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SCIENCE AND MEDIEVAL THOUGHT.
* * * * *
London: C. J. CLAY AND SONS,
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS WAREHOUSE,
AVE MARIA LANE.
Glasgow: 50, WELLINGTON STREET.
Leipzig: F. A. BROCKHAUS.
New York: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Bombay: E. SEYMOUR HALE.
* * * * *
SCIENCE AND MEDIEVAL THOUGHT
The Harveian Oration Delivered Before
the Royal College of Physicians,
October 18, 1900,
by
THOMAS CLIFFORD ALLBUTT, M.A., M.D. Cantab.
Fellow of the College,
Hon. Ll.D. Glasgow, Hon. M.D. Dubl., Hon. D.Sc. Vict.,
Hon. F.R.C.P. Dubl., F.R.S.
Regius Professor of Physic in the University of Cambridge;
Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge;
Consulting Physician to the Leeds General Infirmary;
Physician to the Addenbrooke's Hospital, Cambridge.
London
C. J. Clay and Sons
Cambridge University Press Warehouse
Ave Maria Lane
1901
[All Rights reserved.]
"Duo enim sunt modi cognoscendi, scilicet per argumentum et
experimentum. Argumentum concludit, et facit nos concludere
quæstionem, sed non certificat, neque removet dubitationem, ut
quiescat animus in intuitu veritatis, nisi eam inveniat via
experientiæ." ROGER BACON, _Op. Majus_, Venet. 1750, p. 336.
TO
SIR WILLIAM SELBY CHURCH, BART., M.D.
PRESIDENT OF THE ROYAL COLLEGE OF PHYSICIANS OF LONDON,
THIS ORATION,
DELIVERED AT HIS REQUEST,
IS DEDICATED.
ERRATUM.
p. 78, note 1, l. 19; _for_ "were in orders, for the most part in holy
orders;" _read_ "were generally speaking in holy orders;"
PREFACE.
In the Middle Ages the old world had passed, and the vision of a new
world came near to the eager and passionate hearts of many peoples.
Lincoln and Wells, Amiens and Chartres, Florence and Assisi tell us of
the glory of that vision; and bear witness of its flight: for with
Gilbert, Galileo, Harvey and Newton the Middle Ages themselves became a
phantom, and again the spirit of a new world appeared. Thus in the
phases of time the world dies and is born again; fulfilling greater
destinies. But the new are born in the cold bed of the elder worlds, and
the young life is chilled, or a lustier offspring turns unnaturally to
curse the dead; so in their decrepitude lay the Middle Ages upon modern
life; and the Middle Ages were accursed, until certain pious men sought
to reanimate their vestments and their formulas, and to set the hands
back on the dial of the centuries; as manyminded man seeks wistfully to
reanimate the simple wonders and beliefs of his childhood. Their
ministry was no more than pious; the method of modern history wins the
fruits of the past while casting away the shadow of its withered
branches. This comparative method, first applied to the art and romance
of the Middle Ages, so that every dilettante may now discourse to us of
their evolution, has been applied also to the thought of the period; but
its results, laid up in the closets of a few scholars, are as yet
unfamiliar. It may then become one, who in no sense a scholar has
strayed into these secret places, to try to distribute some lessons of
the medieval thought which, to many of us, seems as sere and outworn as
did the relics of Gothic shrines to our great-grandfathers. For, as in
those medieval generations which lay nearest us the furnace had cooled,
impatiently we had thrown metal and dross aside, and let our contempt
for the dryness and pedantry of its latter days prevent our vision of
the earlier time when the passion for knowledge bore up the world, and
sought even to contain it. That dogma is not eternal is manifest to
every wanderer in the streets of Toledo, yet the historian may well
recall us to the study of a time when, by mystical or intellectual
inspirations, men strove eagerly to know the meaning of life, its
origins, and its issues; and may lead us to the discovery of the seeds
and wells of its fertility. The Greeks prophesied that before man can
determine his place and service in this world he must form some theory
of the world as a whole; the ages of faith prophesied that great deeds
must be born of great faith and of great conceptions.
To those who live only in the past, or only in the present, there seems
in the discriminations of the comparative historian to be a certain
cold-bloodedness. Are not the ears of this critic, so aloof from the
murmuring of creed and controversy, are they not deaf to the voices of
the spirit which he would interpret to us? A distinguished bishop who
was among my hearers, with the fervour and gentle humour so well known
in him, rallied me not for celebrating science but for putting religion
to rout. Yet in our own day surely the argument is changed, not in form
only but in very nature; so changed by the conceptions of evolution,
which have entered the mind of churchman and layman alike, that not a
few speculative beliefs are changing sides without the knowledge of the
disputants; and he who thinks himself a defender of the faith may have
joined the revolt. But if we no longer carry the colours of the troops
of the past we shall collect our lessons from its strategies; and for
one of these lessons a prelate of the King will give thanks with me,
that his supremacy has palsied the arm of the inquisitor to strengthen
that of the apostle.
* * * * *
An unsystematic reader of a subject finds it out of his power to make
due acknowledgment of the help and advantage derived from expert
authors. Much of the matter had seeded itself insensibly in his brain in
the course of general reading and conversation; much of it again had
been obtained more carefully from sources now forgotten. To the
following authors I know I am profoundly indebted, as I am to many
others to whose names and works I can now give no reference:
Hauréau, La Philosophie Scolastique, Ed. 1872;
Jowett, Dialogues of Plato (vol. III. p. 523);
Jourdain (Amable), Recherches critiques, Paris 1848;
Jourdain (Charles), Excursions historiques, Paris 1888 (and the
Philosophie de St Thomas of the same author);
Ampère, Histoire litt. de la France avant le XIIme siècle;
Brucker's Historia Critica Philosophiæ (English Ed., 1791);
Renan, Averroès, Paris 1866; the Philosophie périp. apud Syros;
and the Peuples Sémitiques dans l'histoire de la civilisation, of
the same author;
Roger Bacon, Westminster Review, 1864, two Articles (by Thomas
Marshall, M.A. Oxon.);
Schmidt, Essai sur les Mystiques du XIVme siècle;
Benn, A. W., The Greek Philosophers, London 1882 (and many helpful
essays in periodical literature);
Zeller, Die Philosophie der Griechen, 1881;
Krische, A. B., Theologische Lehre d. Griechischen Denker,
Göttingen 1840;
Ueberweg, Grundriss d. Gesch. d. Phil. des Alterthums, Berlin
1867; Gerlach und Traumüller, Gesch. d. physik.
Experimentierkunst, Leipzig 1899;
Rashdall's History of Universities;
Haeser, Geschichte der Medicin, Jena 1875-82;
Baas, J. H., Gesch. d. Medicin, Stuttgart 1876;
_Idem_, Die geschichtliche Entwicklung des ärztlichen Standes,
Berlin 1896;
Charles Daremberg (all his works);
Rousselot, Études sur la philosophie dans le Moyen Age, 1840;
Pattison, Casaubon, 1875;
Meunier, Francis, Essai sur la vie et les ouvrages de Nicole
Oresme, Paris 1857.
Descartes, Epist. Cartes. 4to. Amst., 1668;
Plumpius, Fundamenta Med. Fol. Lovan., 1652;
Sylvii Op. Omn., 1679, p. 875;
Haller, Elem. Physiol., 1757, I. 3;
Tiedemann, Physiologie de l'homme, Paris 1831, I. 41;
Delle Chiaja, Instituzione di Anatom. e Fis. Comp., 1832, I. 13.
(The six last works are cited as being especially useful, among
many others, to show the extent to which modern physiology, from
Harvey onwards, is based upon vivisection; and that it could not
have arisen or thriven otherwise. It was by the test of many
vivisections that Plumpius was led to the honourable withdrawal of
his opposition to Harvey.)
INTRODUCTION[1].
In the many Harveian Orations which have been delivered since the death
of the founder of modern physiology the direct aspects of his honour and
of his work have been exhausted; of late years the orators have
concerned themselves with indirect aspects. Some of my friends have said
to me that they lack a perspective view of Harvey and his work; that
even highly educated men have little sense of his relation to medieval
thought, or of the evolution of medieval into modern thought. Of the
several stars of the constellation--of Copernicus, Gilbert, Galileo,
Harvey--they had some knowledge; but how came Harvey to be at Padua? how
did science spring up in North Italy? did science arise out of the womb
of medicine, or contrariwise? why did natural science not flourish in
the thirteenth century, and was it not a great misfortune for Europe
that it did not then flourish? what were the systems of thought which in
the Middle Ages preceded, encouraged or thwarted the travail of the
human mind, and what of good or ill do we owe to them? These and such
questions it seemed not unfitting that a Harveian Orator of this latter
day should consider. Now on the philosophy of the Middle Ages, and on
its relation to the era of positive science of which Harvey was perhaps
the chief pioneer, there lay in a drawer in my cabinet the confused and
occasional notes of many years. An interest in this thorny subject, sown
in my mind at first by accident, and reawakened by these enquiring
friends, had for me the charms of an old fancy, and I trust some brief
essay thereon may have a temporary service; if, that is, I can touch the
imagination of my hearers, and after some broken fashion bring before
them a vision of the nations swayed hither and thither upon the face of
Europe by a thirst for knowledge of a kind different, both in its
methods and in its aims, from our own.
This oration cannot have the merit of an original study. Had I the
equipment I have not the leisure to carry my investigations to the
sources. Yet I may have attained to some maturity of judgment herein by
long occupation of my mind since, in 1863, my old friend Mr Thomas
Marshall of Leeds, sometime of St John's College, Oxford, interested me
in the life and work of Roger Bacon, the only eminent forerunner of the
great naturalists of the seventeenth century.
The art of the Middle Ages and the social and political history of the
time have fascinated modern Europe; for medieval thought, though its
phrases survive in their mouths, few persons have shown any care: yet to
these conflicts we owe what we are. No great battles of mankind have
been fought in vain; none of its great captains has deserved oblivion.
Yet we shrug our shoulders at their uncouth or outlandish names; we
assume that from their chairs there issued naught but rhetoric,
casuistries and fallacies, and that their multitudinous disciples were
silly moths.
Each period of human achievement has its phases of spring, culmination,
and decline; and it is in its decline that the leafless tree comes to
judgment. In the unloveliness of decay the Middle Ages are as other ages
have been, as our own will be: but in those ages there was more than one
outburst of life; more than once the enthusiasm of the youth of the West
went out to explore the ways of the realm of ideas; and, if we believe
ourselves at last to have found the only thoroughfare, we owe this
knowledge to those who before us travelled the uncharted seas. If we
have inherited a great commerce and dominion of science it is because
their argosies had been on the ocean, and their camels on the desert.
"Discipulus est prioris posterior dies"; man cannot know all at once;
knowledge must be built up by laborious generations. In all times, as in
our own, the advance of knowledge is very largely by elimination and
negation; we ascertain what is not true, and we weed it out. To perceive
and to respect the limits of the knowable we must have sought to
transgress them. We can build our bridge over the chasm of ignorance
with stored material in which the thirteenth century was poor indeed, we
can fix our bearings where then was no foundation; yet man may be well
engaged when he knows not the ends of his work; and the schoolmen in
digging for treasure cultivated the field of knowledge, even for Galileo
and Harvey, for Newton and Darwin. Their many errors came not of
indolence, for they were passionate; not of hatred of light, for they
were eager for the light; not of fickleness, for they wrought with
unparalleled devotion; nor indeed of ignorance of particular things, for
they knew many things: they erred because they did not know, and they
could not know, the conditions of the problems which, as they emerged
from the cauldron of war and from the wreck of letters and science, they
were nevertheless bound to attack, if civil societies worthy of the name
were to be constructed. How slow in gestation is the mother of truth we
may see by comparing the schoolmen of the second medieval period with
those of the first; in the enlargement of their view, the better
furniture of their minds, and the deeper meaning of their distinctions:
and when we compare with these later schoolmen the naturalists of the
seventeenth century, we find not new acquirements only but also a new
direction of the pursuit of truth.
It seems hardly comprehensible that great and stable societies have been
built up on transcendental schemes of thought, upon conceptions poised
as it were in the air. Without a system of morals no civil society
could exist; yet if mankind must have waited for civil polity until some
such system were built up from below, of scientifically tested
materials, social constructions would have been virtually impossible. In
morals, as in the arts, the art precedes the science; the intuitions of
genius imagine social schemes of provisional validity, and new and lofty
standards of fitness. But a social fabric thus born of a vision can bear
no rough handling; and even the solid builders who would make a more
permanent foundation upon positive conceptions, while seeking more or
less deliberately to underpin the fabric, may, and often do, shake it to
ruin.
Hence in all guardians of morals the dread of meddling with the reigning
vision of truth; hence its sanctity, that no man shall try the stuff of
which it is made. And the dangers of heresies from within are more
fearful than those of alien attacks; social cohesion, the end of it all,
is thereby more exposed to disintegration. Yet nevertheless, as the
generations of men change, and as knowledge increases, men see from new
points of view; and thus while for some the reigning vision retains its
apparent solidity, for others its rays are broken or dissolved. Even
John Henry Newman was compelled to teach the relativity of truth, and
that a doctrine of development must be accepted. For every provisional
synthesis then the time must come when the apparition of truth can no
longer command united allegiance, and criterions begin to encroach upon
sanctions. Broader and more stable foundations have, it is true, been
rising almost insensibly, yet it may be long ere the superstructure rise
into the heavenly light; in the lower work many will see no beauty and
no hope, others will see safety in its enlargement and solidity. By
these indeed the visions of the imagination are apt to be forgotten, or
in the pressure of intellectual verification even despised; the mean
level of conception may not indeed be lower, it may haply be higher, yet
the highest, wherein truth may be revealed by illumination, is not
divined in its full force, abundance and life. Great seers are wont to
leave to others to find out, or even to care, what bottom they stood
upon; yet only through transitory periods of a humbler duty than theirs
can the bases be laid and enlarged for times of richer fruition. One of
the profoundest of modern sayings was that of Freeman--that the end of
modern material progress is to bring large societies up to the level of
small ones.
This is the day of a great celebration; that on this anniversary I am
worthy to take a place in the succession of your Orators is more than I
dare to believe, that you have deemed me worthy is my encouragement. In
private duty also I am bound to honour one of the greatest of the sons
of the University of Cambridge, and the greatest member of the ancient
and honourable house of Gonville and Caius College.
In some respects I am ill equipped for my office; of the history of the
practice of Medicine from the time of Galen to the time of Harvey I am
almost ignorant, I fear wilfully ignorant. Well indeed may we turn our
eyes away from those centuries wherein one of the chief callings of man
fell into unexampled and even odious degradation; yet I trust that in me
this ignorance and this aversion may be compensated by some familiarity
with the history of thought in the Middle Ages, a familiarity acquired
during thirty-six years of abiding interest, and occasional study.
The discovery of the circulation of the blood by William Harvey is
commonly regarded among scientific discoveries as pre-eminent if not
unique. I can quote but two opinions on this matter, both taken beyond
our own land. In France, Dr Daremberg exclaims "Voici Harvey! Comme au
jour de la création le chaos se débrouille, la lumière se sépare des
ténèbres!" In Germany, Dr Baas says that Harvey stands alone in respect
of the world of life; that his discovery of the inner working of the
microcosm takes a place equal to, if not indeed higher than, those of
Copernicus, Kepler and Newton in respect of the macrocosm. It will be
my endeavour to show that these judgments are historically justifiable.
To put the discovery of the systemic circulation of the blood in its
true light, we must have some notion of the history of philosophy,
science and medicine. Medicine, and herein it is in contrast with
Theology and Law, had its sources almost wholly in the Greeks. Not only
in the doctrine of the four elements of Empedocles, a doctrine which has
survived almost to our own day[2], and in the physical theories of
Heraclitus and Leucippus, did medicine, for good or ill, first find a
scheme of thought, but in the schools of Hippocrates and of Alexandria
it was based also, and far more soundly, upon natural history and
anatomy. The noble figure of Galen, the first experimental physiologist
and the last of the great Greek physicians, portrayed for us by Dr Payne
in the Harveian Oration of 1896, stood eminent upon the brow of the
abyss when, as if by some convulsion of nature, medicine was overwhelmed
for fifteen centuries. To the philosophy of medicine, Galen had given
more than enough; to its natural history he had contributed in the
following of Hippocrates; to its discoveries he had given the greatest
of all means of research, individual genius; to its methods he had
given, but in vain, that indispensable method, practised first perhaps
in history by Archimedes and the Alexandrians, of verification by
experiment; a method, after Galen, virtually lost till the time of
Gilbert, of Galileo and of Harvey.
In the growth of human societies small civilisations, however exquisite,
have been sacrificed to the formation of vaster and vaster congregations
of men; thus only, it would seem, is an equilibrium to be reached of
sufficient stability for the highest ends of mankind. Greece, beautiful
as was her bloom, penetrating as was her spirit, perhaps because of her
very freedom of thought, never became a nation; her city states were too
wilful to combine. The Macedonian power broadened the foundation of
polity eastward and westward; and this work was carried as far perhaps
as sword and fasces could carry it by the power of Rome. But even the
Roman peace, bought as it was at the cost of learning and the arts, was
but a mechanical peace; in the wilder, more turbulent and more
heterogeneous peoples of the later Empire the bodies but not the wills
of men were in subjugation. The great system of Roman Law, which Numa,
the Moses of Rome, had invested with supernatural awe, had become but an
external rule; even in Rome herself, poorer in people, poorer in
commerce, poorer than ever in ideas, the sanction of patriotism was
failing, and her citizens were held together for the most part by their
baser and more dangerous passions[3]. For Eastern Europe the University
of Constantinople established a compact and uniform system of thought,
subtle prolix and acquisitive rather than original or profound; but in
the West, under the Frank and later Northern devastations, the very
traditions of learning and obedience were broken up; schools were
closed, and even the art of writing was almost lost. Then it was that
the cohesion and development of Western Europe were saved by a new and
a wonderful thing. From the East, the home of religions, had spread,
like an exhalation, Christianity, that religion which proves by its
survival that it is the fittest sanction for the will of man. This
religion, entering as a new spirit into the ancient fabric of Roman
Empire, was to hold men's service in heart and soul as well as in body;
yet to this end no mere mystic or personal religion could suffice:
clothing itself with the political and ritual pride and even with the
mythology of the pagan Empire it inspired a new adoration; but it
imposed also upon Europe a catholic and elaborated creed. To preserve
the authority of the common faith not only must every knee be bowed, not
only must every heart be touched, but to build and to repair its fabric
every mind must also bring its service. How the scheme of the Faith was
built up, how oriental ecstasy and hellenistic subtlety, possessing
themselves of the machinery of Roman pomp, were wrought to this end, we
may briefly consider.
As, politically, under Diocletian and Constantine the ancient world gave
place to the new, so in the third century philosophy was born again in
neo-platonism[4], the offspring of the coition of East and West in
Alexandria, where all religions and all philosophies met together. The
world and the flesh were crucified that by the spirit, man might enter
into God[5]. Pure in its ethical mood, neo-platonism, says Harnack, led
surely to intellectual bankruptcy; the irruption of the barbarians was
not altogether the cause of the eclipse of natural knowledge: to
transcendental intuition the wisdom of the world had become foolishness.
Yet even then, as again and again, came the genius of Aristotle to save
the human mind. The death of Hypatia was the death of the School of
Alexandria, but in Athens neo-platonism survived and grew. Proclus,
ascetic as he was, was versed also in Aristotle; and he compelled the
Eastern mysteries into categories: so that on the closure of the School
of Athens by Justinian (A.D. 529) a formal philosophy was bequeathed to
the Faith; the first scholastic period was fashioned, and the objects
and methods of enquiry were determined for thirty generations. From
Aristotle Europe adopted logic first, and then metaphysics, yet both in
method and in purpose Origen and Augustine were platonists; rationalised
dogma lived upon dialectic, and conflicted with mysticism; but logic,
dogma and mysticism alike disdained experience.
Thus, no mere external sanction, stood the Faith; threefold: from the
past it brought its pompous ritual, it appealed by its subtle dogmatic
scheme to the intellects, and by its devotion to the hearts of men.
Through the mirage of it, when its substance had waned, Copernicus,
Galileo, and Harvey had to steer by the compass of the experimental
method. This was their chief adversity, and of other adversities I have
to speak.
The visitor to the Dominican Church of St Catherine at Pisa will see on
its walls St Thomas of Aquino with the Holy Scriptures in his hand;
prostrate beneath him is Averroes with his Great Commentary, but beside
him Plato bearing the Timæus. It was the fortune of the Faith that, of
all the treatises of Plato, the Timæus, the most fantastic and the least
scientific, should have been set apart to instruct the medieval world;
that the cosmical scheme of the Timæus, apparelled in the Latin of
Chalcidius,--for there were then no Greek texts in the libraries of the
West,--should for some 500 years have occupied that theoretical activity
which Aristotle regarded as the highest good of man[6]. Again, those
works of. Aristotle which might have made for natural knowledge fell out
of men's hands[7], while in them, as Abélard tells us of himself, lay
the Categories, the Interpretation, and the Introduction of Porphyry to
the Categories, all in the Latin of Boetius[8]; treatises which made for
peripatetic nominalism, but whereby men were versed rather in logic and
rhetoric than in natural science. Thus Plato's chimera of the human
microcosm, a reflection of his theory of the macrocosm, stood beside the
Faith as the second great adversary of physiology.
The influence of authority, by which Europe was to be welded together,
governed all human ideas. As in theology was the authority of the Faith,
so in the science and medicine of the first period of the Middle Ages
was that of the neo-platonic doctrines, and, in the second period, of
the Arabian versions of Galen and of Aristotle; furthermore in this
rigid discipline metallic doctrine almost necessarily overbore life and
freedom. It is not easy for us to realise a time when intellectual
progress--which involves the successive abandonment of provisional
syntheses--was unconceived; when truths were regarded as stationary;
when reasons were not tested but counted and balanced; when even the
later Averroists found final answers either in Aristotle or in Galen[9].
Thus in the irony of things it came to pass that Harvey was withstood by
the dogma of Galen who, in his own day, had passionately appealed from
dogma to nature.
Porphyry of Tyre, who lived in the 3rd century, may be called the
founder of both Arabian and Christian scholastics. He was an
Alexandrian, but of peripatetic rather than platonic opinions. In the
Isagoge, or Introduction to the Categories, already mentioned as
translated by Boetius about 500 A.D., he set forth plainly a problem
which during the Middle Ages rent Western Europe asunder; a problem
which, says John of Salisbury[10], engaged more of the time and
passions of men than for the house of Cæsar to conquer and govern the
world; one indeed which even in our day and country is not wholly
resolved.
The controversy lay between the Realists[11] and the Nominalists; and
the issues of it, in the eleventh century,--at which time the "Dark
Ages" passed into the earlier of the two periods of the Middle
Ages,--were formulated on the realist side by William of Champeaux,
while the Breton Rousselin, or Roscellinus, had the perilous honour of
defining them on behalf of the nominalists[12]. To see the depth of the
difference we must step back a little, to a time when metaphysics and
psychology were not distinguished from other spheres of science[13], and
all research had for its object the nature of being. Plato himself held
ideas not as mere abstractions but in some degree as creative powers;
and we shall see how potent this function became in the thought of the
Middle Ages when, in the ardour of research into the nature of being,
the modes of individuating principles were distinguished or contrasted
with an ingenuity incomprehensible to Plato or Aristotle, or at any rate
undesired by these greater thinkers. Aristotle avoided the question
whether form or matter individuate; he held that there is no form and no
matter extrinsic to the individual. But by the medieval realist every
particular, every thing, was regarded as after some fashion the product
of universal matter and individual form. Now "form" might be regarded,
and severally was regarded, as a shaping, determinative force or
principle, pattern type or mould, having real existence apart from
stuff, or, on the other hand, as an abstract principle or pattern having
no existence but as a conception of the mind of the observer. The
realists roundly asserted that form is as actual as matter, and that
things arise by their participation--without whiteness no white thing,
without humanity no man; and not individuals only: for the realist,
out-platonising Plato, genera and species also had their forms, either
pre-existent ("universalia ante rem"), or continuously evolved in the
several acts of creation ("universalia in re"). Indeed for the extreme
realist every "predicamental modality" was "aliquid ens separatum"; for
instance, the soul, the active intellect, the passive intellect, and so
on: conversely, by fusing idea with will, for other philosophers realism
would get pushed back into efficient reason or divine will, and almost
vanish[14]. By this latter route the Sorbonne, originally opposed to the
Thomists, became nominalist after all; as did those once pious realists
the Augustinians and Cistercians. Setting aside then the extreme
nominalists, who would have dissolved thought by declaring all creatures
to be so individual as to be incomparable,--"pulverising existence into
detached particulars," as some one has put it--and that names of kinds
are mere nouns, or indeed mere air ("flatus vocis"), the prevalent
nominalists were content to deny to ideas, forms, principles, or
abstractions any other existence than as functions of the human
mind--as subjective conceptions. For Ockham, says Hauréau, an idea was
but a modality of the thinking subject. Abstractions then for these
thinkers were but mental machinery for analysis of the concrete.
Aristotle was as obscure and inconsistent in his language herein, and
often elsewhere, as he was profound and scrupulous; but when his works
came to be studied as a whole, and in the original tongue, the influence
of his method, rather than the close consistency of his language, told
against realism: virtually he was a conceptualist, and he found reality,
where Plato denied it, in the particular object of sense[15].
Even Francis Bacon, who was deeply indebted to Aristotle, never
extricated himself from the tangle of form, cause and law[16].
Now this was a great argument, no empty dispute; the bones of dead
controversies cumber the ground, but no controversy was empty which
moved profoundly the minds and passions of men: both for ecclesiastical
and secular thought the dispute was grave. While realism was essential
to the Church--for instance, on realist grounds St Anselm defended the
medieval doctrine of the Trinity against Roscellinus; the Church herself
claimed a real existence apart from the wills of successive generations
of individual and variable men; she taught that Man had fallen
not only in many or all individual cases, but as a kind having a
real existence[17], and again that in the Mass there is change of
hypostasis[18]--while then realism was essential to the Faith,
yet if forms pre-exist ("ante rem") then the acts of God must be
predetermined--"fatis" non "avolsa voluntas"; or if forms are only "in
re" God must be form, living in each and every act and thing, which is
Pantheism ("materia omnium Deus"): an impersonal conception and a
dissolution of dogma which the Church must and did abhor. "Pessimus
error"--there is the abyss, cried Albert, avoiding it by dialectical
juggles. Erigena, the brilliant prophet and protestant[19] of the first
period of the scholastic philosophy, was virtually a pantheist after
the pattern of Parmenides[20]; as Spinoza was the last great realist.
David of Dinan again was such a pantheist, though luckily for him the
Church did not find it out till he was dead; and he was martyred only in
his bones. Indeed the great Robert of Lincoln barely escaped the
accusation of pantheism under the wing of Augustine. The heresies of
David, and of Amaury, caused the reaction of the first years of the 13th
century against Aristotle. Amaury seems indeed to have cleared out
Christian dogma pretty thoroughly, and to have preached the coming of
science as the "third age" of the world. Many of his followers were sent
to the stake; by the Synod of Paris (1209) the works of Aristotle were
proscribed, and many copies of them burned. This proscription was
virtually withdrawn by Gregory the Ninth in 1231; and Hales, Albert and
St Thomas devoted themselves again to the study of Aristotle, and
established his supremacy[21]. Indispensable then as realism was for
the Church, its creed, and its sacraments, yet therein it found itself
in a dilemma between the conceptions of a Creator working under
conditions, and of a spirit immanent in matter; and when theological
philosophy culminated in St Thomas, and was fixed by him as it now rules
in Rome, this difficulty was rather concealed in his system than
resolved[22]. Every scheme of thought must make some declaration on the
nature and place of universals; the problem was no hair splitting[23],
it dealt with the very nature and origin of being; it agitated the minds
of thinking men at a time of the most fervid and widespread enthusiasm
for knowledge which the Western world has ever known,--at a time when
Oxford counted its students by thousands, and when in Paris a throng
athirst for knowledge would stretch from the cloisters of the Mathurins
to the faubourg of St Denis[24]; and, in respect of our theme of this
day, we shall see that even Harvey was embarrassed by certain aspects of
it.
For, to resume, closely allied to the argument concerning universals was
that concerning "form and matter." Whether the terms used were "form and
matter," force or energy or "pneuma" and matter, "soul or life" and
"body," "determinative essence and determinate subsistence," "male
principle and female element," "archæus and body," the potter and the
clay of the potter; or whether again they were "type and individual,"
"cause and effect," "law and nature," "becoming and being," or even the
"thought and extension" of Descartes, the riddle lay in the contrast of
the static and dynamic aspects of things; in the incessant formation of
variable and transitory individuals in the eternal ocean of
existence[25].
"Spiritus intus alit, totamque infusa per artus
Mens agitat molem, et magno se corpore miscet."
For early thinkers, untrained in the methods and unaware of the limits
of thought, even for the great and free thinkers of Greece, a
captivating analogy was irresistible[26]; while inventing schemes of
thought they believed themselves to be describing the processes of
nature. Moreover it has been the temptation of philosophers of all
times, and even of Harvey himself than whom none had put better the
conditions of scientific method, to suppose that by means of abstraction
kinds may be apprehended; that thus they may get nearer to the inmost
core of things; that by purging away the characters of individuals they
may detect the essence and cause of individuation ([Greek: spermatikos
logos]): not perceiving indeed that the content of notions is, as
Abélard had pointed out plainly, in inverse proportion to their
universality. Like Sidney's hooded dove, the blinder they were the
higher they strove[27]. For example: from a lump of silver a medal is
struck; from many lumps of silver many medals are struck, each different
from the other: let us eliminate as accidents the notions of silver, of
the blow of a hammer, even of particular features of the devices, and we
shall reach the idea of an agent with a type or seal, or of such an
agent with many seals, or ideas, who may thus individualise indifferent
matter; or, to penetrate deeper into abstraction, who may transfer forms
of his own activity to motionless stuff. It is my part to-day to show
that before motionless stuff--before the problem of the "primum
mobile"--even Harvey himself stood helpless; helpless yet fascinated by
the indulgence of invention when, in the _De motu cordis_, or the _De
generatione_, he permitted himself to carry contemplation beyond the
sphere of his admirable experiments. "Natural, vital and animal spirits"
indeed he would have none of; saying well that he should want as many
spirits as functions, and that to introduce such agents as artificers of
tissues is to go beyond experience: yet in his need of a motor for his
machine he was not able to divest himself of the language nor even of
the philosophy of his day; he referred the cause of the motion of the
blood, and therefore of the heart, to innate heat[28]. In his day he
could not but regard rest and motion as different things; and motion as
a super-added quality. In denying the older opinion[29] that the heart
is the source of motion, of perfection[30] and of heat, he put the
difficulty but one stage back; and, when in the treatise on Generation
he propounded his transcendental notion of the impregnation of the
female by the conception of a "general immaterial idea," we find in him
realism still very much alive indeed. Had Harvey been content with
innate heat he would have done well enough; but the innate heat of the
blood, as he explains it, is not fire nor derived from fire; nor is the
blood occupied by a spirit, but is a spirit: it is also "celestial in
nature, the soul, that which answers to the essence of the stars ... is
something analogous to heaven, the instrument of heaven."
In denying that a spirit descends and stows itself in the body, as "an
extraneous inmate," Harvey advances beyond Cremoninus, who then taught
in the chair of Averroistic philosophy in Padua; for, says Harvey, I
cannot discover this spirit with my senses, nor any seat of it. In
another passage indeed Harvey warns us "not to derive from the stars
what is in truth produced at home"; in yet another he tells us that
philosophers produce principles as indifferent poets thrust gods upon
the stage, to unravel plots and to bring about catastrophes: yet he
concludes that "the spirit in the blood acting superiorly to the powers
of the elements, ... the soul in this spirit and blood, is identical
with the essence of the stars."
Thus the riddle which oppressed these great thinkers, from the Ionians
to Lavoisier, was in part the nature of the "impetum faciens[31]"--of
the Bildungstrieb. What makes the ball to roll? Does heart move blood or
blood move heart; and in either case what builds the organ and what
bestows and perpetuates the motion? Albert of Cologne, and at times even
Aristotle, as we have seen, were apt to leave moving things for abstract
motion, and to regard formulas as agents. Telesius again, the first of
the brilliant band of natural philosophers in Italy of the XVIth and
XVIIth centuries, was still seeking this principle of nature in the
"form" of the peripatetics. Gilbert regarded his magnetic force as "of
the nature of soul, surpassing the soul of man." Galileo, although
willing to conceive circular motion as perpetual[32], and even
self-existent, was unable thus to conceive rectilineal motion.
Harvey, then, and other naturalists of the time, including Cæsalpinus
and after a fashion even Descartes, followed the medieval world and
Aristotle in deriving the source of motion directly from the spheres.
Harvey says with Dante, "Questi nei cuor mortali è permotore." The
attraction exercised by external supreme mind (not associated with
matter) and its thoughts bring the material cosmos and its parts into
regular movements. The so-called [Greek: Aithêr], or fifth element,
"[Greek: stoicheion heteron tôn tessarôn, akêraton te kai theion]" (De
Cælo, cap. 2 and vid. Zeller II. ii. 437), under the name of the
Quintessence, played a large part in the speculations of Lulli,
Paracelsus and other chemical mystics. Till Copernicus transfigured the
cosmos, and Galileo and Newton carried terrestrial physics into the
celestial world, the heavenly bodies were regarded as animated beings,
themselves set in motion by spheres, and, by propagation of their
intense activity from sphere to sphere, animating all sublunary matter,
wheels within wheels, even to its innermost particles. Aristotle's view
(Metaph. XI.) was as follows:--The stars and planets are in their nature
eternal essences; that which moves them must itself be eternal, and
prior and external to that which it causes to be moved; likewise that
which is prior to essence must itself be essence; and so on for a
hierarchy of eternal essences: thus Heaven if not God is a divine
embodiment ([Greek: Theion sôma]); and this [Greek: prôton tôn sômatôn]
he regarded as the essence of heaven and stars, and the cause of animal
heat in living beings. Thus the transition from Aristotle to the later
conception of the celestial bodies as themselves animated beings was
easy; indeed the attribution of intelligence to the spheres goes back at
any rate to Plato (Timæus), if not to Pythagoras; and was the foundation
of astrology. In Harvey's time there was still in Rome a basilica of the
Seven Angels (the planetary essences). Much of this doctrine Harvey
probably got from Cicero (Acad. I. ii. 39 and De Fin. IV. 5-12; vid.
Krische), who speaks of "ardor coeli" as the whole astral sphere. If I
am not mistaken Harvey somewhere advises Aubrey to study Cicero.
Matthew Arnold thus regrets the old illusion:--
And you, ye stars!
* * * * *
You too once lived--
You too moved joyfully
Among august companions
In an older world, peopled by Gods,
In a mightier order,
The radiant, rejoicing, intelligent Sons of Heaven!
But now you kindle
Your lonely, cold shining lights,
Unwilling lingerers
In 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 undelighted[33].
Of the origin of energy we have not solved the riddle, we have given it
up; but instead of coming from 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 all[34]. Logic, which
for us is but a drill, and, like all drills, 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 ([Greek: katalêpsis]); 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 the _De anima_[35], 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 and universals, 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 [Greek: ta physika]--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 life[36].
Malebranche warned 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.