Henry Cecil Sturt

“ The Realists held that universals alone have substantial reality, existing ante res; the Nominalists that universals are mere names invented to express the qualities of particular things and existing post res; while the Conceptualists, mediating between the two extremes, held that universals are concepts which exist in our minds and express real similarities in things themselves. ”

“ When nominalism was revived in the 14th century by the English Franciscan, William of Occam, it gave evidence of a new tendency in thought, a distrust of abstractions and an impulse towards direct observation and inductive research, a tendency which had its fulfilment in the scientific movement of the Renaissance. ”

“ Though a strong realist tendency is evident in the system of Erigena (9th century) , the controversy was not definitely started till the 11th century: it lasted till the middle of the 12th, when the first period of scholastic philosophy ends. Under an appearance of much vain subtlety the controversy about universals involved issues of the greatest speculative and practical importance: realism represented a spiritual, nominalism an anti-spiritual, view of the world ”