human mind. Socrates, although, for ethics and politics, he initiated
the inductive method, was disposed to regard physical speculations as
but a rational pastime[37], and the political and ethical study of man
as the only serious engagement of thought. Aristotle took up natural
knowledge as an encyclopedist[38]; he rarely verified his facts and he
made no experimental researches[39]. The medieval church held that "ex
puris naturalibus cognoscere" was a meagre 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 filthy[40]. 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 exhausted[41]; 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 higher[42]. A higher order of ideas is put
in a lower order of language; the "[Greek: hodos eis to katô]" 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 were gross 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 starcraft and
alchemy, and the scientific era of Harvey[44]. 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 own[45]. Surgery
was excluded from the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Paris;
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, from the 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. "[Greek: Menei to
theion doulia per en phreni]." 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 Faith[46],
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 Byzantium[47]
until 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 and sciences had scarcely found breathing-time, and no sure
establishment[48]. 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 domains of 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 sages[49]
translated some classical texts, and from 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 Salernitan
scholar), by Michael the wizard[50], 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 text[51]. 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 the
IXth Book of Rhazes, Honein, Aegidius Corboliensis, and perhaps some of
the translations of Constantinus Africanus[52];--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 in advance 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 Aristotle[53], 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 same time Alexander Neckam cited the Posterior Analytics, the
Topics and the _De 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 failed[54], that its
light was but the phantom of dawn[55], is no matter for surprise; yet
from this time forward the methods 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 limen
Sanctæ Theologiæ intromiserit; ... in ipsa sacraria Christi[56]." Men
got used to reason, and great protestants, such as Robert of Lincoln,
had put justice and honour before ecclesiastical politics[57]. 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 Aristotle[58]. And in the history of
the comparatively unlearned Friars Minors we find, as elsewhere in the
history of thought, that mysticism 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"!
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
order[59]. 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.
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 consentient action. The toleration and
scepticism of the first renascence had causes no deeper than a general
enlargement of experience and thought.