and Chaucer, or later in the degraded fanaticism of the Observants,
had fallen far from the example of his master. Perhaps the chief
reason for Bacon's decision was that his friend Grosseteste, who on
the first coming of the friars wrote eloquently to Gregory the Ninth
of their illumination, humility and piety, was a member of the Order,
and was the first of its Rectors in Oxford. (Rd. Grosseteste, Epist.
ed. Luard; Rolls, 1861, p. 179.) Even in Cambridge, till 1877,
teachers and professors, save those of Law or Medicine, were
generally speaking in holy orders; for instance, the following
extract, of date 1849, which I owe to the kindness of Dr Donald
MacAlister, "Cæterum neminem in socium unquam admitti volumus qui non
sit aut Theologiam professurus et sacros ordines post certum temporis
intervallum inferius definiendum suscepturus aut e Collegio
discessurus, nisi unus e duobus sociis qui Medicinæ aut ex illis
duobus qui Juris Civilis studio deputati sunt, electus fuerit." (Stat.
Coll. Div. Joh. Evan. Cant. cap. xii. 28 April, 12 Vict. 1849.) To
this hour in England the clergy command the public schools. In a
warlike society learning and contemplation must fall to the clergy;
without the fortresses of war or learning, if there was any safety,
there was not dignity or peace. The mendicant orders were young
institutions, ascendant, and in favour with the great. Of their
usurpations in the universities I have spoken. Within them even Popes
could not meddle, as Bacon found to his sorrow. Hales and Ockham also
became Minors, as Albert and St Thomas, both of illustrious descent,
became Preachers. Moreover the Franciscans had devoted themselves to
the care of the sick, and especially of those smitten with the new
pestilences--such as leprosy, syphilis, and plague--which Oriental
dirt and asceticism had engendered or inflamed; and thus a bent to
observation of natural phenomena may have been encouraged (see art.
Roger Bacon, Westminster Rev. loc. cit.). To say that to the monks we
owe the conservation of learning is not so true as to say that learned
men betook themselves to the religious houses in order to find relief
from turmoil, to secure the subsistence of life without its cares, to
get access to books, and to profit by the counsel of comrades who had
enjoyed not only the culture of their own house, but also the
interchange of ideas and manuscripts with all the learned houses in
Europe. When these advantages were to be had in the world, learning
deserted the monasteries. Again, Bacon was not an unbeliever, nor
anything like it; in the _Opus Majus_ he declares the Holy Scriptures
to be the source of all truth; not only, like Socrates before him and
Kant after him, did he fix his eyes on moral perfection as the end,
but also on the Church as the means: on the other hand the resentments
of passionate genius under harsh duress did not make a naturally
rebellious temper more tractable. "Fames et mora bilem conciunt." It
is evident that within the Franciscan order there were three
well-marked parties; namely, of the naturalists, as Bacon; of the
mystics, as Bonaventura; and of the sophists, as John Duns the
Northumbrian. Now Bacon's troubles did not begin till the succession
to the Generalship of the Order of the seraphic Bonaventura, an
argumentative mystic (like Duns, and unlike the ecstatic mystics of St
Victor), who, rejecting Aristotle, had steeped himself in the
neo-platonism of Augustine and "Dionysius the Areopagite"; and
Bonaventura and his party it was who stopped Bacon's mouth at Oxford,
and shut him up in Paris. What the life of Bacon and the direction of
medieval thought might have been had Grosseteste been able to spare
Adam Marsh from Oxford for the Generalship it were perhaps too curious
to consider; yet we may profitably remember that Bacon, brushing aside
Porphyry and his questions, and denouncing the "vain physics" of
Paris, urged that enquiry should begin with the simplest objects of
research, and rise gradually to the higher and higher; every
observation being controlled by experiment. He says indeed that by
experiment only can we distinguish a sophism from a demonstration.
(Op. Tert. XIX.) Earnestly he tried to follow this method; he seems to
have spent on it substance of his own, and, after this was exhausted,
to have appeared for the first time in history as a petitioner for
"scientific grants in aid." Diderot speaks of Bacon as "Un des génies
les plus surprenants que la nature ait produits, et un des hommes les
plus malheureux"; he lived in vain, died unhonoured, and left no
disciple.
[60] "Colliget," Mr E. G. Browne tells me, is a corruption of
Kulliyyat. It does not exactly mean "Summary" (as commonly stated) but
rather "General Principles" (Kull means "the whole"; Kulli universal
or general; fem. pl. Kulliyyat). It may also mean collected writings
(e.g. of a poet).
[61] Vid. p. 50.
[62] I venture to say "even of Caius," though Caius was a competent
and indeed for his time an able clinical physician, as we observe in
his work on the sweating sickness. (Vid. note, p. 96.)
[63] Oxford fell in the first instance under Franciscan influence, yet
Alexander Hales (of this order) gave the peripatetic bent to Oxford
which it retains to this day. Creed rather than conduct was the
dominant note of the Faith (p. 85); it is interesting therefore to
learn that for Oxford Robert of Lincoln and Adam Marsh translated, or
procured a translation of, the Ethics. On the probability that
Grosseteste had some substantial knowledge of Greek, see p. 75, note
2.
[64] In Casaubon's diary we get a glimpse of Oxford in 1613. The
University was wealthy enough; it had escaped the Paris devastation,
but had scarcely deserved its good fortune. There was much active
teaching of a routine kind, many formalities, much serving of tables;
but of living interest in science, learning, or high culture there was
not a trace. Of classical learning, in Casaubon's sense, there was
naught. Ecclesiastical controversies absorbed or overwhelmed all other
subjects; and the University was regarded by the Government as an
instrument of party. The professors were all clerks, and ardent only
as pamphleteers. Thus, says Pattison, "the University took its full
share of national passion, prejudice and religious sentiment, but was
wholly destitute of any power to vivify, to correct, to instruct, or
to enlighten." Pattison's Casaubon, p. 417.
[65] Both in Bologna and Padua of course there was a faculty of
Medicine; but its tradition in Bologna was traditional and galenical,
in Padua independent and progressive. Montpellier had suffered in the
desolation of Languedoc.
[66] See page 82.
[67] Contra Medicum quendam Invectivarum Libri Quatuor. (Op. T. II.
pp. 1086, 801. Ed. Basel, 1555, quoted Renan, Aver. p. 331.)
[68] The Royal College of Physicians of London had its birth in the
schools of Italy; and perhaps in revolt from Averroism the elegant
humanity of Linacre has too often prevailed in this College rather
than Harvey's strenuous control of tradition and rhetoric by more
positive conceptions, and of all conceptions by direct experimental
verification.
[69] Niccolò Leonico (I give his Latin name in the text as Ueberweg
gives it) seems to have been a spirited and effective philosophical
lecturer of Hellenist and critical qualities, and of much charm both
of style and character. He is not to be confounded with his elder
contemporary, Nicolaus Leonicenus, of Vicenza and Ferrara, professor
of medicine and an elegant latiner, who translated the aphorisms of
Hippocrates; and whose friend Linacre, in translating parts of Galen,
did a like service to medicine and letters in England.
[70] Not only of the circulation of the blood. In his treatise _De
generatione_ Harvey disposed of the belief in spontaneous generation
(so far as regards visible creatures, its abolition we owe to
Pasteur), yet Bacon (N. O. II. 41) accepts it, perhaps as fully as did
Sir Thomas Browne. The _De generatione_ however was not actually
published till 1651, some 30 years after the _Novum Organon_.
[71] Galileo and Kepler had proved the validity of terrestrial physics
and mathematics in astronomy. Aristotle of course was the first to
apply physics to astronomy, but wrong physics.
[72] With which Malpighi was in close association.
[73] The _Consilia medica_, or Consultations, were published records,
either of particular cases or of diseases in a more general sense,
which seem to have been instituted by Thaddæus of Florence in the
thirteenth century, were abundant in the fifteenth, and were continued
into the sixteenth, and even later. In the fifteenth century these
records have a considerable historical value, and no little clinical
interest, as the questions to the patient and the records of symptoms
are often orderly and graphic, and enable the modern reader to revise
the diagnoses, many of them grotesque enough. These Consilia make a
great bulk of matter, and one which has not been thoroughly explored.
A general account of the Consilia may be read in any good history of
medicine, but perhaps the most interesting is to be found in the
chapters on medieval medicine in Daremberg's "Histoire et Doctrines"
(e.g. tom. 1. p. 334 et seq.).
[74] Originally by Fracastorius, Montanus and others, in the former
half of the sixteenth century. Caius in England, Mercado in Spain,
Baillou in Paris, if not bedside teachers, had done good clinical
work, in Consilia and otherwise, in the same century. What
Fracastorius did for syphilis, Caius did for the sweating sickness,
and Mercado for petechial typhus. Baillou was too dependent upon the
letter of tradition.
[75] Even Descartes has some share with Hegel in the profound error
that whatsoever is clearly and definitely conceived is true. The
inference if true for formal logic, is not true for natural processes;
for instance, Descartes' well-known attribution of the soul to the
pineal gland, because all other parts of the brain are double, and the
soul is single!
[76] "The share of Servetus was small"; that is, the effect of his
remarkable discovery was small, for it was buried in a theological
work of which but a few copies were rescued from the burning; namely
"Christianismi restitutio. Viennæ Allobrogum, 1553." (Haeser gives the
reference to pp. 170-177, De Trinitate divina.) The work was reprinted
at Nuremberg in 1790.
[77] Quæ, simul æthereos animo conceperat ignes,
Ore dabat vero carmina plena dei.
Ovid, _Fasti_ I, 473.
CAMBRIDGE: PRINTED BY J. AND C. F. CLAY, AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS.