In a previous chapter, describing the genesis of the Dominican school of mysticism, I did not lay sufficient stress on the extent to which it met a crying general need. This popularized religious philosophy, this “scholastic of the heart”, would have shown little vitality in the convents, and certainly would not have spread as it did among the people at large, if there had not been a deep and wide craving for something more living than the current theology. Moreover, the same craving was strong among the learned classes also. Nominalism was triumphant in the schools of the later Middle Ages. The moderate realism of the Dominican Aquinas [1250] was attacked on both sides by his Franciscan successors. Duns Scotus [1280] fell into extreme realism, and William of Ockham [1320] into decided nominalism. Ockham's nominalism, in spite of repeated condemnation by Popes, was triumphant in his lifetime and for the rest of the Middle Ages: on the whole, it is more in the tenor of modern philosophy. But any decidedly nominalistic philosophy has always a materialistic tendency. “From the point of view of the modern non-metaphysical man of Science Ockham represents perfection of common-sense: ‘Ockham's Philosophy is that of centuries later.’ On nearly every purely logical or psychological question Ockham gives an answer which, right or wrong, might still be maintained in almost the same terms by a modern philosopher.”