Spanish and English America down even to our own time and in doing so
points out that our advances which have for the time being put us so
far ahead of the Spanish Americans are mostly the gains of the age of
steam and are due to the fact that it was hard for their mixed
population with so many barbarous elements {498} in them to keep up
with our comparatively homogeneous population, homogeneous at least in
the sense of coming from the same strata and civilization in Europe.
While our Indians have been almost entirely obliterated there are more
Indians alive in Mexico and in South America to-day than there were
when Columbus landed. With this fact in mind Professor Bourne's
comparison and contrast takes on renewed interest and his apology for
the Spanish Americans is all the more telling.
"If we compare Spanish America with the United States a hundred
years ago we must recognize that while in the North there was a
sounder body politic, a purer social life and a more general
dissemination of elementary education, yet in Spanish America there
were both vastly greater wealth and greater poverty, _more imposing
monuments of civilization, such as public buildings, institutions of
learning and hospitals, more populous and richer cities, a higher
attainment in certain branches of science_. No one can read
Humboldt's account of the City of Mexico and its establishments for
the promotion of science and the fine arts without realizing that
whatever may be the superiorities of the United States over Mexico
in these respects, they have been mostly the gains of the age of
steam."
If one reads Champlain's account of the City of Mexico as he saw it at
the very beginning of the seventeenth century, as I have quoted it in
the chapter "America in Columbus' Century," in "The Century of
Columbus" (_Catholic Summer School Press. New York, 1914_), it will be
quite clear that Humboldt was only seeing the natural development of
culture and artistic progress that was already in evidence in the
early sixteenth century.
"During the first half-century," Bourne continues, "after the
application of steam to transportation Mexico weltered in domestic
turmoils arising out of the crash of the old regime. If the rule of
Spain could have lasted half a century longer, being progressively
as it was during the reign of Charles III; if a succession of such
viceroys as Revilla Gigedo, in Mexico, and De Croix and De Taboaday
Lemos, in Peru, could have borne sway in America until railroads
could have been built, intercolonial intercourse ramified, a
distinctly Spanish-American federal State might possibly have been
created, capable of self-defence against Europe, and inviting
cooperation rather than aggression from the neighbor in the North."
If the effort to understand Spanish America now so manifest will only
go to the extent of having our people realize the full truth that
until the nineteenth century English America was far behind Spanish
America in facilities for higher education, in culture and literature,
in the application of the arts to municipal life and, above {499} all,
in interest in science, then the prevalent impression that the Popes
and the Catholic Church are opposed to genuine progress and true
science will disappear. Catholic America was far ahead of Protestant
America in scientific education and research until the untimely break
from Spain left the Spanish-American countries the prey of political
disturbances.
{500}
APPENDIX IX.
THE DANGER OF A LITTLE KNOWLEDGE.
_Professor Draper's "The History of the Conflict between Religion
and Science."_
What I have tried to emphasize in this volume is that the arguments
advanced to show the opposition of the Catholic Church to science are
founded on actual ignorance of the history of science or
misunderstandings of particular incidents of that history. Not only
was there no policy of opposition to science, but on the contrary
encouragement of interest in scientific subjects, patronage of
scientific workers and even definite endowment of scientific research
by the ecclesiastical authorities. The tradition of Church opposition
to science is founded especially on lack of knowledge of what was done
for science in the medieval period and a misunderstanding of the
medieval universities. This tradition owed its origin partly to the
Renaissance, which, having rediscovered Greek, despised whatever
Western Europe had accomplished during the preceding centuries and
spoke of all that was done as Gothic, as if only worthy of barbarous
Gothic ancestors.
Another large factor, however, in the creation of this tradition and
one which meant more for us here in America than the Renaissance, was
the religious revolt of the sixteenth century in Germany which has
been called the Reformation. The reformers made it a point to
minimize, if not actually to misrepresent, what had been accomplished
under the old Church regime, and this Protestant tradition lived on
here in America with much more vitality even than in Europe.
The consequence was the bringing up of a series of generations, who,
if not actually believing as so many absurdly did, that the Pope of
Rome was the Scarlet Woman and the Church the Babylon of the
Apocalypse, were quite sure at least that no good could possibly have
come out of the Nazareth of pre-Reformation times. It is only in
recent years that we have come to recognize that all the talk about
the Dark Ages is, as John Fiske said, simply due to ignorance of the
time and its accomplishment. The later medieval period might well be
called the "Bright Ages" for its art and architecture, its magnificent
literature, its interest in education and {501} in scholarship, its
development of democracy and its formulation of the great laws and
constitutions by which the rights of men were guaranteed in
practically every country in Europe. Just as soon as this true state
of affairs with regard to the medieval period is recognized, then all
question of any policy of Church opposition to education and science
disappears.
I have illustrated the lack of knowledge of the true history of
science as the basis of the arguments for the thesis of Church
opposition to science in the present volume by impugning what
President White advances as facts. It can be illustrated still better,
however, from another book written twenty years before President
White's, even a little consideration of which shows how the whole
status of the arguments with regard to the relations of Church and
science has changed during a single generation. Our growing knowledge
of history has literally taken away all the ground on which the older
controversialists used to stand. This is the "History of the Conflict
Between Religion and Science" by Professor John W. Draper, which was
issued in 1874, just forty years ago, and already in 1875 had entered
its third edition, so that the book sold almost as a popular novel at
that time and evidently attracted wide attention. The volume was
accorded the privilege of publication in the International Scientific
Series, and as this set is among the recognized serious books of the
time, some of them classics in science and most of them representing
important contributions to knowledge, no wonder most readers never
thought of doubting its authority or above all questioning its
"facts."
Some of Dr. Draper's work made him deservedly one of the best-known
biological scientists of the United States in his time. He had had a
very striking career. As a medical student at the University of
Pennsylvania he reported in his thesis for the doctorate in medicine,
which had become at this time usually such a commonplace statement of
conventional science that it was shortly after given up as a
requirement, a series of observations on absorption through membranes,
using bubbles for his experimental work, that attracted the special
commendation of the faculty and the attention of the scientific world.
He was not yet thirty years of age when he made the first photograph
of a human being--that of his sister--ever made and in 1840
successfully secured the first photographs of the moon. During the
next ten years he made a series of observations on the spectrum which
attracted deserved attention and anticipated not a little of
Kirchoff's work. Melloni, himself a distinguished Italian physicist,
reported these observations {502} to the academy of Naples. Draper's
text-book of physiology was without doubt the best medical text-book
issued in America up to that time and deservedly held its place for
many years in our medical schools.
It was no wonder then that Draper received many distinctions in the
shape of membership in foreign scientific societies, honorable
mentions, and prizes. His works were translated into many of the
European languages. Late in life he gave up his experimental and
scientific work to devote himself to the writing of history. His
history of the Civil War was widely read both in Europe and America.
His "History of the Intellectual Development of Europe," which only a
little reading now in the light of recent knowledge of the Middle Ages
shows us to be a caricature of the philosophy of history, was
translated into several foreign languages and was probably more widely
read than any serious work by an American author up to that time. What
was very rare for an American book at that period it was read by a
great many European teachers and students. All this gave added
distinction to his writing on the subject of the relations of science
and religion, and so it is easy to understand that he was considered
by many to have made an almost final summary of this important
controversy.
Professor Draper's book then became a sort of bible, that is a book of
books, for a great many American teachers of science and, above all,
for the younger generation of university lecturers who were to have
the shaping of opinions among the students of scientific departments
of our colleges and universities during the last quarter of the
nineteenth century. It does not seem too much to assume that most of
the maturer scientists who are now teaching in the university
scientific departments of this country, read Professor Draper's book
and were led by it to an almost unshakeable conviction that religion
and, above all, the Catholic Church, fearful lest science should take
men away from her influence, had been constantly opposed to all true
scientific progress, and what was more unpardonable, that religion as
represented by the Church had been for the same reason a bitter enemy
of any and every social progress that might lead to the real
development of mankind. For them under Draper's inspiration it seemed
that the deliberate Church policy was that if men were not happy here
they would look with all the more eagerness to happiness hereafter and
take all the means offered by the Church to secure it. That such a
conclusion impugned the motives of millions of men whom their own
generation had thoroughly respected and yielded to the most {503}
dangerous of human ideas, suspicion, made no difference. No good could
come out of the Nazareth of the Catholic Church.
It is quite certain that a great many of the younger teachers of
science of that time who are still alive, even when not entirely
conscious of the source of their opinions as to the relations of
science and religion and the Church and education, have at the back of
their minds certain prejudices, founded on the influence produced on
them during their plastic, formative state of mind by the reading of
Professor Draper's book. Indeed, so firm is the feeling in many of
these men, that this whole subject is settled for them beyond the
possibility of any modification, that they have insulated their minds
from any further currents of information.
Controversy is distasteful at best; to find out that one has been
cherishing a mistaken notion for years, is always disturbing as one
grows older, and so it is not surprising that many of these men
frequently use expressions with regard to the supposed relations of
Church and science that are quite incompatible with what is now very
generally known of the history of science. Their minds are made up,
and they simply refuse to bring for a second time any of these
subjects before the bar of judgment. Besides, though they would resent
any such imputation as to their own state of mind, they have the
feeling that people with religious convictions are prone to see only
one side, and, therefore, anything that may be said on the other side
is only a bit of special pleading for a conviction that no reasoning
and no argument would change. They argue, as a consequence, that it
would be quite useless for them to read the other side with any
reasonable hope of getting at the real facts. This attitude of
scientists is very different from the open-mindedness that is supposed
to be characteristic of the devotees of science; but it is very human.
Now the interesting fact with regard to Professor Draper's books is
that Professor Draper, a scientist, did not know the history of
science at all. He was entirely ignorant of the great advances that
were even then being made, with regard to our knowledge of the growth
of science during the medieval period. He thought that there was very
little, indeed practically no science, during that period. Looking
about for a reason, he made the Church a scapegoat. The publication
during the past generation of many German volumes on the history of
the different sciences--and these German students went straight to the
original documents--has shown us that there were magnificent
developments of science during the medieval and early Renaissance
periods, when the Church was in control of the educational
institutions and of every phase of {504} academic work. The story of
the opposition between religion and science falls to the ground at
once when these facts are known. Some of them were already in process
of publication even in Draper's time, but he knew nothing of them. He
was so sure that there was nothing to know in this matter, that he
probably did not bother his head very much about trying to get the
latest results of scholarship in the matter.
Professor Draper's summary of the relations of the Church to science
or learning, and his declaration of her absolute refusal to recognize
anything as scholarship, except what was deduced from the Scriptures,
shows how far a man can go in his assumption of knowledge when he
knows literally nothing about a subject. For him the Dark Ages knew
nothing because he knows nothing about them. If they knew anything, he
would know it, but he does not. Of one or two men he knows something,
but they are exceptions to the general rule of absolute negation of
intellectual interests and developments. Draper said: [Footnote 64]
[Footnote 64: Page 250.]
"In the annals of Christianity, the most ill-omened day is that in
which she separated herself from science. She compelled Origen, at
that time (A.D. 231) its chief representative and supporter in the
Church, to abandon his charge in Alexandria, and retire to Caesarea.
In vain through many subsequent centuries did her leading men spend
themselves in--as the phrase then went--drawing forth the internal
juice and marrow of the Scriptures for the explaining of things.
Universal history from the third to the sixteenth century shows with
what result. The Dark Ages owe their darkness to this fatal policy.
Here and there, it is true, there were great men, such as Frederick
II and Alphonso X, who, standing at a very elevated and general
point of view, had detected the value of learning to civilization,
and, in the midst of the dreary prospect that ecclesiasticism had
created around them, had recognized that science alone can improve
the social condition of man."
Of course the man who wrote that either knew nothing at all about a
whole series of triumphs of human intelligence, or else he
deliberately put them out of his mind. One wonders if he had ever even
heard of Dante, of whom more has been written than of any man who ever
lived. Those triumphs of art, architecture, the arts and crafts,
engineering, construction work of the highest genius, the Gothic
cathedrals and the great public buildings, town halls, hospitals,
university buildings, would surely have appeared to him as
representing magnificent intellectual--and social--accomplishments,
had he appreciated anything of their real significance or allowed
himself for a moment to get out of the narrow circle of {505}
interests in which he was unfortunately placed. Our architecture in
his time was cheap; our art absent; our crafts lacked development; our
civic and university architecture of the quarter century before he
wrote was literally a disgrace, and of course Professor Draper could
not be expected to appreciate the achievements of the Middle Ages in
those departments in which his own generation lacked so much.
It is especially striking to take a paragraph of Professor Draper's,
in which he sums up a whole movement, and place beside it a paragraph
of a serious and informed student of the same subject. Professor
Draper inherited the old traditions of lazy monks, living in idleness,
a drain on the country, of absolutely no benefit to themselves or to
others. Professor Draper wrote: [Footnote 65]
[Footnote 65: Page 267.]
"While thus the higher clergy secured every political appointment
worth having, and abbots vied with counts, in the herds of slaves
they possessed--some, it is said, owned not fewer than twenty
thousand--begging friars pervaded society in all directions, picking
up a share of what still remained to the poor. There was a vast body
of non-producers, living in idleness and owning a foreign
allegiance, who were subsisting on the fruits of the toil of the
laborers. It could not be otherwise than that small farms should be
unceasingly merged into the larger estates; that the poor should
steadily become poorer; that society far from improving, should
exhibit a continually increasing demoralization."
As a commentary on this, read the following paragraph from Mr. Ralph
Adams Cram's book on "The Ruined Abbeys of Great Britain," in which he
describes what the monasteries actually did for the people. Mr. Cram
has made a special study of the subject in connection with the
magnificent architecture which these medieval monks developed, and
which he would like to have our people appreciate and emulate.
Professor Draper is much more positive, but Mr. Cram is much more
convincing. [Footnote 66]
[Footnote 66: _The Ruined Abbeys of Great Britain_. New York: The
Churchman Co., 1905, p. 458.]
"At the height of monastic glory the religious houses were actually
the chief centres of industry and civilization, and around them grew
up the eager villages, many of which now exist, even though their
impulse and original inspiration have long since departed. Of
course, the possessions of the abbey reached far away from the walls
in every direction, including many farms even at a great distance,
for the abbeys were then the great landowners, and beneficent
landlords they were as well; even in their last days, for we have
many records of the cruelty and hardships that came to {506} the
tenants the moment the stolen lands came into the hands of laymen."
Or, almost better still, read the following paragraph from an address
at the summer meeting of the State Board of Agriculture of
Massachusetts, delivered by Dr. Henry Goodell, the President of the
Massachusetts Agricultural College, on the general subject of the
influence of the monks in agriculture:
"Agriculture was sunk to a low ebb at the decadence of the Roman
Empire. Marshes covered once fertile fields, and the men who should
have tilled the land spurned the plow as degrading. The monks left
their cells and their prayers to dig ditches and plow fields. The
effort was magical. Men once more turned back to a noble but
despised industry, and peace and plenty supplanted war and poverty.
So well recognized were the blessings they brought, that an old
German proverb among the peasants runs, 'It is good to live under
the crozier.' They ennobled manual labor, which, in a degenerate
Roman world, had been performed exclusively by slaves, and among the
barbarians by women. For the monks it is no exaggeration to say that
the cultivation of the soil was like an immense alms spread over a
whole country. The abbots and superiors set the example, and
stripping off their sacerdotal robes, toiled as common laborers.
Like the good parson whom Chaucer portrays in the prologue to the
"Canterbury Tales":
"'This noble ensample unto his scheep he gaf
That first he wroughte and after that he taughte.'
"When a Papal messenger came in haste to consult the Abbot Equutius
on important matters of the Church, he was not to be found anywhere,
but was finally discovered in the valley cutting hay. Under such
guidance and such example the monks upheld and taught everywhere the
dignity of labor, first, by consecrating to agriculture the energy
and intelligent activity of freemen often of high birth, and clothed
with the double authority of the priesthood and of hereditary
nobility, and, second, by associating under the Benedictine habit
sons of kings, princes, and nobles with the rudest labors of
peasants and serfs."
President Goodell has told the story of how the monks cleared
and reclaimed the land, transformed fens into forests, marshes
into gardens, and swamps into beautiful domains. As he says:
"A swamp was of no value. It was a source of pestilence. But it was
just the place for a monastery because it made life especially hard,
and so the monks carried in earth and stone and made a foundation,
and built their convent, and then set to work to dyke and drain and
fill up the swamp, till they had turned it into fertile plow land
and the pestilence had ceased."
{507}
President Goodell did not hesitate to proclaim that the monasteries
were the early representatives of our agricultural colleges. They
taught the peasantry of the surrounding country how best to grow their
crops and what to grow. Because of their wide affiliations they were
enabled to secure seeds of various kinds, and stock for breeding
purposes, and so were able to teach the people what was best for
particular neighborhoods, and not only show them how to raise it, but
actually supply them with the necessary initial materials. It became a
proverb that the monks and their people were the best farmers. When we
ourselves were ignorant of scientific farming, we did not appreciate
what the monks had done for agriculture. Now that our soil is becoming
exhausted by unscientific and wasteful farming, the foundation of
agricultural colleges leads the men who have studied the subject to
appreciate what the monks really accomplished. Professor Draper not
only cannot find anything good to say of the monks, but he can
scarcely find anything bitter enough to say of them. On the other hand
President Goodell, who has studied the situation from his point of
view very carefully, can scarcely find words strong enough to praise
them. He concluded his address as follows:
"My friends, I have outlined to you in briefest manner to-day the
work of these grand old monks during the period of 1500 years. They
saved agriculture when no one else would save it, they practised it
under a new life and new conditions when no one else dared undertake
it. They advanced it along every line of theory and practice, and
when they perished they left a void which generations have not
filled."
In the light of these few quotations even it is easy to see that
Professor Draper's book is really quite an amazing work to have come
from the hand of a man widely read, acknowledged as an authority in
certain subjects by his contemporaries and, above all, because the
author seems to have thought that he had quite exhausted his subject.
Here, for instance, is a portion of the paragraph in which he
summarizes the beginnings of science in modern Europe (page 298).