famous ontological argument of the Proslogion, that
the existence of God is proved by our thought of him.[1]
It is the very subtilty of the conception that makes the reasoning silent to mere logicians; but among philosophers
it has commanded a wide-spread sympathy. Anselm's
confidence in its truth has been justified by the manner
in which his argument has been woven and re-woven into the systems of modern thought.
Thus Anselm's interest lay in a field above the controversies of logic; his thoughts did not readily move within that formal circle. He joined of necessity in debates to which one cannot be brought to believe that he devoted his best faculties.[2] The technical victory in his controversy with Gaunilo lay with his opponent, and although our scanty information of the literary proceedings of the time tells us nothing relevant of the reception of his other writings, we may be fairly sure that the realists, or traditionary party, had not yet trained them selves to the same expertness in the manipulation of logic which the nominalists already possessed. A story told by a chronicler of the abbey of Saint Martin at Tournay, and relating to the last years of the century, throws a curious light upon this relation. There was a master there, Odo, afterwards bishop of Cambray, whose fame was so eminent that not only from France, Flanders, and Normandy, but even from far distant Italy, Saxony, and Burgundy, divers clergymen flowed together in crowds to hear him daily; so that if thou shouldst walk about the public places of the city and behold the throngs of disputants—greges disputantium—thou wouldst say that the citizens had left off their other labours and given themselves over entirely to philosophy. But after a while a check came. Odo, who
- ↑ The argument has been spoken of as derived from Augustin and Boethius, but it is clearly shown by F. R. Hasse, Anselm von Canterbury 2. 240 (1852), that this statement rests upon a confusion of the motive of the Proslogion with that of the Monologion.
- ↑ Cousin justly remarks, il retombe dans la barbaric de son temps des qu il quitte le Christianisme et s engage dans la dialectique scholastique. . . . Ce n est pas la qu il faut chercher saint Anselme: Fragments philosophiques 2. 102, 5th ed., 1865.
