Compendium of the Study of Theology

cause. This argument assumes that words are natural signs, instead of being arbitrarily imposed. The illustration of the word "heat" is not relevant, since heat has a meaning of its own before it is applied to a hot thing: in other words, heat is not a mere "form" like humanity, but a physical reality. The book concludes with an allusion to the fourfold meaning of words (allegorical, etc.) in Scripture, and a promise to deal with the subject in the third "tractatus."

In Chapter IV. there follows a discussion of two theses: (1) that a word cannot signify anything common to an "ens" and a "non-ens," and (2) that a word imposed on a thing can lose its significance (cadere a sua significatione). Both these are asserted by Bacon, and he traces the most appalling errors in Philosophy and Theology to the prevalent denial of them.

The first of them was held to be demolished by such propositions as "Cæsar dead is a man," "a dead man is an animal," "Christ in the three days before the Resurrection was a man". The great source of the fallacies which he proceeds to expose was the teaching of Richard of Cornwall, who was condemned at Paris for the errors maintained there during his course on the Sentences, after he had lectured on the Sentences at Oxford in 1250.1 During the forty years that had elapsed between that year and the date of the present work these errors had been prevalent, especially at Oxford.

Bacon bases his refutation upon Aristotle's doctrine that nothing can be common to the past, the future, and the present. Since the past and the future have no real existence, this seems to Bacon to imply his doctrine that nothing can be asserted univocally, both of an "ens" and a "non-ens". The name Cæsar, when applied to the dead Cæsar, is used equi-