Now, Richard Weaver tells us that the real sea-change came with William of Occam and the even earlier age of the birth of nominalism:
The powers of darkness were working, subtly, as always, and they couched this proposition in the seemingly innocent form of attack upon universals. The defeat of logical realism in the great medieval debate was the crucial event in the history of Western culture; from this flowed those acts which issue now in modern decadence.&&&&&&&
Fot this reason I turn to William of Occam as the best representative of the change which came over man's conception of reality at this historic juncture. It was William of Occam who propounded the fateful doctrine of nominalism, which denies that universals have a real existance. His triumph tended to leave universal terms mere names serving our convenience. The issue ultimately involved is whether there is a source of truth higher than, and independent of, man; and the answer to the question is decisive doe one's view of nature and detiny of humankind. The practical result of nominalist philosophy is to banish the reality which is percieved by the intellect and to posit as reality that which is percieved by the senses. With this change in that affirmation of what is real, the whole orientation of culture takes a turn, and we are on the road to modern empiricism.
It is easy to be blind to the significance of a change because it is remote in time and abstract in character. Those who have not discovered that world view is the moat important thing about a man, as about the men composing a culture, should consider the train of circumstnces which have with perfect logic proceeded from this. The denial of universals carries with it the denial of everything transcending experience. The denial of everything transcending experience means inevitably -- though ways are found to hedge on this --the denial of truth. With the denial of objective truth there is no escape from the relitavism of "man the measure of all things".
.........
Thus began the "abomination of desolation" appearing today as a feeling of alienation from all fixed truth.
&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
[Three more pages of profound logical analysis, by Weaver is followed with>>>>]
There is no term proper to descibe the condition in which he is now left unless it be "abysmality." He is in the deep and dark abysm, and he has nothing whith which to raise himself. His life is practice without theory. As problems crowd upon him, he deepens confusion by meeting them with ad hoc policies. Secretly he hungers for truth but consoles himself with the thought that life should be experimental. He sees his institutions crumbling and rationalizes with talk of emancipation. Wars have to be fought, seemingly with increased frequency; therefore he revives the old ideals--ideals which his present assumptions actually render meaningless-- and, by the machinery of state, forces them again to do service. He struggles with the paradox that total immersion in matter unfits him to deal with the problems of matter.
His decline can be represented as a long series of abdications. He found less and less ground for authority at the same time he thought he was setting himself up as the center of authority in the universe; indeed, there seems to exist here a dialectic process which takes away his power in proportion as he demonstrates the his independence entitles him to power.
This story is eleoquently reflected in changes that have come over education. The shift from the truth of the intellect to the facts of experience followed hard upon the meeting witht he witches. A lttle sign appears, "a cloud no bigger than a man's hand," in a change that came over the study of logic in the fourteenth century--the century of Occam. Logic became grammaticized, passing from a science which taught men vere loqui to one which taught recte loqui or from an ontological division by categories to a study of signification, with the inevitable focus on historical meaningns. Here begins the assualt upon definition; if words no longer correspond to objective realities, it seems no great wrong to take liberties with words. From this point on, faith in language as a means of arriving at truth weakens, until our own age, filled with an acute sense of doubt, looks for a new remedy in the science of semantics.