'One never gets away from this question,' he said.

'From whatever point a discussion starts, it is always led back and attached to that.

It is the madness of Rufus about Naevia; "He thinks of nothing else; talks of nothing else, and if Naevia did not exist, Rufus would be dumb."' ...

"In these scholastic tournaments the two champions started from opposite points:--one from the ultimate substance, God,--the universal, the ideal, the type;--the other from the individual, Socrates, the concrete, the observed fact of experience, the object of sensual perception.

The first champion--William in this instance-- assumed that the universal was a real thing; and for that reason he was called a realist.