ABSTRACT
The twelfth century generated much new thought about cosmogony and this has been excitingly considered in some excellent recent studies, especially those by Peter Dronke in his Fabulaand by Tullio Gregory in Anima mundir. Pitted against this in the Middle Ages was, of course, Aristotle’s theory of abstraction: knowledge enters the human mind through the senses. Peter Abelard lived before many of these problems and issues became extensively known and discussed in the West, unlike Islam. What Abelard knew about the mind he largely gained from the translations and commentaries of Boethius. Abelard agrees with Augustine that men fall foul of temptation which arrives through the bodily senses even when the imagination is hard at work. People are unavoidably in the grip of desires and suggestions; the devil is always at work like a magician. Augustine, of course, throws out all these approaches, and all their derivatives and variants, because none could provide one essential factor: permanence.
