62 DANGEROUS THOUGHTS

of a leisured class divorced from contact with the instruments of
production. In the history of science few social circumstances
have been as important as those which led to the disappearance
of chattel slavery. This view, well supported by Professor Far-
rington's recent book on Greek civilization, is repeatedly illus-
trated in Science for the Citizen. If we accept it, we are able to
approach the conflicts between Christianity aiyl science from a
new viewpoint. For our present purpose we must distinguish
two parallel and opposing currents in Christian syncretism. One
may be called the Spartacist ethic derived from its Essene back-
ground. The other was the Platonic metaphysics for the reception
of which the Pauline teaching prepared the way.

Inspired by the former, monks founded hospitals to which the
progress of science owes far more than most free thinkers are
willing to admit. Christian medicine opened the doors to the
Jewish missionaries of Moorish science, and it can scarcely be
doubted that the influence of the early Church encouraged the
decline of chattel slavery. The overthrow of the pagan schools
of Alexandria was the partial destruction of a culture which had
long since fossilized and could no longer provide guidance for
fresh human achievements. Unhappily the cosmogony of the
Timaeus, already enshrined rin Christian theology, outlived the
sound navigational science which was salvaged by the Moors.
Progressively, the official metaphysic of Christianity approxi-
mated to a Platonism which accepted the necessity of servile
labour and, as a corollary, exalted ratiocination out of contact
with the mundane realities from which science draws its sus-
tenance.

As Platonism supplanted Essenism, the Platonic ingredients of
Aristotle's ethics and Aristotle's physics had long since displaced
the temper of the Natural History, when the Parliament of Paris
passed the well-known law of 1624, prescribing that chemists
of the Sorbonne must conform to the teachings of Aristotle on
pain of death or confiscation of goods. Each department of
knowledge which is recognized as a science in the modern sense
of the word has felt the same paralysing grip. The dead hand of