_April 19. 1830._
It is a small thing that the patient knows of his own state; yet some
things he _does_ know better than his physician.
* * * * *
I never had, and never could feel, any horror at death, simply as death.
* * * * *
Good and bad men are each less so than they seem.
_April 30. 1830._
NOMINALISTS AND REALISTS.--BRITISH SCHOOLMEN.--SPINOSA.
The result of my system will be, to show, that, so far from the world being
a goddess in petticoats, it is rather the Devil in a strait waistcoat.
* * * * *
The controversy of the Nominalists and Realists was one of the greatest and
most important that ever occupied the human mind. They were both right, and
both wrong. They each maintained opposite poles of the same truth; which
truth neither of them saw, for want of a higher premiss. Duns Scotus was
the head of the Realists; Ockham,[1] his own disciple, of the Nominalists.
Ockham, though certainly very prolix, is a most extraordinary writer.
[Footnote 1:
John Duns Scotus was born in 1274, at Dunstone in the parish of Emildune,
near Alnwick. He was a fellow of Merton College, and Professor of Divinity
at Oxford.
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