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 before those
thinkers; for instance no Greek philosopher would have separated faith
from reason. In the well-known words of Hippocrates, "[Greek: ouden
heteron heterou theioteron oude anthrôpinôteron, alla panta theia]."
"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
([Greek: ataraxia]). Pyrrhonism on the other hand leads to slackness of
ethics; either to the insouciance of Horace and Montaigne, or to the
attitude of the seventeenth century 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." The
_Hypotyposes Pyrrhonioe_ of 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 (in MS. _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 and social 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 deeper truth 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 of
Bacon, 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 [Greek: kai
tris kataraton]" 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 of infidels 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 Colliget[60] of 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 peripatetic teaching 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
science[61].
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 Caius[62],
seems to have been rather humanist than scientific[63]; 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 Oxford[64], under some
discouragement. Of Paris the great days were 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 Law[65], 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 condemnation of 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--the triumph 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'?" The _Credo ut
intelligam_ of Augustine and Anselm of Canterbury; the _Intelligo ut
credam_ of 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
scepticism[66], 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 the _De 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: "Nihil indoctius, 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 metuendum[67]." 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 Bruno[68].
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 Leonicus[69], 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 Harvey[70]. 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 Greek had 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 spheres[71]. Malpighi, who was to fulfil Harvey's discovery
and foresight, was born in N.-E. Italy in the very year (1628) in which
the _De motu cordis_ was 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 Society[72] in 1645; the Academy of France in 1656. Clinical
teaching, initiated in Salerno and advanced by the _Consilia_
_medica_[73], was formally established in Padua[74], 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 the fiery 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
time in 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 this passionate
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 or more 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 "[Greek:
meta ta physika]," "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 sum and
store of nature, "in dem Gedanken selbst das Wahre ist zu suchen[75]."
"Long fed on boundless hopes, O race of man,
How angrily thou spurn'st all simpler fare."