DEVOTION
_Passion._ _Lady._ _Love-longing._ _Conscience._ _Inquisition._
_Authority._ _Individual._ _Influence._
Plato, following the doctrines of Timaeus and Pythagoras, taught
also a moral and intellectual system of doctrine, comprehending at
once the past, the present, and the future condition of man. Jesus
Christ divulged the sacred and eternal truths contained in these
views to mankind, and Christianity, in its abstract purity, became
the exoteric expression of the esoteric doctrines of the poetry
and wisdom of antiquity. The incorporation of the Celtic nations
with the exhausted population of the south, impressed upon it the
figure of the poetry existing in their mythology and institutions.
The result was a sum of the action and reaction of all the causes
included in it; for it may be assumed as a maxim that no nation or
religion can supersede any other without incorporating into itself
a portion of that which it supersedes. The abolition of personal
and domestic slavery, and the emancipation of women from a great
part of the degrading restraints of antiquity, were among the
consequences of these events.
... The freedom of women produced the poetry of sexual love. Love
became a religion, the idols of whose worship were ever present.
It was as if the statues of Apollo and the Muses had been endowed
with life and motion, and had walked forth among their worshippers;
so that the earth became peopled by the inhabitants of a diviner
world. The familiar appearance and proceedings of life became
wonderful and heavenly, and a paradise was created as out of the
wrecks of Eden. And as this creation itself is poetry, so its
creators were poets; and language was the instrument of their art:
_Galeotto fù il libro, e chi lo scrisse._—SHELLEY: _A Defence of
Poetry_.
Apuleius and other imperial writers have left us a picture, gaudy and
fascinating enough, of the earlier centuries of the Roman Empire. In
their works the pomps and frivolities of that decaying world pass in
procession before our eyes; the tenuous old Roman gods and goddesses
rub shoulders in the popular imagination, on the one hand, with
powerful relics of the Egyptian Mysteries, and on the other—already
in the second century—with full-blooded medieval witches and demons;
while the polite scepticism and graceful dissipation of the educated
raises its eyebrows and shrugs its shoulders at the credulous
fervours of Christians and their numerous fellow-cranks. There are
only one or two common English words which throw any direct light
on this period. _Martyr_, the Greek word for a ‘witness’, and so ‘a
witness to the truth’, tells its story of the earlier days of the
Church, as _heresy_ of the later. The name _Constantinople_ has a
double historical significance. It bears the name of the first Roman
emperor who recognized Christianity as the established religion of
the empire, and it marks the removal in A.D. 330 of the imperial
capital from Italy to the shores of the Bosphorus. That removal
foreshadowed the inevitable splitting up of the Roman Empire into an
eastern and a western half, a schism which survives formally to-day
in the difference between the Greek and the Catholic Church. It may
be called the starting-point of European history.
For Christian Rome we can go to Gibbon’s _Decline and Fall_ and
Kingsley’s _Hypatia_, while Merejkowski, in his _Death of the Gods_,
has attempted to paint, in addition, something of the _inner_ surface
of that world, to depict the huge shadowy movements that were taking
place deep down in the wills and imaginations of men. Powerful
movements they must have been. For now the meanings and associations
of all those Latin words which were subsequently to come into our
language in the various ways described in Chapter III were being
built up or altered, not only by outstanding figures such as St.
Jerome and St. Augustine, and the lawyer Emperor Justinian, but also
by insignificant Roman legionaries and barbarian private soldiers,
by outlandish scholars and studious, dreaming monks. In particular,
an increasing number of the profound and manifold concepts which
had been laboriously worked into the Greek language in the manner
suggested in the last chapter were gradually decanted, either by
actual translation or by more indirect methods, into Latin syllables.
Thus, side by side with the Septuagint, there came into being the
Vulgate, a Latin translation of the Old and New Testaments, finished
by St. Jerome in A.D. 405, and still the received text of the Roman
Catholic Church. But it did not stand alone like the Septuagint.
Many volumes of ecclesiastical literature are extant through which
we could trace the gradual importation into the Latin language of
the new meanings. For example, at the end of the second century—no
doubt with the object of distinguishing the Christian Mystery of
incarnation, death, and rebirth from its many rivals—Tertullian fixed
the Latin ‘sacramentum’ as the proper translation of ‘musterion’
instead of ‘mysterium’, which would probably have disappeared
altogether had not Jerome restored it to partial use. Thus one word,
as is often the case, split up into two, _sacrament_ remaining
within the Church to express, among other things, part of the old
technical meaning of _mystery_, while _mystery_ itself, freed
from one half of its associations, moved outside and quickly grew
wider and vaguer. ‘Passio’, the Latin word for _suffering_, used
in ecclesiastical literature for the death of Jesus on the cross,
gradually extended in a similar way the scope of its pregnant new
meaning, and we find already in Tertullian a derivative ‘compassio’.
From Latin, largely through French, such new meanings found their way
into English, and it was these, as we shall see, more than anything
else which transformed the country between the Norman Conquest and
the fifteenth century into something like the England which we know
to-day.
For if we omit the Dark Ages, and, turning suddenly from the
civilization of classical Greece and Rome, raise the curtain on,
say, thirteenth-century England, we are struck by a remarkable
transformation. An attempt has been made in previous chapters to
trace the general changes of meaning in certain key-words of human
thought and feeling, such as _God_ and _love_, _life_ and _death_,
_heaven_ and _hell_,... When we reach medieval Europe, it is
necessary to add a new class of key-word altogether. Let us look at a
fifteenth-century English carol:
I sing of a maiden
That is makeless;[31]
King of all kings
To her son she ches.[32]
He came al so still
There his mother was,
As dew in April
That falleth on the grass.
He came al so still
To his mother’s bour,
As dew in April
That falleth on the flour.
He came al so still
There his mother lay,
As dew in April
That falleth on the spray.
Mother and maiden
Was never none but she;
Well may such a lady
Goddes mother be.
In such a poem we have once more a kind of cross-section of the
growth of European outlook. Between its lines we seem to be able to
hear, as in a dream, the monotonous intonings of Egyptian priests,
the quiet words of Socrates in the Academy, and the alert speculative
hum of the Alexandrian world. It is so graceful that for the moment
it seems as though all these things, with all the pillages and
massacres and crucifixions and vast imperial achievements of Rome,
had been conspiring together merely to load the homely old Teutonic
word ‘loaf-kneader’ with new semantic significance, to transform it
into that mystery and symbol in the imaginations of men, a _lady_.
The medieval lyric, as it gradually loses its exclusive preoccupation
with ecclesiastical subjects, becomes more and more concerned with
woman, and concerned with her in a new way. Through the poetry of
Italy, where the Renaissance was already stirring, the troubadour
literature of France, and that strange “Rose” tradition which is
preserved to us in Chaucer’s translation of the _Roman de la Rose_,
there grew up during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries a small
special vocabulary defining the landmarks in that new region of the
imagination which the poets, and even the scholars, of Europe were
just discovering; we might call it the region of devotional love.
Indeed, it was more than a vocabulary; it developed at one time
into a sort of miniature mythology, for the various conflicting
elements in a lady’s disposition which the lover had to meet with and
overcome were actually personified, ‘Danger’ being a kind of mixture
of modesty and haughtiness—an ill-omened creature whom ‘Pity’ or
‘Mercy’, if the lover was fortunate, finally put to rout:
Al founde they Daunger for a tyme a lord,
Yet Pitee, thurgh his stronge gentle might
Foryaf[33] and made Mercy passen Ryght.
In these three lines from Chaucer’s _Legend of Good Women_ the four
Anglo-French words _Danger_, _Pity_, _Gentle_, and _Mercy_ are all
Latin terms whose forms had altered, and whose meanings had received
the Christian stamp during the Dark Ages. _Pity_ comes from ‘pietas’
(compare _piety_); _gentle_ from ‘gentilis’ meaning ‘of the same
family’ and later ‘of noble birth’; and _mercy_ from ‘merces’, ‘a
reward’, then ‘a reward in heaven for kindness displayed on earth’.
None of them—with the exception of _mercy_ in its theological
sense—are known to have been used in English before the thirteenth
century. _Anguish_, _beauty_, _bounty_, _charity_, _comfort_,
_compassion_, _courtesy_, _delicate_, _devotion_, _grace_, _honour_,
_humble_, _passion_, _patience_, _peace_, _purity_, _tender_ are
further examples of this new vocabulary of tenderness which came to
us from Latin through Early French. Some of them, such as _charity_,
_delicate_, and _passion_, were probably brought to England by the
preaching friars before the Conquest; others came with the devout
Normans, and did not develop a secular meaning until after they had
reached our shores (_devotion_ remaining purely theological until as
late as the sixteenth century); while yet a third class had already
been secularized by nimble spirits like Petrarch and Ronsard a
century or two before they reached us by the Norman route along with
more frivolous terms, _amorous_, _dainty_, _dalliance_, _debonair_,
_delight_, _pleasure_, _pleasance_, and the like, in which there is
no particular reason to perceive a strong ecclesiastical influence.
All of them, apart from the last group, are alike in that they
started with a theological meaning and subsequently developed an
affectionate one alongside of it. We may think of them as gifts
presented to the lyric lover by the Bride of Christ—well-chosen
gifts; for were they not the ardent creations of her own early
passion?
Thus, side by side with such lyrics as the carol quoted above,
we find in the Middle Ages charming little secular poems almost
indistinguishable from them in tone and manner:
Sweet rose of vertew and of gentilness,
Delightsome lily of everie lustyness,
Richest in bountie and in bewtie clear,
And everie vertew that is wened dear,
Except onlie that ye are mercyless.
Into your garth this day I did pursew;
There saw I flowris that fresh were of hew;
Both white and red most lusty were to seene
And halesome herbis upon stalkis greene;
Yet leaf nor flowr find could I none of rew.
I doubt that Merche, with his cauld blastis keene,
Has slain this gentil herb, that I of mene;
Whose piteous death does to my heart such paine
That I would make to plant his root againe,—
So comforting his leavis unto me bene.
And along with the influx of Anglo-French words further semantic
changes were, of course, taking place in the more important Old
English words. If there are occasions when a single word seems to
throw more light on the workings of men’s minds than a whole volume
of history or a whole page of contemporary literature, the Middle
English _love-longing_ is certainly one of them.
A new element had entered into human relationships, for which perhaps
the best name that can be found is ‘tenderness’. And so—at any rate
in the world of imagination—children as well as women gradually
became the objects of a new solicitude. We do not find in all
literature prior to the Middle Ages quite that _pathetic_ sense of
childhood which Chaucer has expressed so delicately in the story of
Ugolino of Pisa in his _Monk’s Tale_:
But litel out of Pize stant[34] a tour
In whiche tour in prisoun put was he,
And with hym been his litel children three,
The eldest scarsly fyf yeer was of age.
Allas, Fortune! it was greet crueltee
Swiche briddes[35] for to put in swiche a cage!
Quotations are scarcely needed to intimate how such colourless
words as _little_—here sentimentally repeated—_children_, and even
_cruelty_, had gradually been laden with fresh emotional significance
by the Roman Church’s worship of the baby Jesus and its popular
expression in carol and drama. We still have a few examples of these
old Nativity Plays, from the individual scenes of which we take the
word _pageant_, and about the same time that Chaucer wrote we know
that the tailors of Coventry composed and sang the beautiful carol
which begins:
Lully, lullay, thou little tiny Child,
By by lully, lullay.
Herod the King
In his raging
Charged he hath this day
His men of might
In his own sight
All young children to slay....
Thus, when Tindale and Coverdale came to make their translations of
the Bible in the sixteenth century, they found ready to their hand a
vocabulary of feeling which had indeed been drawn in the first place
from the austerities of the religious life, but which had in many
cases acquired warmer and more human echoes by having been applied to
secular uses. And just as lyrical devotion to the Virgin Mary and to
the infant Jesus had evolved a vocabulary which could express, and
thus partly create, a sentiment of tenderness towards all women and
young children, so we seem to feel the warmth of human affection,
as it were, reflected back into religious emotion in such creations
as Coverdale’s _lovingkindness_ and _tender mercy_, Tindale’s
_long-suffering_, _mercifulness_, _peacemaker_, and _beautiful_ (for
it was he who brought this word into general use), and in many of the
majestically simple phrases of the Authorised Version.
In tracing the elements of modern consciousness through the history
of words in this way, there is one mistake which it is especially
important to avoid, and that is the mistake of over-simplification.
For instance, just as it is true that the shade of feeling which
we call ‘tenderness’ can be traced back to the literature of the
Middle Ages, and that from there we can trace it farther back still,
through the Mariolatry of the Roman Church to the opening chapters
of the Luke Gospel, and so to the old Egyptian Isis-worship and the
philosophy of Plato, so it is also true that it can be understood
more perfectly and felt more fully when we have thus unravelled it.
But not to realize that with the appearance of a poetic tradition
which can give rise to such a poem as “I sing of a maiden” something
quite new, something with no perceptible historical origin, enters
into humanity, is to cultivate a deaf ear to literature, and to
mistake quite as grievously both the method and the object of
understanding history.
If medieval Europe is cut off from Greece and Rome by her imaginative
conception of women, she is cut off even more completely by her
abstention from slavery. Of this development, thus negatively stated,
there are few, if any, signs in our language; but traces are by no
means wanting of a certain deeper and more interior change which must
have underlain the other two. Perhaps it can best be expressed as a
new consciousness of the individual human soul. On the one hand the
sense of its independent _being_ and activity, of bottomless depths
and soaring heights within it, to be explored in fear and trembling
or with hope and joy—with _delight_ and _mirth_, or with _agony_,
_anguish_, _despair_, _repentance_—and on the other hand that feeling
of its being an _inner_ world, which has since developed so fully
that this book, for example, has fallen naturally into two halves.
In this connection it is particularly interesting to note the
appearance of _conscience_ in the thirteenth century. In classical
times the Latin ‘conscientia’ seems to have meant something more
like ‘consciousness’ or ‘knowledge’; it was generally qualified by
some other word (‘virtutum, vitiorum’—‘consciousness of virtues, of
vices,’ ...), and its termination, similar to that of _science_,
_intelligence_, ... suggests that it was conceived of by the Romans
more as a general, _abstract_ quality, which one would partake of,
but not actually possess—just as one has knowledge or happiness, but
not “a knowledge” or “a happiness”. Used in ecclesiastical Latin and
later in English, _conscience_ seems to have grown more and more
real, until at last it became that semi-personified and perfectly
private mentor whom we are inclined to mean to-day when we speak of
“my _conscience_” or “his _conscience_”.
The movement towards “individualism”, like many other phenomena of
modern civilization, has long ago shifted its centre of gravity
outside the walls of the Church. Once it was felt as the peculiar
glory of the Christian religion. In the Dark Ages heresies which
attempted to explain away the significant paradox of Christ’s
simultaneous divinity and humanity were hunted down with the utmost
rigour, and it is probable that a vivid sense of the dignity of the
individual human soul was at the bottom of a good many actions which
now seem to us like the very stultification of such a conviction.
This great inner world of consciousness, we may suppose, which each
individual was now felt to control in some measure for himself, was
a thing to fear as well as to respect. It gave to every single soul
almost infinite potentialities, for evil as well as good; and even
the wisest heads seem to have felt that civilization could only
be held together as long as all these souls maintained a certain
uniformity of pattern. Thus, while the influence of Christianity
had ensured to all men—not merely to a small slave-owning class—a
modicum of personal liberty, it deprived them in the same breath
of that dearest of all possessions, freedom of thought. The grim
meaning gradually acquired by the Latin word _Inquisition_, meaning
an ‘inquiry’, still signifies to us the ruthless pains that were now
taken, for the first time in the world’s history, to pry into and
endeavour to control that private thinking life of men which had
suddenly acquired such a vast importance in their eyes. The still
grimmer _auto-da-fé_ began life as a Spanish phrase meaning simply an
‘act of faith’.
* * * * *
It seems remarkable to us that, in spite of this active
discouragement of independent thinking, the Dark and Middle Ages
were, beyond dispute, the cradle of European philosophy. Perhaps this
was because men did not yet feel the need for such independence.
The leading quality of medieval thought was its receptiveness, and
towards the end of its life it seems to have become almost conscious
of this itself; for it is hardly possible to open a volume of Chaucer
without lighting on some half-respectful, half-ironical reference to
“olde clerkes” or “olde bokes”. But the profound respect in which the
written word had been held throughout the Middle Ages survives in
many other curious ways as well. We still use the word _authority_
in its two separate meanings of ‘a quotation from a book’ and ‘the
power of controlling’. Of these the first meaning is the older, and
from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries it may almost be said to
have included the latter within it. Again, our word _glamour_, a
later form of _gramarye_, suggests an almost mystical reverence for
the ‘grammar’ which—along with most of the other branches of medieval
learning—was derived entirely from the works of Aristotle. The
popularity and general use of _term_, which began life as a subtle
technicality of Aristotelian logic, reminds us again of the universal
study of that writer in the Middle Ages, and _spice_—a corrupted form
of ‘species’—is but another indication of the way in which the jargon
of classical philosophy crept into their everyday thought.
The change from Greek and Roman civilization to the civilization of
modern Europe is often represented as having been more abrupt than
it really was. We have deduced some of the intermediate stages in
the alterations of feeling. In the world of thought there are actual
written documents for our information, philosophical treatises and
counter-treatises, which, by revealing to us the very moment of
impact, enable us to trace more easily the reverberation of thought
from mind to mind. Very soon after the break up of Rome, when the
Empire was being partially re-organized under Teutonic dynasties and
the defunct Latin _Caesar_ rising again as the Germanic _Kaiser_,
the great medieval “Schools”, of which the most famous was at Paris,
began to arise out of the traditions of monastic learning. Their
classical library apparently consisted of one Platonic dialogue and
two or three works of Aristotle, all of them translated; but the
authority of these translations was absolute. At first Plato was
considered the greater “authority”, but from the beginning of the
thirteenth century it seems to have been accepted almost as a matter
of course that the one great object of all philosophy for all time
was the harmonization of Aristotelian logic and Catholic dogma.
But though the Aristotelian method (as they understood it) was all
in all, the actual Platonic system, with the help of Neoplatonism
and the Mystics, lingered in sufficient strength to divide medieval
philosophy for several hundred years into two rival camps. The one
party, known as “Realists”, held with Plato that “ideas”—now usually
called _universals_—had existed before, and could exist quite apart
from, things; while the “Nominalists” held that universals had no
separate or previous existence. But as time passed, many of the
Nominalists went farther still, maintaining that these universals
did not exist at all, that they were mere intellectual abstractions
or classifications made by the human mind—in fact “ideas” in the
sense in which, owing to them, we use the word to-day. One of the
reasons—perhaps the chief reason—why so many Schoolmen carried
Aristotle beyond himself in this way is a particularly interesting
one.
Reference has already been made to the wave of Arabic civilization
which surged into Europe early in the Dark Ages. It was a
civilization in every sense of the word; for in the ninth century
learning had developed under the Caliphs of Baghdad to a degree
unparalleled elsewhere in the world, and _rapprochements_ between the
two races and civilizations, which had already begun in the world
of philosophy, were soon strengthened and increased by those great
medieval experiments, the Crusades.[36] Now Arabic scholars were,
if anything, more enthusiastic Aristotelians than the scholars of
Europe. The curious word _arabesque_, and the fact that words like
_algebra_, _cipher_, _zero_, and some others to be mentioned in
the next chapter are among the few Arabic words which reached our
language before the fourteenth century, are both symptomatic of a
certain peculiarity of the Arabic mind which we may perhaps call the
tendency to abstraction. The Arab seems to have possessed something
of that combination of materialism on the one hand and excessive
intellectual abstraction on the other which we have already noticed
in the later stages of Roman mythology. Just as he made Mohammedanism
out of the Jewish sacred traditions, so he made Nominalism out of
Greek philosophy. The influence upon Christian thought of great
Arabic philosophers like Averroes and Avicenna is one of the most
astonishing chapters in its history. But it is not difficult to
see how it occurred. The learning of the Middle Ages was founded
entirely on translations, and this was an activity in which, as far
as Aristotle’s works were concerned, the Arabs had got in first.
According to Renan, some of the current versions of Aristotle were
“Latin translations from a Hebrew translation of a Commentary of
Averroes made on an Arabic translation of a Syriac translation of a
Greek text”.
To the Popes and those who had the power and interest of the Church
most at heart the problem appeared in quite a different light. It
was a question of steering Christian dogma between the Scylla
of pantheism and the Charybdis of materialism and its logical
conclusion, scepticism. Thus, throughout the history of Scholasticism
we have to do with a sort of triangle of intellectual forces: Realism
and Nominalism fighting a five hundred years’ war, and the Church,
in its official capacity, anxiously endeavouring to hold the balance
between them. One wonders whether the three parties to this ancient
dispute may not have found symbolic expression in Tweedledum,
Tweedledee, and the “Monstrous Crow” of nursery legend. But it is no
disparagement of the intellects of that day to say that to us the
chief interest of their polemics lies in the many new and accurate
instruments of thought with which they provided us. The common word
_accident_ is an excellent example. We use it every day without
realizing that it was only imported from Latin by the indefatigable
efforts of the Schoolmen to reconcile the doctrine of Realism with
the Catholic dogma of Transubstantiation. The _accidents_, when
they first came into the English language, meant that part of the
sacred bread and wine which remained after the _substance_ had been
transmuted into the body and blood of Christ.
On the whole it is a safe rule to assume that those who speak most
contemptuously of such thinkers as Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus are
the nearest modern representatives of their own idea of what these
Schoolmen were; that is to say, they are those whose imaginations
are most completely imprisoned within the intellectual horizon of
the passing age. Much fun has been made of medieval philosophy for
discussing such matters as how many angels can stand on the point
of a needle, and whether Christ could have performed His cosmic
mission equally well if He had been incarnated as a pea instead of
as a man. The growth of a rudimentary historical sense has, it is
true, made it fashionable lately to take these ancient thinkers a
little more seriously, but it is still the rarest thing to find
a philosopher or a psychologist who fully comprehends that he is
consuming the fruits of this long, agonizing struggle to state the
exact relation between spirit and matter, every time he uses such
key-words of thought as _absolute_, _actual_, _attribute_, _cause_,
_concept_, _deduction_, _essence_, _existence_, _intellect_,
_intelligence_, _intention_, _intuition_, _motive_, _potential_,
_predicate_, _substance_, _tendency_, _transcend_; _abstract_ and
_concrete_, _entity_ and _identity_, _matter_ and _form_, _quality_
and _quantity_, _objective_ and _subjective_, _real_ and _ideal_,
_general_, _special_, and _species_, _particular_, _individual_, and
_universal_. ‘Free will’ is the translation of a Latin phrase first
used by a Church Father, and ‘argumentum ad hominem’ is an example
of a scholastic idiom which has remained untranslated. Many of these
words, it is true, are in the first instance Latin translations
of Greek terms introduced by pagan writers before the days of the
Schoolmen; some, like _quality_ and _species_, by Cicero himself,
and others, like _accident_, _actual_, and _essence_, by later Latin
writers such as Quintilian or Macrobius. But it must be remembered
that, even in these cases, the words, as we use them to-day, are not
_mere_ translations. By their earnest and lengthy discussions the
Schoolmen were all the time defining more strictly the meanings of
these and of many other words already in use, and so adapting them to
the European brain that in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries
it was an easy matter for the lawyers and for popular writers like
Chaucer and Wyclif to stamp them with the authentic genius of the
English language and turn them into current coin.[37] Nobody who
understands the amount of pain and energy which go to the creation
of new instruments of thought can feel anything but respect for the
philosophy of the Middle Ages.
If the philosophy of the Middle Ages is based on the logic of
Aristotle, their science can be traced rather to the Greek thought
of pre-Aristotelian times. For authority it relied very largely on a
single dialogue of Plato, to which may be added Latin translations
of a small part of Hippocrates, and of his post-Christian successor
and interpreter, Galen. But the way in which its terms have entered
right into the heart of our language is proof enough that this
medieval science arose, not merely from blind subservience to
tradition, but also from an actual survival of the kind of feeling,
the kind of outlook which, ages ago, had created the tradition. In
spite of that strong and growing sense of the individual soul, man
was not yet felt, either physically or psychically, to be isolated
from his surroundings in the way that he is to-day. Conversely his
mind and soul were not felt to be imprisoned within, and dependent
upon, his body. Intellectual classifications were accordingly less
dry and clear, and science—that general speculative activity which a
later age has split up into such categories as astronomy, physics,
chemistry, physiology, psychology, ...—was as yet almost an undivided
whole. Common words like _ascendant_, _aspect_, _atmosphere_,
_choleric_, _common sense_, _complexion_, _consider_, _cordial_,
_disaster_, _disposition_, _distemper_, _ether_, _hearty_, _humour_,
_humorous_, _indisposed_, _influence_, _jovial_, _lunatic_,
_melancholy_, _mercurial_, _phlegmatic_, _predominant_, _sanguine_,
_saturnine_, _spirited_, _temper_, _temperament_, with _heart_,
_liver_, _spleen_, and _stomach_ in their psychological sense, most
of which retained their original and literal meanings down to the
fourteenth century, give us more than a glimpse into the relations
between body, soul, and cosmos, as they were felt by the medieval
scientist.
Thus, the physical body was said to contain four _humours_ (Latin
‘humor’, ‘moisture’)—_blood_, _phlegm_, _bile_ or _choler_,
and _black bile_ (melancholy)—which last had its seat in the
_hypochondria_. Not only diseases, or _distempers_, but qualities of
character were intimately connected with the proper ‘mixture’ (Latin
‘temperamentum’) of these humours, just as modern medical theory sees
a connection between the character and the glands. Thus, a man might
be good _humoured_ or bad _humoured_; he might have a good _temper_
or a bad _temper_; and according to which _humour_ predominated in
his _temperament_ or _complexion_, he was _choleric_, _melancholy_,
_phlegmatic_, or _sanguine_. His character depended on other things
as well; for the medieval scientist believed with Hippocrates that
the _arteries_ (Greek ‘aēr’, ‘air’) were ducts through which there
flowed, not blood, but three different kinds of _ether_ (Greek
‘aithēr’, ‘the upper air’) or _spirits_ (Latin ‘spiritus’, ‘breath’,
‘life’), viz. the _animal_[38] (Latin ‘anima’, ‘soul’), the _vital_,
and the _natural_. But the stars and the planets were also living
bodies; they were composed of that ‘fifth essence’ or _quintessence_,
which was likewise latent in all terrestrial things, so that the
character and the fate of men were determined by the _influences_
(Latin ‘influere’, ‘to flow in’) which came from them. The Earth had
its _atmosphere_ (a kind of breath which it exhaled from itself); the
Moon, which was regarded as a planet, had a special connection with
_lunacy_, and according as the planet Jupiter, or Saturn, or Mercury
was _predominant_ or in the _ascendant_ in the general _disposition_
of stars at a man’s birth, he would be _jovial_, _saturnine_, or
_mercurial_. Finally, things or persons which were susceptible to the
same _influences_, or which _influenced_ each other in this occult
way, were said to be in _sympathy_ or _sympathetic_.
_Test_ is an alchemist’s word, coming from the Latin ‘testa’, an
earthen pot in which the alchemist made his alloys. The same word
was once used as a slang term for ‘head’, and in its French form,
‘tête’, still retains that meaning. The phrase _hermetically sealed_
reminds us that alchemy, known as the ‘hermetic art’, was traced back
by its exponents to the mysterious Hermes Trismegistus, who himself
took his name from the Greek messenger-god Hermes. Other alchemists’
words are _amalgam_, _alcohol_, _alembic_, _alkali_, _arsenic_, and
_tartar_. The last five, together with the word _alchemy_ itself, all
come to us from Arabic, and are evidence of the fact that the Arabs
of the Dark Ages, besides being philosophers, were the fathers of
modern chemistry. It was, indeed, they who first joined the study of
chemistry to the practice of medicine, and thus initiated a science
of drugs. Moreover, that old ‘humoral’ pathology which has shaped so
many of our conceptions of human character—in so far as it was based
on ancient authority and tradition—came from Hippocrates to Europe,
for the most part not directly, but by way of Baghdad and Spain.
The more intimate and indispensable such conceptions are, the more
effort does it require from the twentieth-century imagination to
realize how they have grown up. It is so difficult, even when we are
reading contemporary literature, to blot out from our consciousness
the different meanings which have since gathered round the words.
If, however, we can succeed in doing this, we cannot but be struck
by the odd nature of the change which they have all undergone. When
we reflect on the history of such notions as _humour_, _influence_,
_melancholy_, _temper_, and the rest, it seems for the moment as
though some invisible sorcerer had been conjuring them all inside
ourselves—sucking them away from the planets, away from the outside
world, away from our own warm flesh and blood, down into the shadowy
realm of thoughts and feelings. There they still repose; astrology
has changed to astronomy; alchemy to chemistry; to-day the cold stars
glitter unapproachable overhead, and with a naïve detachment mind
watches matter moving incomprehensibly in the void. At last, after
four centuries, thought has shaken herself free.