It is only recently that scholars have again taken note of Adelard's position on logic and the question of universals. The debate now has a much richer texture than it had a hundred years ago, thanks to our more detailed knowledge of the manuscripts. In particular, the successive stages of the medieval exposition of Boethius's commentaries on Porphyry's Isagoge have been mapped out and the positions on this map of great figures such as Roscelin of Compiègne, William of Champeaux and Peter Abelard have been noted.(4) It is not my intention in this article to compare Adelard's doctrine with that of any of his medieval contemporaries, but rather to point out to what degree his theory can be understood in reference to Boethius's words. But I do not mean the Boethius of the commentaries on the Isagoge ; rather, the Boethius of the Consolatio Philosophiae.

First, a brief summary of Adelard's doctrine on universals. The De eodem et diverso is divided into two parts. The first part takes the form of a debate between the personifications of Philocosmia, the lover of the world, and Philosophia, the lover of wisdom, who defend the realms of the senses and of reason, respectively. Philosophia naturally wins the debate and the second half of the text is devoted to the description of her handmaidens, the seven liberal arts. The liberal arts are described schematically with lists of terms from the standard texts, rather like revision notes for exams. So in the case of dialectic, as the third of the liberal arts, Adelard does little more than summarise passages from the Categories and Boethius's De differentiis topicis . It is in the first part of the De eodem et diverso that logic plays a much more important---indeed a dominant---role, and it is in a section of this part that historians of philosophy have been interested.

The section in question occurs as Philosophia's reply to Philocosmia's accusation that even the greatest of philosophers do not agree with each other.(5) I paraphrase my translation of the section:

`You say that Plato says that genus and species exist outside sensible objects, Aristotle that they are only in sensibles. We solve this apparent disagreement in the following way. Genus and species are also the names of subject things, for you give the names genus, species and individual to the same essence, but in different respects. For when philosophers wish to deal with things in respect to their being subject to the senses, being different from each other and countable, they call them individuals (e.g., Socrates, Plato etc.). But when the same individuals are considered more profoundly, i.e., not in respect to differing from each other individually, but in respect to sharing the same term ( vox )(6) `man', they call them a species. When the same individuals are considered with respect only to the fact that they are denoted by the term `animal', they call them a genus. In considering the species they forget the individual but do not deny its existence; and the same is true when they consider the genus. For the term `animal' applied to a thing connotes a substance with animation and sensation; the term `man' connotes all that and, in addition, rationality and mortality; `Socrates' however, connotes all that with the addition of separating that object as an individual from other objects by a particular set of accidents.'

`Consideration of the object as an individual is easy, even for those who have not learnt philosophy. Consideration of the species, on the other hand, is difficult even for those initiated into philosophy's secrets. For people rely on their eyes for discerning things, and these give information about the accidents and individual features of the object, but it is difficult to go from here to observing the `nota' which is independent of these accidents, and which is, in fact, the species shared by all the objects.'

`When the subject was universals, one [student] looked up into the sky and said: ``Who can show me where they are?'' '.

`In the case of mortals imagination gets in the way of reason, as if it envies the rational faculty. But the divine mind knows things directly without the entanglement of imagination because everything was simple in the divine mind (called here `Noys', i.e., ) before being clothed in its multifarious forms.'

`So, Aristotle says that genus and species do not exist except in sensible objects precisely because in each sensible object you can see genus, species and individual. But we can only use imagination to see the genus and species [and therefore we do not know them as they are], whereas Noys knows genus and species directly. Hence Plato prefers to say that genus and species exist outside the sensibles, i.e., in Noys .'

The clue to the understanding of this passage, as Willner already hinted in his edition, is not the commentaries on the Vetus logica (the Aristotelian logical texts that Boethius had translated from Greek), but rather a section of Boethius's Consolatio Philosophiae . From this section Adelard draws the solution to the problem of universals in terms of the different capacities of the beholder. The clue to this source is provided by the differentiation Adelard makes between the role of imagination and the role of reason. In the last part of the fifth book of the Consolatio , as a culmination of his argument for the providence of God, Boethius describes four different levels of perception which correspond to four different levels of creation. The lowest level employs only sense and is that of molluscs and other unmoving animals; the next level employs imagination and is that of animals who can take flight from what they fear and run towards what they desire; after that comes reason which is the province of humankind alone among animals; and finally there is intellect which is what God uses.

Adelard applies the first three of these levels of perception to man. The uneducated common man can only use his senses, and these give only information concerning individuals. Those who can use imagination can, in some way, discern the species and the genera. But imagination itself can be a snare that prevents the reason from operating effectively. Only Noys knows things as they are. Noys is Adelard's equivalent of `intellect'. It is described here as `the divine mind', and, as stated in another passage in De eodem ,(7) is a function of the human soul in its perfect state. When turning to the knowledge of Noys Adelard uses the terms `matter and form' rather than individual, species and genus, and it is clear that he ranks matter with the individual material object and the species and genus with forms. With this substitution of terms the argument is exactly parallelled in Cons. Phil. V, pr. 4:

`For sense has no power outside matter, imagination gazes at the universal species [cf. Adelard: `cum speciem intueri nituntur'], reason takes in the simple form [cf. Adelard: `simplicem notam'], but intelligence, as if surveying everything from above, having understood the form, also judges all things that exist, and it understands them in the same way as it understands the form itself which could be known to no other faculty. For it knows the universal of the reason, the picture (`figura') of the imagination and the sensible material object, not using reason nor imagination nor the senses, but with one flash of the mind, seeing everything, so to speak, in a formal way [Adelard also uses the words `nota', `forma', `cognoscere', `mens', and his `distincte cognoscere' recalls Boethius's `diiudicare'].'(8)

Boethius goes on to explain how the reason defines the universal (what Adelard would call the genus and the species), giving as his example of a universal `homo est animal bipes rationale'; and how imagination is able to picture things even when they are no longer being perceived. He concludes the section with a restatement of that fact that all things are known according to the capacity of the knower.

Boethius's prime objective in this argument is to show how the knowledge of God differs from that of man, so that He is able to know `everything at once' (`cuncta simul'), while man can only know things as they succeed each other in time. Adelard's objectives are different. He wishes to prove that men in themselves have different capacities. He collapses Boethius's range of creatures (from molluscs to God) into the one species, man. It is man who can choose to use the senses only, or to rise from that to using the imagination too, or to use reason which transcends both. The contrast between the benefits of using the senses and using reason is, in fact, the leitmotif of the first part of the De eodem et diverso . Philocosmia is the advocate of the senses. Her handmaidens are personifications of things which gratify the senses: riches, power, honour, fame and pleasure, and she emphasizes the sensual aspect of their appeal.

Of riches she says `do not listen to what I say about riches but trust in your own eyes, whose very purpose is to make judgements'.(9) Of the personification of pleasure, she says: `She rules over our senses in such a way that they prefer to serve her alone. She has taught people to feast on scent---smeared with ointments and garlanded with flowers; she has told them to taste honeyed and Bacchic drafts; she has ordered the eyes to thirst after gold and gems and everything else that is beautiful; she has opened the ears of animate beings to all the sounds of harmonic modulation, which the Greeks call `symphonies'; finally, lest any part of the body should not serve pleasure, she has covered the whole surface of the body with the enticements of touch.'(10)

The point about the senses is that they allow you to deal with individual, material, objects, or, as Philocosmia says, things (`res'), whereas reason deals only with empty words. Philocosmia curses those who `put into one species these things which you see before you', and concludes her imprecation with the statement that `the philosopher, by using words , deprives the world of the beauty of things.'(11) Philocosmia, a champion of Epicurus,(12) can only consider things from the point of view of whether they give pleasure (and pleasure is entirely sensual). Thus, in her peroration, she states that philosophy can give pleasure to one sense only: i.e., the hearing. And when the words stop you find you are left with nothing.(13)

Philosophia's reply falls into two parts. The first is a justification of reason (including the portion analysed above); the second is an attack on the senses. To take the second first. Here Adelard shows his true inclinations as a natural scientist. For his `proof' of the deception of the senses parallels discussions of finding out the properties of materia medica in medical works translated from Arabic into Latin in Southern Italy in the late eleventh century. Adelard describes how each of the senses in turn can be deceived by an object which looks, feels and smells like a fig. The medical writers conclude that only taste, in that it penetrates to the very substance of the material (say, a fruit), can truly tell you what that fruit is.(14) Adelard's conclusion too is that one has to resort to `breaking the fig open with the teeth' to discover whether it is really a fig, but dismisses this way of `knowing' something as being more appropriate to a dog than a man. The second argument is that the senses prevent the reason from functioning properly, a point made at the beginning of the De eodem too, when Adelard describes how he escaped from the din of the city to a quiet place by the river Loire where he could concentrate on `re-reading in his mind' a discussion he had had with his master in Tours.

The first part of Philosophia's defence takes up precisely the `verba' which Philocosmia had accused philosophers of prefering to things. These words as `voces', as we have already seen, are the designations of the individual, the species and the genus. Following the Platonic way of looking at things, which Adelard is clearly most in sympathy with, the species and the genera are the forms and matters of things existing in Noys which belongs both to God and to the human soul in its perfect state. Described in another respect, these are the `causes' of the things (res ) that Philocosmia makes so much of, and `the beginnings of the causes'. Thus the criticism of `empty words' is turned around to such an extent that the words, or terms, themselves, become the causes and the beginnings from which all sensible objects derive. The way one reaches a genus from an individual, a form from the material object, and a cause from the thing itself, is through the deductive activity of the reason, which also operates in the other direction: reason both divides and composes. This `alternating path' is described in more explicit terms in the section on dialectic in the second half of the De eodem . The verses following the prose passage of the Consolatio Philosophiae just quoted, provide the source. Here reason is described as `the force that sees individual objects and divides what it recognizes, and also puts together again what it divides, and choosing this alternating path now pushes its head to the heights, now descends into the lowest parts.'(15) Adelard adds to Boethius's `alternating path' of reason an analogy of his own devising, that of the procedure on an abacus whereby one can check whether the product of multiplying two numbers is correct, by dividing that same product. Adelard's text on the abacus is probably one of his earliest works, presumed contemporary with the De eodem.

The same verses of the Consolatio that provide a parallel for the alternating path of reason provided Adelard in his work on natural science, the Quaestiones naturales, with the very words in which he refutes the Stoic view of vision being caused `by sensations and images imprinted on the minds like letters on the page'(16) and Adelard follows Boethius in advocating the alternative doctrine that the stimulus for recognizing what we see comes from the mind itself (though Adelard puts this in a much more detailed way than Boethius, using medical sources). This is a necessary conclusion from the fact that reason is superior and prior to the senses.

The influence of the doctrine and the terms of this section of Boethius's Consolatio philosophiae on Adelard's work is, therefore, quite explicit. But the Consolatio as a whole is important for Adelard. It provides the literary form of the first part of the De eodem, alternating prose argument with philosophical poetry. Boethius's consoler, Lady Philosophy, appears in a vision (not a dream) just as Philosophia and Philocosmia appear to Adelard on the banks of the Loire,(17) and both works seek to cure the mind's anguish through the study of philosophy. Boethius's ambition was to reconcile Plato and Aristotle, as Adelard does, but in both the Consolatio and De eodem, the sympathy for Plato is clearly stronger. It is, therefore, not surprising that Adelard should adapt the words of Boethius's Philosophia to solving the problem of universals.

There is, however, a twist to the tale of the conflict of `things' and `words' in the De eodem. When Philosophia has refuted one by one Philocosmia's criticism of reason and its `empty words', her auditor ---i.e., Adelard himself---wishes to try his own hand in debate. He describes the genesis of the human soul, how it is reduced from its original perfect state by being incorporated into the body and becoming subject to the deceptions of the senses. She is in thrall to the burden of `things'. And what is her remedy? Nothing other than words. She realised that she was in danger of becoming corrupted by corporeal things, and that she could not rely on her memory. She therefore wrote down (`committed to the memory of the written text') all the teachings of philosophy whilst she was still able to do so, so that when she began to realise that she was being corrupted, she could re-read what she had written and be restored to the truth. These writings are the text-books of the seven liberal arts whose contents are sketched in the second half of the De eodem et diverso.(18)

So words have conquered things! I leave it to the historians of logic to decide whether this preoccupation in Adelard's work with the difference between `things' and `words' and his use of the word `vox', for the term describing the individual, species and genus, reflects the lively discussion of contemporary logicians, one group of which were called the `vocales'. (19)

Appendix: Parallel Passages

1. Adelard and Boethius on Universals, Sense, Imagination and Reason

Amat enim et compositio divisionem et divisio compositionem, dum utraque alteri fidem facit. Unde si quid in digitis et articulis abaci numeralibus ex multiplicatione creverit, id utrum recte processerit, divisione eiusdem summae probatur. Quod autem unus ea extra sensibilia, alter in sensibilibus tantum existere dixit, sic accipiendum est. Genus et species---de his enim sermo est---etiam rerum subiectarum nomina sunt. Nam si res consideres, eidem essentiae et generis et speciei et individui nomina imposita sunt, sed respectu diverso. Volentes etenim philosophi de rebus agere secundum hoc quod sensibus subiectae sunt, secundum quod a vocibus singularibus notantur et numeraliter diversae sunt, individua vocarunt, scilicet Socratem, Platonem, et ceteros. Eosdem autem altius intuentes ---videlicet non secundum quod sensualiter diversi sunt, sed in eo quod notantur ab hac voce `homo', speciem vocaverunt. Eosdem item in hoc tantum quod ab hac voce `animal' notantur, considerantes, genus vocaverunt. Nec tamen in consideratione speciali formas individuales tollunt, sed obliviscuntur, cum a speciali nomine non ponantur; nec in generali speciales oblatas intelligunt, sed inesse non attendunt, vocis generalis significatione contenti. Vox enim haec `animal' in re illa notat substantiam cum animatione et sensibilitate; haec autem `homo' totum illud, et insuper cum rationalitate et mortalitate; `Socrates' vero illud idem addita insuper numerali accidentium discretione. Unde vel doctrina non initiatis patet consideratio individualis; specialis certe non modo litterarum profanos verum etiam ipsius arcani conscios admodum angit. Assueti enim rebus discernendis oculos advertere, et easdem longas vel latas altasque conspicere, nec non unam aut plures esse, undique circumscriptione locali ambitas percurrere, cum speciem intueri nituntur, eisdem quodammodo caliginibus implicantur. Nec ipsam simplicem notam sine numerali aut circumscriptionali discretione contemplari, nec ac simplicem specialis vocis positionem ascendere queunt. Inde quidam cum de universalibus ageretur, sursum inhians, ``quis locum earum mihi ostendent?'' inquit. Adeo rationem imaginatio perturbat et quasi invidia quadam subtilitati eius se opponit. Sed id apud mortales. Divinae enim menti quae hanc ipsam materiam tam vario et subtili tegmine formarum induit, praesto est, et materiam sine formis et formas sine aliis, immo et omnia cum aliis sine irretitu imaginationis distincte cognoscere. Nam et antequam coniuncta essent, universa quae vides in ipsa noy simplicia erant. Sed quomodo et qua ratione in ea essent, id et subtilius considerandum et in alia disputatione dicendum est. Nunc autem ad propositum redeamus. Quoniam igitur illud idem quod vides et genus et species et individuum sit, merito ea Aristoteles non nisi in sensibilibus esse proposuit. Sunt etenim ipsa sensibilia quamvis acutius considerata. Quoniam vero ea, in quantum dicuntur genera et species, nemo sine imaginatione presse pureque intuetur, Plato extra sensibilia, scilicet in mente divina, et concipi et existere dixit. Sic viri illi licet verbis contrarii videantur, re tamen idem senserunt.

2. The `Alternating Path' of Reason

Quae vis singula perspicit
aut quae cognita dividit?
Quae divisa recolligit
alternumque legens iter
nunc summis caput inserit,
nunc decedit in infima?

.... nobilissimum illud iter alternans ut nunc ab individuis per media ad generalissimum proprietates expoliando, immo obliviscendo ascendat, nunc a generalissimo eodem gradu singula formis suis retexens, ad individua usque descendat. (cf. also the beginning of the passage quoted in 1 above).

3. The Vision

Haec dum mecum tacitus ipse reputarem querimoniamque lacrimabilem stili officio signarem, astitisse mihi supra verticem visa est mulier reverendi admodum vultus oculis ardentibus ....

Itaque cum soli relectioni sententiae illius operam darem, cunctis extra cessantibus, duas mulieres unam a dextra aliam a sinistra et aspexi et admiratus sum.