'I start from the universe,' said William.

'I start from the atom,' said Abelard; and, once having started, they necessarily came into collision at some point between the two." In this "Story of My Misfortunes" Abelard gives his own account of the triumphant manner in which he confounded his master, William, but as Henry Adams says, "We should be more credulous than twelfth-century monks, if we believed, on Abelard's word in 1135, that in 1110 he had driven out of the schools the most accomplished dialectician of the age by an objection so familiar that no other dialectician was ever silenced by it--whatever may have been the case with theologians-and so obvious that it could not have troubled a scholar of fifteen.

William stated a selected doctrine as old as Plato; Abelard interposed an objection as old as Aristotle.

Probably Plato and Aristotle had received the question and answer from philosophers ten thousand years older than themselves.

Certainly the whole of philosophy has always been involved in this dispute." So began the battle of the schools with all its more than military strategy and tactics, and in the end it was a drawn battle, in spite of its marvels of intellectual heroism and dialectical sublety.