written in the form of a dialogue or of quaestiones.[1] The method allows him to throw out the most startling suggestions, but at the same time saves him from the necessity of formulating his own express answer. We are in most cases left to guess it from a balance of more or less conflicting passages. Thus we are hardly even able to arrive at a clear view of his conception of the empire and the papacy, in themselves and in their mutual relations. He hints that in a certain state of society it might be better to have several popes and several sovereigns; and a although he recognises in some sort the claims of the theoretical universal empire, there is an air of unreality about his assertions which lets us see that he had not forgotten his English birth and French training. No human institution is absolute or final, and neither pope nor emperor can claim exemption from the general law of progress and adaptation. If however at the present time, Ockham argues, the prerogative of the empire reaches over the entire world in its temporal relations, this must inevitably exclude the pope from all but spiritual functions. Ockham has travelled by a different road to the same point as Marsiglio. Neither is really in love with the imperial idea: all that is of importance to them is to erect the state into an organic, consolidated force independent of, and in its own province superior to, that of the spiritualty; and this done, they circumscribe even the spiritual part of the papal authority by making it in all respects subject to the general voice of Christendom. The pope remains the exponent of the church,
- ↑ It appears to me that the Dialogus was never written to form a single work. The second part admittedly stands by itself; and the third opens the whole subject of the first afresh, and compara- tively seldom assumes conclusions which one might think had already been (from the author's point of view) proved many times over in the first part. It is also, unlike its predecessors, subdivided into tractatus as well as into books and chapters. How lax the composition of the Dialogus is, we may learn from the title of Ockham's Opus nonaginta dierum, Goldast 2. 993, which speaks of it as belonging to the sixth tractatus of the third part of the former work. [Compare Mr. A. G. Little's Grey Friars in Oxford, pp. 229-232, Oxford 1892, and my article on Ockham in the Dictionary of National Biography, 41. 359 sq., 1895.]
