And you, ye stars!* * * *You too once lived—You too moved joyfullyAmong august companionsIn an older world, peopled by Gods,In a mightier order,The radiant, rejoicing, intelligent Sons of Heaven!But now you kindleYour lonely, cold shining lights,Unwilling lingerersIn the heavenly wilderness,For a younger, ignoble world.And renew by necessity,Night after night your courses,* * * * * * *Above a race you know not,Uncaring and undelighted33.
And you, ye stars!* * * *You too once lived—You too moved joyfullyAmong august companionsIn an older world, peopled by Gods,In a mightier order,The radiant, rejoicing, intelligent Sons of Heaven!But now you kindleYour lonely, cold shining lights,Unwilling lingerersIn the heavenly wilderness,For a younger, ignoble world.And renew by necessity,Night after night your courses,* * * * * * *Above a race you know not,Uncaring and undelighted33.
Of the origin of energy we have not solved the riddle, we have given it up; but instead of comingfrom without we know that it comes from within. As Mr Benn puts it, we have extended the atomistic method from “matter” to motion. Harvey’s contemporary, Francis Bacon, sagaciously guessed that heat is an expansive motion of particles; but he regarded heat and cold as two contrary principles. Almost in the same generation the brilliant John Mayow perceived a substance in the air “allied to saltpetre,” which passed in and out of the blood by the way of the lungs or placenta. “Innate heat” then gave way to phlogiston; but it was not till the discovery of oxygen and of the conservation of energy that we attained a theory of energy, and finally got rid of “matter and form,” and of all the thicket of metaphysics, relating thereto; through which in the day of Harvey no mind, however mighty, could have made its way.
In the history of medieval thought we must always bear in mind that in neither of its two periods were theology, logic, metaphysics, psychology, or even physics, fully differentiated; and before the Arabian literature they were not differentiated at all34. Logic, which for us is but a drill, and, like alldrills, a little out of fashion, was for the Middle Ages a means of discovery, nay, the very source of truth; thus every man carried his own busy laboratory within him. The heirs of Porphyry and Boetius had no other method in their possession. The dialectically irresistible was the true (κατάληψις); thus was man to succeed “irrefutabile aperire secretum.” To begin to think before beginning to learn is a hollow business, yet then logic furnished the theorems which experience might illustrate at its leisure; and nature was contemplated under philosophy. The differentiation of psychology began with the translation of theDe anima35, and the recognition of the relation of the percipient; hence, in the second period, Roger Bacon denounced the pretensions of logic, and John Duns, that brilliant backslider, forced them to an absurdity. Again, on the translation of the Metaphysics, theology parted into the studies of the doctrines of God and the soul, which belong to theology proper, and of being, in modes, kinds anduniversals, which belong to metaphysics. Medicine again was a confusion of spheres, as was theology; the care of the soul and the care of the body were the ends of knowledge, and their means contained all knowledge. Thus when we hear that Alcuin ordered the formal teaching of medicine, it was under the name of “Physica”; and not until the Physics of Aristotle came to light did the various branches of natural history become in their turn not only definite studies but also self-sufficient, aside from the art of healing. To this day the healer keeps the name of “physician”; and the subject at Cambridge the name of Physic. It is well to be reminded that although the soldiers of truth must be separated into several regiments, nevertheless for its edification the healing art must draw, directly or indirectly, on all natural science. Robert of Lincoln, Albert of Cologne, and all the Masters of that time studied medicine—that is τὰ φυσικά—as a solid part of knowledge, which in their apprehension was not only a whole but also a manageable whole. Even Francis Bacon did not realise fully the littleness of man in the presence of nature; he hoped that for his harvest man would on a right method—by, let us say, a reformed astrology and a reformed alchemyquickly surprise the secret of her processes: thus Bacon was the last of the Summists. With the differentiation of the several spheres of knowledge, and the perception of the vastness and variety of each, man has ceased to hold not the unity but the simplicity of nature; and he has given up summaries: the theologian rules no longer in metaphysics and psychology; the physician is no longer the only naturalist.
Systems succeed each other but give each other the hand; it takes many a generation to kill a strong theory outright: realism, shaken by Roscellinus and Abélard, and scotched by Hales and Ockham, survived to mislead Harvey; and still it stretches its withered hand over us in the nursery, in the school, and in the great arguments of life36. Malebranchewarned us against our deceptive terminology. “Ils prétendent expliquer, (he says), la nature par leurs idées générales et abstraites, comme si la nature était abstraite.” The methods of the English grammar schools are even now medieval in so far as their teaching begins, as it mostly does still, with abstract propositions.
Mysticism gathered over Germany; in Paris to this day nature is constrained in the artifices of logic and rhetoric; and to this day platonism, chiefly by the influence of the Florentine humanists and perhaps of the Cambridge school of Henry More, has moulded both thought and language in England. John Hunter conceived a “materia vitæ diffusa”; and but yesterday Huxley had to say of Owen’s theory of “spermatic force” that an artillerist might as well attribute the propulsion of a bullet to “trigger force.” We profess Aristotle, and we talk Plato. Even by men of science it is daily forgotten that the only being is the particular. After the Faith then, realism—the belief in principles and kinds having external existence, and in formative essences to be reached by abstract thinking—stood another adversary against natural knowledge.
But, stronger even than realism, was a third adversity—the pride of the human mind. Socrates, although, for ethics and politics, he initiated the inductive method, was disposed to regard physical speculations as but a rational pastime37, and the political and ethical study of man as the only serious engagement of thought. Aristotle took up natural knowledge as an encyclopedist38; he rarely verified his facts and he made no experimental researches39. The medieval church held that “ex puris naturalibus cognoscere” was ameagre and might be a mischievous amusement; and it sought to confine speculations to final causes, that is to the animation of the world by an intelligent Being, as man animates his own instruments: though, as Roger Bacon declared, final causes must have physical means. Even Locke thought nature to be hopelessly complex, and urged that ethics is the proper study of man. The asceticism derived from the East, disdainful of carnal things, brought the dualism of matter and spirit into monstrous eminence; and, in respect of medicine, in a few generations it turned the cleanest people in the world into the most filthy40. Moreover, are we not bound to admit that, as ultimate analysis was dangerous to the synthesis of the Faith, so for unwieldy and unstable societies in which ethical and political habits had not yet become engrained, to descend from transcendental explanations to explanations by lower categories was fraught with some danger to lofty and imposing standards of custom and conduct? Nature is too base, says St Anselm,for us to argue from it to God; we must argue from God to things. Analysis is a disintegrating function; the departure of the scientific enquirer is rather from below upwards: it is not only his bias but also his deliberate method to decline to use the discipline and the conceptions of higher categories until he is satisfied that those of the lower are inadequate. A certain natural process may not be attributed to those of chemistry until those of physics are proved to be inadequate; to another process biological conceptions and methods are denied until those of physics first, and then of chemistry, have been tried and found wanting; psychological conceptions are denied to another until in their turns the physical, the chemical, and the physiological are exhausted41; and so on: and within each category the same economy prevails. Now this scientific economy, perhaps first formulated, or effectively used, by William Ockham, in the phrase “entia non sunt multiplicanda”—known as “Ockham’s rasor”—is what is called now-a-days “materialism”; and there is no doubt that the method, legitimate, nay,imperative, as it is in natural science, may in custom and conduct engender a personal and collective habit of apprehending in lower categories, and even of contentment in them until strong reason be shown to go higher42. A higher order of ideas is put in a lower order of language; the “ὁδος εἰς τὸ κάτω” of Heraclitus. The danger of this attitude lies in loss of effort, of aspiration, and even of imagination; he must stoop on the weary oar who, knowing no anchorage, is ever stemming the drift. Notwithstanding is there in history any lesson sadder than this, that where ideals have been loftiest sin and failure have most abounded? a lesson from which Carlyle learned that “the ideal has always to grow in the real, and often to seek out its bed and board there in a very sorry way.”
Almost to this day then the mechanical arts, presumably concerned rather with the lower categories, have been regarded as base; and the craft even of the laboratory as unworthy of great souls. Anatomy had to labour against antipathy both ecclesiastical and popular; chemistry and mechanics weregross pursuits, unless endowed with the perilous distinctions of alchemy and sorcery. Unfortunately this charge upon the dignity of man was made heavier rather than lighter by Petrarch, and by the later humanists of the Renascence; even in the 17th century we find in Oxford that Boyle was bantered by his friends as one “given up to base and mechanical pursuits.” As Boyle himself put it in his delightful way—“There are many Learned Men ... who are apt to repine when they see any Person capable of succeeding in the Study of solid Philosophy, addicting himself to an Art (Chemistry) they judge so much below a Philosopher, and so unserviceable to him. Nay, there are some that are troubled when they see a Man acquainted with other Learning countenance by his example sooty Empiricks” ... “whose Experiments may indeed be useful to Apothecaries, and perhaps to Physicians, but are useless to a Philosopher that aims at curing no Disease but that of Ignorance.”43
Lord Herbert of Cherbury, who early in the seventeenth century attended lectures at Padua, opined that natural science deals with “ignoble studies, not proportioned to the dignity of our Souls.” In the eighteenth century indeed, grave English physicians, humanists who forgot how Aristotle had exclaimed that marvellousness lies in all natural phenomena, scorned the trivial curiosity of John Hunter respecting flies and tadpoles.
It is part of my argument to-day to point out one evil of many which this prejudice has wrought for medicine. The progress of an applied science dependent as it is upon accessions of advantage from other arts, yet on the whole is from the simple to the complex; from facts of more direct observation to those of longer inference: and this path was the more necessary when the right method of inference—the so-called inductive method—had not been formulated, and indeed was barely in use. Now in medicine, from Homer to Lord Lister, direct observation and the simpler means of experiment have obtained their first-fruits on the surface of the body. In Homeric times surgery was the institution of medicine, and kings concerned themselves with the practice of it. From Erasistratus to Celsus physicians of all schools practised medicine and surgery as one art. Galen urges the unity of medicine, and Littré points out that this unity is maintained in the Hippocratic writings. In the Middle Ages the ascetic contempt for the body—partly Stoic, chiefly oriental,—the barren alliance of medicine with philosophy, and the low esteem of mechanical callings hid from the physician the very gates of the city into which he would enter. Francis Bacon says of the physicians of Harvey’s day, that they saw things from afar off, as if from a high tower; and, again, that after the manner of spiders they spun webs of sophistical speculation from their own bowels. Surgery, by virtue of its imperative methods, was kept clear of philosophy on the one hand and of humanism on the other; and in Paris the establishment of the Collège de St Côme, afterwards the Academy of Surgery, protected the higher surgery against the rabble of barbers. Upon the raft of anatomy and surgery, with some clinical aid from Salerno, positive medicine crossed the gulf between Byzantine compilations, monkish leechcraft, Arab starcraftand alchemy, and the scientific era of Harvey44. But physicians were not only blind to the great services to the whole art of medicine of the surgical school of Lanfranc in the fourteenth century, of Guy de Chauliac in the fifteenth, and of Paré and Gale in the sixteenth century, advances even accelerated in the seventeenth, but they ignored also their very origin, and even withdrew from fellowship with the surgeon; to our grievous harm from those days unto our own45. Surgery was excluded from the Faculty of Medicine of the University ofParis; and from the Royal College of Physicians of England, which was, and is still, enabled by charter to teach surgery, and to grant licenses therein. Fabricius, the master of Harvey, was fortunately as great a surgeon as anatomist, and such was Fallopius. In this College Harvey lectured on anatomy and surgery, and he left his surgical instruments to us; for us Caldwal founded a lectureship in surgery which has been allowed virtually to lapse. From the progress of anatomy which, under the protection of the Italian nobles as formerly of the Alexandrian, went hand in hand with surgery, physicians drew then little advantage; and so in part perhaps it came about that although Vesalius, Fallopius, and Fabricius broke up the traditional anatomy of Mundinus, yet anatomy did more even for the fine arts than for physiology; and medicine at the end of the Middle Ages had not recovered the standard of Alexandria. Against this adversity also had to contend the founder of physiology whom to-day we celebrate.
Such were the chief adversities (vid. Appendix on Astrology) under which the naturalist suffered, but natural knowledge was never stifled; let us now turn our eyes to another point of view, fromthe oppression to the gradual enfranchisement of knowledge.
Necessary for the welding of western society in the Middle Ages as was authority in all spheres of thought and action, and, heavy as the price of its inertia has been since its work was done, yet in the celebration of the founders of natural science it would be untrue to assume that before them, even in the earlier scholastic period, the indomitable spirit of man had lain under tyranny in silence. “Μένει τὸ θεῖον δουλίᾳ περ ἐν φρενί.” The way had been prepared for them. By the Crusades of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries fury and devastation were diverted in part from Europe, and hurled upon Asia; which soon closes up again. The naïve serenity of the Faith was gone, but as its great minsters arose it forgot its dangers; and the social bonds of orthodoxy rudely shaken were renewed. The Schools grew as great as the churches: Naples, Pavia, Bologna and Padua; Paris, Orleans, Bourges, Toulouse, Montpellier, the Sorbonne; Oxford and Cambridge. Even the Friars Preachers and Minors were driven to fight with the new weapons; first rivalling the universities, then possessing themselves of their chairs.But philosophy, which had lent much to the Faith46, gained nothing from it; and to philosophy rather than to the Church the sciences looked for their principles and methods. In physics the experimental method was creeping into life; and the substance as well as the form of old controversies was changing. Thus through all these generations was rising a leaven of free thought, and its reforms may roughly be put in a twofold division, into the reform of tradition, and the reform of method; the reform of texts being again divisible into two periods—the Arabian, or second scholastic, and the modern or Renascence period. The chief monuments of learning were stored in Byzantium47until Western Europe was fit to take care of them. In the peace of Theodoric, in the peace of Charlemagne, under Alfred at Winchester, the arts andsciences had scarcely found breathing-time, and no sure establishment48. Cassiodorus is said to have directed the Benedictines of the sixth century to read Cælius Aurelianus, a Roman adaptor of Soranus of Ephesus; but medical lore consisted of little beyond some relics of the Roman schools, handed on in prose or verse compilations which the teacher read to his class, and explained so far as he could. It seems that medicine was not taught formally until so ordered, in 805, by Charlemagne; probably by the advice of Alcuin, the founder of the learned tradition at Fulda, the founder, we may almost say, of the neo-latin period, and some time headmaster of my own school of St Peter at York. The influence of the School of Salerno, relatively excellent as it was in the domainsof clinical medicine and of public health, never made its way into the general stream of Western culture. Religious wars and persecutions had driven Greek learning eastwards, as in the case of the Nestorians from Antioch to Persia; Hebrew and Syrian sages49translated some classical texts, andfrom these again the Arabs, in their brief and brilliant culture, made translations; for no Arab sage knew Greek. The palace of the Spanish Caliphs in the tenth century was a workshop of translators, and a huge storehouse of books. The learned and ubiquitous Jew carried texts and translations from Bagdad to Morocco, and from Morocco to Toledo, Paris, Oxford and Cologne; but translations made in Bagdad in the ninth century did not reach Paris till the eleventh or twelfth.
Among the earliest of these renderings in the West were works on medicine, mathematics, and astronomy, which in the Schools of Toledo and Cordova, by Constantinus Africanus at Monte Cassino (including certain treatises of Hippocrates and Galen), by Gerard of Cremona (a Salernitanscholar), by Michael the wizard50, and by other hands, were converted into Latin; and, thus doubly disguised, and half buried in glosses which not only overlaid the text (“oscura glossa dov’ é piana la lettera”) but often supplanted it, were received with pathetic eagerness by the ardent scholars of the West. Aristotle, for instance, was now taught in the schools of the West from a Latin translation of a Hebrew translation of an Arab commentary upon an Arab translation of a Syriac translation of the Greek text51. Even in the sixteenth century medicine and anatomy were taught wholly from books; and teachers were forbidden to use other than prescribed books. Students began with the “Articella” of the Venetian physician Gregorio Volpi, a compendium of translations with woodcuts, published in 1491; they advanced to the Aphorisms, the Diet in Acute Diseases and the Prognostics of Hippocrates, overlaid with Syriac, Arabic and Spanish apparatus and glosses; to the Ars Parva of Galen; to the first and fifth Canons of Avicenna, with glosses; to theixth Book of Rhazes, Honein, Aegidius Corboliensis, and perhaps some of the translations of Constantinus Africanus52;—this was the lore that ruled the medical schools even to the birth of Harvey. Disputations among the students were incessant, both “inter se” and “sub cathedrâ”; but it is doubtful whether these did more than sharpen their dialectical wits. Botany, regarded by the galenists as the secret of the divine dispensary, was always more forward; every medical school had its physic garden, professors carried their students abroad to gather herbs, and Herbals, Dispensatoriums and Kräuterbücher were much inadvance of the Bestiaries, mostly after Pliny’s kind, the chief of which, largely an original work, was that of the well-known Conrad Gesner.
Some hundred years before the appearance of the Arabian Aristotle, which marked the second scholastic period, we have seen that the shadow of the Faith and the savagery of the peoples had not quelled such teachers as Roscellinus and Abélard, who fought for rationalism so sturdily as even then to threaten the ascendency of realism and the persuasion of supple and plausible demagogues like Anselm of Laon—that “sterile tree” as Abélard called him,—and actually to determine the first period of the Middle Ages. Happily the Arabian scholastic philosophy took its root in Alexandria when neo-platonism had veered towards Aristotle53, and it was more uniformly peripatetic than the earliest Christian Scholasticism. It is one of the notes of the greatness of Aristotle that, even thus garbled and glossed, his power made itself felt by the mouths of the great Franciscans Alexander Hales, Roger Bacon, and William Ockham. The Organon had been expounded in Paris in 1180, and about the sametime Alexander Neckam cited the Posterior Analytics, the Topics and theDe anima; but Hales was in possession of the whole, or almost the whole, of a more or less corrupt Aristotle, which he turned upon theology.
Roger Bacon was the first of the natural philosophers of the West, and the only eminent forerunner of Harvey and the other pioneers of natural science in the seventeenth century. As erudite as Albert, Bacon was more inventive, freer of spirit, more disposed to scientific method, better aware of the hollowness of authority, better aware that truth can be found only in free reason guided by experiment. Unfortunately as an author he was as dull and ineffectual as Francis Bacon was rich, animated and impressive. That indeed this premature renascence, without scientific methods or sound tradition, should have failed54, that its light was but the phantom of dawn55, is no matter for surprise; yet from this time forward themethods of Cyprian and Athanasius lost their undisputed sway. This earlier renascence made the second period of the Middle Ages: the period distinguished by the Arabian version of Aristotle; by a check to the chimeras of realism; by some liberty of secular knowledge, for even bishops came out of the Mussulman school of Toledo and arrayed themselves in vestments of Arab work decorated with sentences from the Koran; and again by the coming of the friars, the Dominican and Franciscan especially, whose influence upon the thought of the Middle Ages was considerable, and soon rivalled even that of the universities, wherein later, as we have seen, they filled some of the chairs.
The issues of all schemes of thought led indeed as inevitably to natural science, as all ways to Rome. The logic and rhetoric of the learned Dominicans—the watch-dogs (“Domine cani”) of the Lord against the wolves of heresy,—culminating in the systems of Albert and St Thomas, by their rationalism defined, and in defining restricted, the dominion of the Faith. Keen defenders of the Faith recognised this danger, and whimpered even against Albert that “philosophiam profanam in limenSanctæ Theologiæ intromiserit; ... in ipsa sacraria Christi56.” Men got used to reason, and great protestants, such as Robert of Lincoln, had put justiceand honour before ecclesiastical politics57. Then the few Greek texts found their way into the West, and in the thirteenth century Albert and Aquinas possessed themselves of Greco-latin translations of some treatises of Aristotle58. And in the historyof the comparatively unlearned Friars Minors we find, as elsewhere in the history of thought, thatmysticism was less unfavourable to natural science than the passionate dogmatism of Clairvaux, or the dogmatism by ratiocination of St Thomas; the Victorians, as Gerson after them, despised reason rather than feared it; they would not accept the services of philosophy even with its wings clipped.
“Cujus laus est ex ore infantum,Hæc est sapientia”!
“Cujus laus est ex ore infantum,Hæc est sapientia”!
Mysticism makes for individual religion, as with Glisson and Newton, rather than for a Church,as Albert was clear-sighted enough to foresee; if science undermines dogma, mysticism relaxes or neglects it: hence, as clerks only could teach, it may have been that independent thinkers like Hales, Roger Bacon, and Ockham entered the Franciscan order59. Indeed the science of Pietro di Abano(1250-1320), which laid the foundations of medicine at Padua, and inspired the frescoes of the Salla della Ragione, was occult and mystical.
In the thirteenth century then the conflict with the provisional synthesis of the Faith had become imminent and menacing. The faith, the chivalry and the learning of the Saracens led men to feel that without the Church all might not be utter darkness. Albert owed as much to Avicenna—“the Albert of the Orient”—as St Thomas to Averroes; pagan sages technically damnable yet “mighty spirits,” worthy of reverence. Dante put in Hell, but on green meadows in an open place, lofty and luminous,—esteeming himself exalted by the sight of them,—not only Aristotle, Plato and Socrates, but also
“Euclide geometra, e Tolommeo,Ippocrate, Avicenna, e Galieno,Averrois, che il gran comento feo.”Inf.iv.142.
“Euclide geometra, e Tolommeo,Ippocrate, Avicenna, e Galieno,Averrois, che il gran comento feo.”Inf.iv.142.
Universities were founded in France, England, and Italy. Frederick the Second protected the Arabs, and even aped them; Ghibeline indeed almost signified freethinker. From the Roman de Renard, from the candid Joinville, from Boccaccio, we may infer that the very foundations of the Faith were sapped; and therewith, for good or ill, both moral and political bonds were loosened. But the natural Science which made the second renascence irresistible was absent in the first: the consolidation of the European peoples was not compact enough for a rehandling of the conceptions of religion and morals, too incomplete even for the latitude of opinion which, in nations as in individuals, is apt to slacken swift and consentientaction. The toleration and scepticism of the first renascence had causes no deeper than a general enlargement of experience and thought.
To appreciate the influence, covert or overt, of scepticism in the Middle Ages we must clear the meaning of the word. Under the yoke of tribal custom scepticism can hardly arise, there is no place for the half-hearted, as all men feel alike so all think alike: scepticism arises when beliefs are put into formal propositions. Then, as experience and comparison enlarge, we detect scepticism in three forms or degrees: namely, doubt of a particular creed; doubt of all unverified propositions; and doubt of the validity of reason itself, whether in respect of the supernatural only or of all argument. It is remarkable that this last, the most devastating of the forms of scepticism, has come from the ranks of the faithful (Pascal, Hamilton, Mansel), who in resentment of the attacks of reason have turned blindly to rend reason herself. No civil society has been without scepticism; even in ages of most prevalent faith some current of doubt has flowed under the surface. In the Ionian philosophy the place of scepticism was only restricted in so far as many aspects of the subject-matter were not beforethose thinkers; for instance no Greek philosopher would have separated faith from reason. In the well-known words of Hippocrates, “οὐδὲν ἕτερον ἑτέρου θειότερον οὐδὲ ἀνθρωπινώτερον, ἀλλὰ πάντα θεῖα.” “The Greek boldly set up his academy by the side of the temple.” Even Protagoras never taught the futility of all reason, nor even the inconstancy of sensation which indeed is doctrine rather than scepticism. Neo-platonism had its scepticism in the first two forms, covering even the ground of the modern agnostic. Agnosticism does not deny the existence of the ladder, but asserts that the ladder begins and ends in the clouds; it is consistent therefore with ethical and practical activity. When Abélard said “Dubitando enim ad inquisitionem venimus, inquirendo veritatem percipimus,” if a sceptic, he was no infidel. Even in the thirteenth century it was never doubted that truth is attainable, nor indeed that the Faith contained the truth. The scepticism of that age was rather cautious and controversial than faithless, and in practice divine discontent rather than indifference (ἀταραξία). Pyrrhonism on the other hand leads to slackness of ethics; either to the insouciance of Horace and Montaigne, or to the attitude of the seventeenthcentury in Padua (Pomponatius) and elsewhere, when the “economy,” ironic or disingenuous, of allotting their several spheres to reason and dogma, if not first invented, became as fashionable as in the pulpits and in the drawing-rooms of Mayfair. “Comme savant j’ignore tout; comme citoyen je crois tout.” TheHypotyposes Pyrrhoniœof Sextus Empiricus, whose influence in the times of the Renascence was considerable, was not translated till the fourteenth century. The detachment of mind and shrewd wisdom of John of Salisbury foreshadowed Petrarch rather than Hume; and when John discusses what it is given to man to know, asking the frequent question, “Utrum contingat homini scire aliquid?”, we must not fall into the error of importing into his question all it connotes for ourselves. Likewise when James of Douay (inms.De anima, quoted by Hauréau) roundly says, “Id quod recipitur ab aliquo non recipitur secundum naturam rei receptæ sed secundum naturam recipientis ... sicut recipitur ita patitur.... Sensus judicando de sua passione non decipitur” and so on, he knew no more whither this would lead than John Duns knew that his system must lead to that of Spinoza. That guardians of morals andsocial cohesion, from Cato to the Westminster Assembly, and from Samuel Johnson to Cardinal Newman, should have distrusted scepticism even as reserve of judgment, or indeed repelled it with fierceness; that priest, presbyter, magistrate and moralist have tolerated irony, or even license, rather than vigilant and radical criticism of doctrine, is intelligible; and within limits springs from a justifiable apprehension. For the gay and indolent sceptic veers to conformity, especially if he mistrust the competence of reason; while the active sceptic endangers the theory of his society, and of the sanctions upon which all moral conduct temporarily depends. Hence the bitter condemnation of Galileo, “Perish all physical science rather than one article of the Faith be lost.” Happily it is true that during times of transition piety and good conduct survive by virtue of “inertia,” that is by tradition, social pressure, custom and sense of fitness; and it is true that in times of transition, as in our own times, halting thought is quickened for a while by plenitude of emotion, and wealth of æsthetic impressions makes amends for poverty of ideas; yet that morals are based on a theory of life is a truth still deeper and more abiding, and this deepertruth it was the function of the “Ages of Faith” to root in the conscience of mankind. “Abeunt studia in mores.” As contrasted with Pyrrhonism, scepticism in its normal sense, while it declares that the conformity of notions with things in themselves cannot be postulated, for lack of an external standpoint of comparison, and while it declines to be confuted by the “regressus ad infinitum,” for, having repudiated first principles it is prepared to be pushed backwards to remoter and remoter causes, is ready nevertheless to yield to assurance as facts are intercalated into inferences, and as inferences thus stiffened by verification are found to consist with each other and with the general context of experience.
If in the Middle Ages these various attitudes of mind were not fully distinguished, yet scepticism was moving variably towards the demand for verification on which all natural science is based; and the reaction was not long delayed. In the thirteenth century the culture of Omeyad and Abasid caliphs failed; by the end of the century philosophy was denounced and its books were burned; the generous and learned Frederick dashed himself in vain against the Papacy; Clement, the protector ofBacon, was dead, and during the two following centuries, in Spain at any rate, freedom of thought was crushed out by the Church. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the very name of Averroes—of “the mad dog who barked against the Christ,” the “Averroem impium καὶ τρὶς κατάρατον” of Erasmus—began to signify loose life as well as free thought. Of this resentment there had been no trace in Albert or St Thomas; but Imola had begun to wonder why Dante had treated so well Averroes who, if the Great Commentator, was yet the father of infidels. The Dominicans controlled the fine arts, and for them,—at Pisa, at Siena, in the Spanish Chapel,—Orcagna, Gaddi, Spinello Aretino, Simone Memmi abased the Empire, Averroes, and the new learning far more intolerantly than Dante had done; and exalted the Pope, with his handmaids Theology, Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric. In Santa Maria Novella, Memmi represents the triumph of the Dominicans in theology, Gaddi in philosophy; St Thomas and the Dominicans march triumphant over Arius, Sabellius, Averroes, and Savonarola. Thus in the Middle Ages Averroes appeared in two forms—first as the Great Commentator, later as the blasphemer and father ofinfidels of the Campo Santo and of Santa Maria Novella. In the fifteenth century the Council of Constance forbad the laity to teach, under a penalty of forty days’ excommunication. In the sixteenth, in Granada, Ximenes burnt, it is said, 80,000 books of Arab philosophy, as Torquemada did for Hebrew in Seville; medical works, however, such as the Colliget60of Averroes, and his Commentary on Galen, were spared.
With the greater renascence the second period of Scholasticism, and indeed the Middle Ages themselves are closed. With the fall of Constantinople the stream of learning, driven eastwards in the first period of the Middle Ages, set westward again. Exiled grammarians now found their shelter under the protection of the “literate tyrants” of Italy, and with their spoil of manuscripts enriched the libraries of Rome and Venice. The Universities of Bologna and Padua from their foundation became notable for independence of thought; and, on the revival of learning, for their peripateticteaching as opposed to the platonism of Florence, where, however, a spirit of accurate learning was nurtured in the deciphering and verification of texts. The political and commercial ambition of Venice, the Holland of Italy, of which State Padua was the learned quarter, and the inflow of liberal thinkers from other nations, kept her aloof from the fury of the Catholic reaction of the sixteenth century, which ruined Paris; thus in North-east Italy the spirit of modern science awoke sooner than in England or in France, and inquisitive students, both home and foreign, were attracted rather to Padua and to Bologna than, as in earlier times, to Paris.
In so far as Scholasticism may be described as a temporary reconciliation of Aristotle—that is, of natural and secular methods—with the Faith, this end had been attained, if at all, by St Thomas; in St Thomas Scholasticism culminated. But no such artificial truce could abide; and the issue of the chief scholastic controversy was to be determined by one greater than St Thomas. The pilgrim to Ockham, sitting in its church beneath the seven lancets of its twelfth century window, may be solitary also in his memory of one of the greatest of Englishmen,who saw that light six long centuries ago; yet a child rather of our age than of his own. As Abélard had closed the gates upon the neo-platonist tradition of Alexandria, so Ockham closed them against realism in all its forms; and the Church cursed them both. In his own person the occupation of professorial chairs by Franciscans came to an end; Paris and the Thomists could not consistently oppose nominalism; Duns the Northumbrian had inflated realism into a monstrous phantasm, and speculative reason had to submit to the yoke of verification. Yet what could nominalism do for theology, or for clerical schools? The Franciscans for the most part had turned to mysticism, and thenceforth the man of science and the devotee were to work apart. Furthermore, by Ockham philosophy gained a new meaning, or lost all meaning. Before Locke, Voltaire, and Kant, Ockham demonstrated that faculties were not substances; and differentiated logic, psychology, and natural science61.
But if, as I have said, the way for Harvey and the other pioneers of natural knowledge was thus prepared for them, it was still, even in the seventeenth century, dark, rough and perilous. As in all times of transition, still the weight of defunct systems rolled inertly along; and while the new forces seemed to slumber stresses were accumulating. In Oxford and Cambridge the influence of Linacre, and even of Caius62, seems to have been rather humanist than scientific63; in Oxford the text rather than the inspiration of Aristotle prevailed, while in Cambridge the platonist school, of which the charming Henry More was the leader, full of inspiration as it was, soon evaporated into mysticism, or obscurantism. Bacon and Harvey seem to have left Cambridge—for Paris and Padua respectively—as Locke left Oxford64, under some discouragement. Of Paris the great dayswere over; it was in Padua that medicine, long degraded or disguised, was now to prove her lineage as the mother of natural science, and the truth of the saying of Hippocrates that to know the nature of man one must know the nature of all things. But on Harvey’s arrival, Padua, which had become the first school of Medicine in Europe, as was Bologna of Imperial Law65, was settling down upon the lees of the once noble school of Averroes: a discipline which, by its original strength, by its freedom of thought, and by the ascendency of its professors, had withstood in the thirteenth century the direct condemnationof the brilliant fourth Lateran Council; and in the sixteenth the thunders of Trent. Padua adopted Averroism, in the fourteenth century, because of its medical contents; in the two following centuries this system was emptied of heart and life, but pattered and mumbled by pretentious pedants in North-east Italy it prevailed till the seventeenth, when after a reign of three centuries it was succeeded by the Cartesian. Of its phases in the sixteenth century Patrizzi said, “Ingens ab his philosophorum numerus ac successio manavit quæ in Aven Rois hypothesibus habitavit.... Inde dubitationum ac quæstionum sexcentorum milium numerus manavit” (Disc. Peripat. Vol. I. Venet. 1571; quoted by Renan, Averroès). The name of Averroes, “perfectus et gloriosissimus physicus, veritatis amicus et defensor intrepidus,” became the shibboleth of philosophers who held the different nature of the heavenly bodies against the “moderns” who alleged the identity of matter in sky and earth, and the doctrine of the universal against the individual soul.
Yet, in spite of Petrarch’s gibes, Averroism in its spring had nursed Padua with the milk of natural science. Even in its decay—for all teaching of philosophy, as a separate study, must decay—thetriumph of the Faith was premature; like Jansenism, the School of Averroes, effete as it became, held the ground for a more dangerous invasion, for Leonardo, Telesio, Bruno, Gilbert, Sarpi, Campanella, Galileo, and Harvey; for the pioneers of truth, not as consistency with tradition, not as an alchemical search for real essences, nor indeed as wisdom only; but as the verification of premises. This fuse Paracelsus fixed to the shell which burst upon the Faith, upon Scholasticism, upon Galenism, and even upon humanism, “So Christus spricht ‘Perscrutamini scripturas’; warum soll ich nicht sagen ‘Perscrutamini naturas rerum’?” TheCredo ut intelligamof Augustine and Anselm of Canterbury; theIntelligo ut credamof Aquinas belonged to the past; and men began to cry “c’est Dieu qui nous veut hérétiques.” A criticism based upon a larger sense of the relativity of knowledge, and, in the sixteenth century, a new scepticism66, which pierced even into the Vatican, as to the very possibility of knowledge of the nature of being, were preparing the way for new conceptions: but in ethics meanwhile men were falling either into the carelessness of the scoffer or into the anti-nomianism of the mystic. The brilliant futilities of the medieval dialectic had led to weariness of spirit. After vain and vexatious jugglings with the dry tissues of unchastened ratiocination, simplicity and even ignorance brought their solace.
As from Florence humanism invaded English letters, so the Averroistic physician of Padua became known, even in Chaucer’s day, as a man of secular rather than of Scriptural learning. In Padua, while Galileo was teaching Euclid for a pittance, chairs of Averroistic philosophy were filled by highly paid professors, whose “rotuli” or portfolios, many of which now rest in the dust of the libraries of North Italy, were handed down from one to another in deadly routine. Virtually, however, the Averroistic tradition ended with a contemporary Paduan professor, Cremonini, lifted into fame by Harvey’s refutation in theDe motu cordis, and by his own repudiation of the satellites of Jupiter, bodies for which Aristotle had made no provision. The coarseness and pedantry of the Averroistic freethinkers, whose scepticism lacked the elegance and sprightliness of the French, and their bastard language—mongrel of Greek and Arabic—revolted the humanists also: “Nihilindoctius, nihil insulsius, frigidius.” “Unum te obsecro,” Petrarch had said two hundred years before (in his invectives against doctors, whom he classed with astrologers, as afterwards indeed did Harvey more or less), “ut ab omni consilio mearum rerum tui isti Arabes arceantur atque exsulent.” “De medicis non modo nil sperandum sed valde etiam metuendum67.” The doctors in their turn did not hide their disdain for poets. Whether justly or unjustly, the Doctors of Medicine were classed with astrologers and alchemists; the latter of whom Harvey repudiated frankly, not altogether avoiding a contempt for chemistry itself. Clad in fine raiment, with rings on their fingers and golden spurs on their heels, they rode tall horses, and gave themselves pompous airs. The humanist would rather pose as a believer than as an underbred infidel; the Averroist protected the license of his doctrines and manners by subterfuge and ironic evasion: and humanist and Averroist alike stood by at the burning of Bruno68.
It must not be supposed, however, that these pompous pedants had it all their own way, and that Medicine was not better justified of her children. It is full of interest for our present purpose to read in the preface by Thomas Junta to the Edition of Averroes (1552), “Plerique omnes juniores medici jam intolerabile in Arabum Mauritaniorumque dogmata odium conceperunt, ut ne nominandi citandive locus relinquatur; principes etiam Hippocratem atque Galenum habere nos prædicant.” This enlightenment seems to have come about in some part through the teaching of Thomæus Nicolaus Leonicus69, who began to lecture, for the first time, from the Greek text of Aristotle (there were chairs thenceforth for both the Arabian and the Greek Aristotle) in 1497.
It was with Galileo however that scientific research began in Padua, at any rate for professors; and Galileo may be venerated as the first modern naturalist to set the experimental method conceptually, coherently, and thoroughly before himself, including the deductive side of it. In the Harveian Oration of 1892, Dr Bridges reminded us that Galileo conceived of motion and energy as calculable quantities, and drew our attention to those most interesting experiments wherein Galileo applied the pendulum to measure the rate and rhythm of the pulse. Roger Bacon had dwelt upon experiment, but scarcely upon methodical verification thereby. The chemistry of Albert of Cologne was but a return of the curiosity of Geber of Cordova (in the ninth century). Even Francis Bacon saw the method less clearly than Galileo had done; and, as the last of the schoolmen and encyclopedists, he made a place for it rather in literature and philosophy: he ignored, as the scientific Descartes welcomed, the cardinal discoveries of Copernicus and of Harvey70.But if Galileo discovered the experimental method as a method, before Galileo the method was in use. Leonardo had laid down the rule of investigation of nature by experiment, and the aphorism that nature never deceives us; unfortunately his manuscripts were not published. In the first half of the fifteenth century Nicholas of Cusa weighed plants at definite stages of their growth in known weights of earth; and he weighed the moisture of the air. His contemporary Leon Battista Alberti of Genoa had done likewise. But above all the scientific forerunners of Galileo and Harvey stands William Gilbert, Fellow of St John’s College, Doctor of Medicine of Cambridge, Censor and President of this College, Physician to Queen Elizabeth, and Founder of the science of Magnetism.
The century dating from the birth of Galileo to the death of Harvey was perhaps the most brilliant in the history of modern knowledge. The discovery of Greek texts had destroyed the conventional Aristotle, the conventional Hippocrates and Galen; since the latter part of the sixteenth century Greekhad been taught in the High Schools, philosophy was born again, and men found themselves no longer the slaves but the kin of the great ancients. Telesius, Bruno, Campanella vindicated natural science and liberty of thought. Galileo taught in Padua for twenty years, including the time when Harvey graduated there; Torricelli was a pupil of the great Florentine; in 1582, on the theory of Copernicus, Gregory reformed the Calendar, and thus laid the axe to the root of astrology; by Newton terrestrial physics were established in the celestial spheres71. Malpighi, who was to fulfil Harvey’s discovery and foresight, was born in N.-E. Italy in the very year (1628) in which theDe motu cordiswas published. In 1626 Boyle was creating chemistry. Anatomy, which had slept since its days in Alexandria, was fully awake. The Society of the Lincei was virtually founded in 1603; the Royal Society72in 1645; the Academy of France in 1656. Clinical teaching, initiated in Salerno and advanced by theConsiliamedica73, was formally established in Padua74, to be pursued in Heidelberg, Leyden, and Vienna. Thus was the study “De rerum natura juxta propria principia” unfolded, and the “Civitas Dei” gave place to the “Regnum Hominis.”
The “Regnum Hominis”! Yet when I look, from a respectful distance, upon the folios of the schoolmen, monuments, I am told, as empty as the Pyramids of Egypt, my mind turns back to thefiery and turbulent tribes which in the “deep but dazzling darkness” of the Middle Ages raged upon a barren land before the nations began; and I wonder if the ideas which awed them, swayed them, and welded them into stable societies were fancies as wild and sterile; and if the men who wrought them were mere traffickers in words. And then I wonder if we are glad that the riddle of the origin and issues of being, which tormented their eager hearts, is not solved, but proved insoluble: if we are glad that “sub specie hominis” the earth, no longer the nursery of eternal souls, is but a meteor in the sky; men and women but the gleam upon it; the sons of Heaven but companies of whirling stones, and the Father of Heaven an inaccessible idea.
The scholastic philosophies became inhuman only in their decrepitude. In the equal eye of history, the Middle Ages teach us that the slow and painful travail of natural science is not to be regarded as the belated labour of light in the womb of darkness, nor as a mere stifling of the growth of the human mind by tyranny and oppression, nor indeed as the arming of moral forces against brute forces, but as the condition of timein the making of societies on a necessarily provisional theory of life. They teach us that conduct in state and morals depends upon a theory of life; that although habits and even standards of ethics may abide for a time after the theory on which they were built is sapped, it is but for a time; that if the social discipline and fruition are to be renewed and enlarged it must be upon a new synthesis, as laborious and ardent as the former, and more true. Meanwhile the business of a nation, whether in war or peace, is first to be quick and strong in action, to be rational afterwards; and swiftness and strength come of union of wills and singleness of heart rather than of wisdom. Even within its borders freedom of opinion must awaken slowly; the nation strong enough to suffer irresolutions in its outward policy has yet to appear. Hence it is that we find in ruling classes, and in social circles which put on aristocratical fashions, that ideas, and especially scientific ideas, are held in sincere aversion and in simulated contempt.
The Greek was no heathen, suckled by nature and endowed only with her instincts; he sought in his mind to improve nature: but in the Renascence instincts were set as free as thought. In thispassionate and adventurous time to preach the destruction of the animal instincts, or to crush them for the higher life, was a noble idea, but an impossible hope; the animal impulses are to be trained, not suppressed, and for this the help of science was to come. Yet science was to be not the hated rival but a necessary ally of religion. It is not within the province of science to answer the medieval searchings on the nature of being, nevertheless this threshold problem—“der Drudenfuss auf der Schwelle”—faces us still; and the world, so far as we have seen of it, has always demanded a provisional answer. To-day Professor James Ward offers it again in “Supreme Intelligence”; and Principal Caird (“Fundamental Christianity”) yearns for the knowledge of infinite being almost in the words of Plato himself:—“If,” he cries, “underneath all the phenomena of the world in which we live we can discern no principle of reason and order, no absolute intelligence and love, then indeed” this world is a “meaningless waste.”
Gilbert Galileo and Harvey, Maxwell Hertz and Darwin have taught men not that the speculations of the schoolmen were over-bold, for they busied themselves with no speculations bolder ormore transcendental than are our modern theories on matter, on inertia, on the ether, or on the origin of life, but that metaphysics by “intercalation of facts” shall become physics, that, in the words of Descartes, concepts, if “μετὰ τὰ φυσικά,” “talia sint tantum ut omnibus naturae phænomenis accurate respondeant,” and that notions great and small shall be subjected to strict verification, so far as such tests can be carried; not that men shall deny themselves the rapture of touching that various instrument they find within themselves, but that they shall endure the drudgery of learning to play it in harmony with the orchestra of nature; not that they shall desist from imagining, but that before proclaiming hypotheses they shall be compelled to the humble task of making an infinite number of little piles of facts. The art of experiment can grow only with the growth of science itself; instruments of precision are not provided till men feel the need of them. The experimental verification of concepts is no mere alternative path, no mere renunciation, but a new birth; a birth into a dull and vexatious discipline for the impatient Hegelian, whether of the thirteenth or of the twentieth century, who believes that, as mind is the product of evolution, and so the sumand store of nature, “in dem Gedanken selbst das Wahre ist zu suchen75.”