It was only to be expected that the church accepted the moderate realism of Thomas Aquinas, while Roscelin’s nominalism was condemned already at the Council of Soissons in 1092.

Thus, despite the idealist character of the entire mediaeval philosophy, the confrontation of the lines of Plato and Democritus continued in it, although it was mostly expressed in logical terms. The mediaeval controversy on the nature of universals had a considerable impact on many philosophical doctrines, especially those of such major thinkers of the Modern Times as Hobbes and Locke. Elements of nominalism also occur in Spinoza, while the technique of the nominalist critique of the ontologism of universals was used by Berkeley and Hume in the shaping of the doctrine of subjective idealism. The realist proposition concerning the presence of general concepts in human consciousness later formed the basis of idealist rationalism of Leibniz and Descartes, while the idea of the ontological independence of universals was absorbed by classical German idealism.

Mediaeval philosophy made a significant contribution to further development of epistemology by working out and clarifying all the logically possible versions of the relations between the rational, the empirical, and the “a priori”—the relations which later became not just the theme of scholastic arguments but the basis for natural-scientific and philosophical knowledge.