et sic de multis ridiculose adductis a pluribus quando eis deficiunt argumenta.

18. Cum universalia regulariter faciunt quod debent, patet quod multum deserviunt Deo suo, cum prius sit dominus eorum quam individuorum.

19. Patrologia Latina, 34. 161.

20. Ut quilibet debet principaliter amare in proximo quod est homo et non quod est filius suus vel sibi utilis, quia esse hominem, secundum Augustinum, est commune et praecipue opus Dei, cum praecedit quemlibet hominem singularem. Sed esse filium tuum vel amicam tuam, hoc est opus tuum.

21. Ut si proprietarii singularibus dediti plus appretiarentur quod res plublica vigeat ordinata, quam quod cognati vel affines sui vel quomodocumque ex loco vel alia conditione individuante confoederati promoveantur, tunc indubie non inordinate sic instarent ut sui sint exaltati ad divitas, officia, praelatias vel alias dignitates.