page 351 note 1 It is for this reason that the great tradition in the history of philosophy has waged a persistent war against the various forms of metaphysical nominalism. Nominalism is the construing of reality as brute fact. It is the denial that the particular manifests any universal nature or essence to which it is pledged to conform. Nominalism thus implies that any standards set up to criticize the individual cannot be other than arbitrary and conventional, for it denies any reflective function to reason and holds that all knowledge comes by way of the senses and is about particular facts. Nominalism sees in universals only arbitrary names which may be teleologically convenient, but which do not represent necessities in the nature of things. It regards a definition not as an effort to get at the essential nature of a thing, but merely as a resolution to use a conventional symbol in a certain way. As there are no real necessities in things, reason can make no contact with reality, and since reason has no power of rational insight it is limited to its descriptive function and must content itself with rearranging conventional designations. Nominalism, therefore, looks upon reflective inquiries as illegitimate. For if the particular fact alone has reality, then the ideal has no valid claim on the actual, and as a consequence normative or reflective statements have no basis in reality, and descriptive inquiries alone are a propos. Hence from the standpoint of the great tradition in the history of philosophy the nominalist is the advocatus diaboli if not the devil himself. For only if there are universal natures in addition to particular things, only if there are ideals which form part of the grain of reality, and only if the human cognitive faculty has the capacity for apprehending what is not evident to the senses, in short only if reason has the power of “seeing” the necessary in the particular, can reflective inquiries be admitted as genuine.
