judgment, but in their lofty estimation of Aristotle they displayed the
finest possible critical judgment. On the contrary, the generations who
made much of the opportunity to minimize medieval scholarship because of
its worship at the shrine of Aristotle, must themselves fall under the
suspicion at least of either not knowing Aristotle or of not thinking
deeply about the subjects with regard to which he wrote. For in all the
world's history the rule has been that whenever men have thought deeply
about a subject and know what Aristotle has written with regard to that
subject, they have the liveliest admiration for the great Greek thinker.
This is true for philosophy, logic, metaphysics, politics, ethics,
dramatics, but it is also quite as true for physical science. He lacked
our knowledge, though not nearly to the degree that is usually thought,
and he had a marvellous accumulation of information, but he had a
breadth of view and a thoroughness of appreciation with a power of
penetration that make his opinions worth while knowing even on
scientific subjects in our enlightened age.
As for the supposed swearing by Aristotle, in the sense of literally
accepting his opinions without daring to examine them critically, which
is so constantly asserted to have been the habit of the medieval
scholars and teachers, it is extremely difficult in the light of the
expressions which we have from them, to understand how this false
impression arose. Aristotle they thoroughly respected. They constantly
referred to his works, but so has every thinking generation ever since.
Whenever he had made a declaration they would not accept the
contradiction of it without a good reason, but whenever they had good
reasons, Aristotle's opinion was at once rejected without compunction.
Albertus Magnus, for instance, said: "Whoever believes that Aristotle
was a God must also believe that he never erred, but if we believe that
Aristotle was a man, then doubtless he was liable to err just as we
are." A number of direct contradictions of Aristotle we have from
Albert. A well-known one is that with regard to Aristotle's assertion
that lunar rainbows appeared only twice in fifty years. Albert declared
that he himself had seen two in a single year.
Indeed, it seems very clear that the whole trend of thought among the
great teachers of the time was away from the acceptance of scientific
conclusions on authority unless there was good evidence for them
available. They were quite as impatient as the scientists of our time
with the constant putting forward of Aristotle as if that settled a
scientific question. Roger Bacon wanted the Pope to forbid the study of
Aristotle because his works were leading men astray from the study of
science, his authority being looked upon as so great that men did not
think for themselves but accepted his assertions. Smaller men are always
prone to do this, and indeed it constitutes one of the difficulties in
the way of advance in scientific knowledge at all times, as Roger Bacon
himself pointed out.
These are the sort of expressions that are to be expected from Friar
Bacon from what we know of other parts of his work. His "Opus Tertium"
was written at the request of Pope Clement IV, because the Pope had
heard many interesting accounts of what the great thirteenth-century
teacher and experimenter was doing at the University of Oxford, and
wished to learn for himself the details of his work. Bacon starts out
with the principle that there are four grounds of human ignorance. These
are, "first, trust in inadequate authority; second, that force of custom
which leads men to accept without properly questioning what has been
accepted before their time; third, the placing of confidence in the
assertions of the inexperienced; and fourth, the hiding of one's own
ignorance behind the parade of superficial knowledge, so that we are
afraid to say I do not know." Professor Henry Morley, a careful student
of Bacon's writings, said with regard to these expressions of Bacon:
No part of that ground has yet been cut away from beneath the
feet of students, although six centuries have passed. We still
make sheep-walks of second, third and fourth, and fiftieth
hand references to authority; still we are the slaves of
habit, still we are found following too frequently the
untaught crowd, still we flinch from the righteous and
wholesome phrase "I do not know" and acquiesce actively in the
opinion of others that we know what we appear to know.
In his "Opus Majus" Bacon had previously given abundant evidence of his
respect for the experimental method. There is a section of this work
which bears the title "Scientia Experimentalis." In this Bacon affirms
that "without experiment nothing can be adequately known. An argument
may prove the correctness of a theory, but does not give the certitude
necessary to remove all doubt, nor will the mind repose in the clear
view of truth unless it finds its way by means of experiment." To this
he later added in his "Opus Tertium": "The strongest argument proves
nothing so long as the conclusions are not verified by experience.
Experimental science is the queen of sciences, and the goal of all
speculation."
It is no wonder that Dr. Whewell, in his "History of the Inductive
Sciences," should have been unstinted in his praise of Roger Bacon's
work and writings. In a well-known passage he says of the "Opus Majus":
Roger Bacon's "Opus Majus" is the encyclopedia and "Novum
Organon" of the thirteenth century, a work equally wonderful
with regard to its wonderful scheme and to the special
treatises by which the outlines of the plans are filled up.
The professed object of the work is to urge the necessity of a
reform in the mode of philosophizing, to set forth the reasons
why knowledge had not made greater progress, to draw back
attention to the sources of knowledge which had been unwisely
neglected, to discover other sources which were yet almost
untouched, and to animate men in the undertaking of a prospect
of the vast advantages which it offered. In the development of
this plan all the leading portions of science are expanded in
the most complete shape which they had at that time assumed;
and improvements of a very wide and striking kind are proposed
in some of the principal branches of study. Even if the work
had no leading purposes it would have been highly valuable as
a treasure of the most solid knowledge and soundest
speculations of the time; even if it had contained no such
details it would have been a work most remarkable for its
general views and scope.
As a matter of fact the universities of the Middle Ages, far from
neglecting science, were really scientific universities. Because the
universities of the early nineteenth century occupied themselves almost
exclusively with languages and especially formed students' minds by
means of classical studies, men in our time seem to be prone to think
that such linguistic studies formed the main portion of the curriculum
of the universities in all the old times and particularly in the Middle
Ages. The study of the classic languages, however, came into university
life only after the Renaissance. Before that the undergraduates of the
universities had occupied themselves almost entirely with science. It
was quite as much trouble to introduce linguistic studies into the old
universities in the Renaissance time to replace science, as it was to
secure room for science by pushing out the classics in the modern time.
Indeed the two revolutions in education are strikingly similar when
studied in detail. Men who had been brought up on science before the
Renaissance were quite sure that that formed the best possible means of
developing the mind. In the early nineteenth century men who had been
formed on the classics were quite as sure that science could not replace
them with any success.
There is no pretence that this view of the medieval universities is a
new idea in the history of education. Those who have known the old
universities at first hand by the study of the actual books of their
professors and by familiarity with their courses of study, have not been
inclined to make the mistake of thinking that the medieval university
neglected science. Professor Huxley in his "Inaugural Address as Rector
of Aberdeen University" some thirty years ago stated very definitely his
recognition of medieval devotion to science. His words are well worth
remembering by all those who are accustomed to think of our time as the
first in which the study of science was taken up seriously in our
universities. Professor Huxley said:
The scholars of the medieval universities seem to have studied
grammar, logic, and rhetoric; arithmetic and geometry;
astronomy, theology, and music. Thus their work, however
imperfect and faulty, judged by modern lights, it may have
been, brought them face to face with all the leading aspects
of the many-sided mind of man. For these studies did really
contain, at any rate in embryo, sometimes it may be in
caricature, what we now call philosophy, mathematical and
physical science, and art. _And I doubt if the curriculum of
any modern university shows so clear and generous a
comprehension of what is meant by culture, as this old Trivium
and Quadrivium does._
It would be entirely a mistake, however, to think that these great
writers and teachers who influenced the medieval universities so deeply
and whose works were the text-books of the universities for centuries
after, only had the principles of physical and experimental science and
did not practically apply them. As a matter of fact their works are full
of observation. Once more, the presumption that they wrote only nonsense
with regard to science comes from those who do not know their writings
at all, while great scientists who have taken the pains to study their
works are enthusiastic in praise. Humboldt, for instance, says of
Albertus Magnus, after reading some of his works with care:
Albertus Magnus is equally active and influential in promoting
the study of natural science and of the Aristotelian
philosophy. His works contain some exceedingly acute remarks
on the organic structure and physiology of plants. One of his
works bearing the title of "Liber Cosmographicus De Natura
Locorum" is a species of physical geography. I have found in
it considerations on the dependence of temperature
concurrently on latitude and elevation and on the effect of
different angles of the sun's rays in heating the ground which
have excited my surprise.
It is with regard to physical geography of course that Humboldt is
himself a distinguished authority.
Humboldt's expression that he found some exceedingly acute remarks on
the organic structure and physiology of plants in Albert the Great's
writings will prove a great surprise to many people. Meyer, the German
historian of botany, however, has re-echoed Humboldt's praise with
emphasis. The extraordinary erudition and originality of Albert's
treatise on plants drew from Meyer the comment:
No botanist who lived before Albert can be compared with him
unless Theophrastus, with whom he was not acquainted; and
after him none has painted nature in such living colors or
studied it so profoundly until the time of Conrad Gessner and
Caesalpino.
These men, it may be remarked, come three centuries after Albert's time.
A ready idea of Albert's contributions to physical science can be
obtained from his life by Sighart, which has been translated into
English by Dixon and was published in London in 1870. Pagel, in
Puschmann's "History of Medicine," already referred to, gives a list of
the books written by Albert on scientific matters with some comments
which are eminently suggestive, and furnish solid basis for the remark
that I have made, that men's minds were occupied with nearly the same
problems in science in the thirteenth century as we are now, while the
conclusions they came to were not very different from ours, though
reached so long before us.
This catalogue of Albertus Magnus' works shows very well his own
interest and that of his generation in physical science of all kinds.
There were eight treatises on Aristotle's physics and on the underlying
principles of natural philosophy and of energy and of movement; four
treatises concerning the heavens and the earth, one on physical
geography which also contains, according to Pagel, numerous suggestions
on ethnography and physiology. There are two treatises on generation and
corruption, six books on meteors, five books on minerals, three books on
the soul, two books on the intellect, a treatise on nutritives, and then
a treatise on the senses and another on the memory and on the
imagination. All the phases of the biological sciences were especially
favorite subjects of his study. There is a treatise on the motion of
animals, a treatise in six books on vegetables and plants, a treatise on
breathing things, a treatise on sleep and waking, a treatise on youth
and old age, and a treatise on life and death. His treatise on minerals
contains, according to Pagel, a description of ninety-five different
kinds of precious stones. Albert's volumes on plants were reproduced
with Meyer, the German botanist, as editor (Berlin, 1867). All of
Albert's books are available in modern editions.
Pagel says of Albertus that
His profound scholarship, his boundless industry, the almost
incontrollable impulse of his mind after universality of
knowledge, the many-sidedness of his literary productivity,
and finally the almost universal recognition which he received
from his contemporaries and succeeding generations, stamp him
as one of the most imposing characters and one of the most
wonderful phenomena of the Middle Ages.
In another passage Pagel has said:
While Albert was a Churchman and an ardent devotee of
Aristotle, in matters of natural phenomena he was relatively
unprejudiced and presented an open mind. He thought that he
must follow Hippocrates and Galen, rather than Aristotle and
Augustine, in medicine and in the natural sciences. We must
concede it a special subject of praise for Albert that he
distinguished very strictly between natural and supernatural
phenomena. The former he considered as entirely the object of
the investigation of nature. The latter he handed over to the
realm of metaphysics.
Roger Bacon is, however, the one of these three great teachers who
shows us how thoroughly practical was the scientific knowledge of the
universities and how much it led to important useful discoveries in
applied science and to anticipations of what is most novel even in our
present-day sciences. Some of these indeed are so startling, that only
that we know them not by tradition but from his works, where they may be
readily found without any doubt of their authenticity, we should be sure
to think that they must be the result of later commentators' ideas.
Bacon was very much interested in astronomy, and not only suggested the
correction of the calendar, but also a method by which it could be kept
from wandering away from the actual date thereafter. He discovered many
of the properties of lenses and is said to have invented spectacles and
announced very emphatically that light did not travel instantaneously
but moved with a definite velocity. He is sometimes said to have
invented gunpowder, but of course he did not, though he studied this
substance in various forms very carefully and drew a number of
conclusions in his observations. He was sure that some time or other man
would learn to control the energies exhibited by explosives and that
then he would be able to accomplish many things that seemed quite
impossible under present conditions.
He said, for instance:
Art can construct instruments of navigation, such that the
largest vessels governed by a single man will traverse rivers
and seas more rapidly than if they were filled with oarsmen.
One may also make carriages which without the aid of any
animal will run with remarkable swiftness.
In these days when the automobile is with us and when the principal
source of energy for motor purposes is derived from explosives of
various kinds, this expression of Roger Bacon represents a prophecy
marvellously surprising in its fulfilment. It is no wonder that the book
whence it comes bears the title "De Secretis Artis et Naturae." Roger
Bacon even went to the extent, however, of declaring that man would some
time be able to fly. He was even sure that with sufficient pains he
could himself construct a flying machine. He did not expect to use
explosives for his motor power, however, but thought that a windlass
properly arranged, worked by hand, might enable a man to make sufficient
movement to carry himself aloft or at least to support himself in the
air, if there were enough surface to enable him to use his lifting power
to advantage. He was in intimate relations by letter with many other
distinguished inventors and investigators besides Peregrinus and was a
source of incentive and encouragement to them all.
The more one knows of Aquinas the more surprise there is at his
anticipation of many modern scientific ideas. At the conclusion of a
course on cosmology delivered at the University of Paris he said that
"nothing at all would ever be reduced to nothingness" (_nihil omnino in
nihilum redigetur_). He was teaching the doctrine that man could not
destroy matter and God would not annihilate it. In other words, he was
teaching the indestructibility of matter even more emphatically than we
do. He saw the many changes that take place in material substances
around us, but he taught that these were only changes of form and not
substantial changes and that the same amount of matter always remained
in the world. At the same time he was teaching that the forms in matter
by which he meant the combinations of energies which distinguish the
various kinds of matter are not destroyed. In other words, he was
anticipating not vaguely, but very clearly and definitely, the
conservation of energy. His teaching with regard to the composition of
matter was very like that now held by physicists. He declared that
matter was composed of two principles, prime matter and form. By _forma_
he meant the dynamic element in matter, while by _materia prima_ he
meant the underlying substratum of material, the same in every
substance, but differentiated by the dynamics of matter.
It used to be the custom to make fun of these medieval scientists for
believing in the transmutation of metals. It may be said that all three
of these greatest teachers did not hold the doctrine of the
transmutation of metals in the exaggerated way in which it appealed to
many of their contemporaries. The theory of matter and form, however,
gave a philosophical basis for the idea that one kind of matter might be
changed into another. We no longer think that notion absurd. Sir William
Ramsay has actually succeeded in changing one element into another and
radium and helium are seen changing into each other, until now we are
quite ready to think of transmutation placidly. The Philosopher's Stone
used to seem a great absurdity until our recent experience with radium,
which is to some extent at least the philosopher's stone, since it
brings about the change of certain supposed elements into others. A
distinguished American chemist said not long ago that he would like to
extract all the silver from a large body of lead ore in which it occurs
so commonly, and then come back after twenty years and look for further
traces of silver, for he felt sure that they would be found and that
lead ore is probably always producing silver in small quantities and
copper ore is producing gold.
Most people will be inclined to ask where the fruits of this
undergraduate teaching of science are to be found. They are inclined to
presume that science was a closed book to the men and women of that
time. It is not hard, however, to point the effect of the scientific
training in the writings of the times. Dante is a typical university man
of the period. He was at several Italian universities, was at Paris and
perhaps at Oxford. His writings are full of science. Professor Kuehns, of
Wesleyan, in his book "The Treatment of Nature in Dante," has pointed
out how much Dante knows of science and of nature. Few of the poets not
only of his own but of any time have known more. There are only one or
two writers of poetry in our time who go with so much confidence to
nature and the scientific interpretation of her for figures for their
poetry. The astronomy, the botany, the zooelogy of Albertus Magnus and
Thomas Aquinas, Dante knew very well and used confidently for figurative
purposes. Anyone who is inclined to think nature study a new idea in the
world forgets, or has never known, his Dante. The birds and the bees,
the flowers, the leaves, the varied aspects of clouds and sea, the
phenomena of phosphorescence, the intimate habits of bird and beast and
the ways of the plants, as well as all the appearances of the heavens,
Dante knew very well and in a detail that is quite surprising when we
recall how little nature study is supposed to have attracted the men of
his time. Only that his readers appreciated it all, Dante would surely
not have used his scientific erudition so constantly.
So much for the undergraduate department of the universities of the
Middle Ages, and the view is absolutely fair, for these were the men to
whom the students flocked by thousands. They were teaching science, not
literature. They were discussing physics as well as metaphysics,
psychology in its phenomena as well as philosophy, observation and
experiment as well as logic, the ethical sciences, economics,
practically all the scientific ideas that were needed in their
generation--and that generation saw the rise of the universities, the
finishing of the cathedrals, the building of magnificent town halls and
castles and beautiful municipal buildings of many kinds, including
hospitals, the development of the Hansa League in commerce, and of
wonderful manufacturers of all the textiles, the arts and crafts, as
well as the most beautiful book-making and art and literature. We could
be quite sure that the men who solved all the other problems so well
could not have been absurd only in their treatment of science. Anyone
who reads their books will be quite sure of that.
While most people might be ready, then, to confess that possibly Huxley
was not mistaken with regard to the undergraduate department of the
universities, most of them would feel sure that at least the graduate
departments were sadly deficient in accomplishment. Once more this is
entirely an assumption. The facts are all against any such idea.
There were three graduate departments in most of the
universities--theology, law, and medicine. While physical scientists are
usually not cognizant of it apparently, theology is a science, a
department of knowledge developed scientifically, and most of these
medieval universities did more for its scientific development than the
schools of any other period. Quite as much may be said for philosophy,
for there are many who hesitate to attribute any scientific quality to
modern developments in the matter. As for law, this is the great period
of the foundation of scientific law development; the English common law
was formulated by Bracton, the deep foundations of basic French and
Spanish law were laid, and canon law acquired a definite scientific
character which it was always to retain. All this was accomplished
almost entirely by the professors in the law departments of the
universities.
It was in medicine, however, where most people would be quite sure
without any more ado that nothing worth while talking about was being
done, that the great triumphs of graduate teaching at the medieval
universities were secured. Here more than anywhere else is there room
for supreme surprise at the quite unheard-of anticipations of our modern
medicine and, stranger still, as it may seem, of our modern surgery.