UC-NRLF SB E7T 137 ND MEDIEVAL FFORD ALLBUTT THE JAMES K. MOFFITT FUND. LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. GIFT OF JAMES KENNEDY MOFFITT OF THE CLASS OF '86. Accession No. 1PJ5625 Class No. 'si ^H^VUxM^ SCIENCE AND MEDIEVAL THOUGHT. Pontoon: C. J. CLAY AND SONS, CAMBEIDGE UNIVEESITY PEESS WAEEHOUSE, AVE MAEIA LANE. ©laagofo: 50, WELLINGTON STREET. F. A. BROCKHAUS. lork: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. Bomfaag: E. SEYMOUR HALE. SCIENCE AND MEDIEVAL THOUGHT THE HARVEIAN ORATION DELIVERED BEFORE THE ROYAL COLLEGE OF PHYSICIANS, OCTOBER 18, 1900, u BY THOMAS CLIFFORD ALLBUTT, M.A., M.D. CANTAB. FELLOW OF THE COLLEGE, HON. LL.D. GLASGOW, HON. M.D. DUEL., HON. D.Sc. VICT., HON. F.R.C.P. DUEL., F.R.S. KEGIUS PROFESSOR OF PHYSIC IN THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE ; FELLOW OF GONVILLE AND CAIUS COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE ; CONSULTING PHYSICIAN TO THE LEEDS GENERAL INFIRMARY ; PHYSICIAN TO THE ADDENBROOKE'S HOSPITAL, CAMBRIDGE. OF THE UNIVERSITY OF LONDON C. J. CLAY AND SONS CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS WAREHOUSE AVE MARIA LANE 1901 [All Rights reserved.] 105625 "Duo enim sunt modi cognoscendi, scilicet per argumentum et experimentum. Argumentum concludit, et facit nos concludere qusestionem, sed non certificat, neque removet dubitationem, ut quiescat animus in intuitu veritatis, nisi earn inveniat via experi- entiae." KOGER BACON, Op. Ma jus, Venet. 1750, p. 336. TOM SIR WILLIAM SELBY CHURCH, BART., M.D. PRESIDENT OF THE ROYAL COLLEGE OF PHYSICIANS OF LONDON, THIS OEATION, DELIVERED AT HIS REQUEST, IS DEDICATED. 105625 PREFACE. ERRATUM. p. 78, note 1, 1. 19 ; /or " were in orders, for the most part in holy orders ;" read " were generally speaking in holy orders; " is chilled, or a lustier offspring turns unnaturally to curse the dead ; so in their decrepitude lay the Middle Ages upon modern life ; and the Middle Ages were accursed, until certain pious men sought to reanimate their vestments and their formulas, and to set the hands back on the dial of the PREFACE. TN the Middle Ages the old world had passed, ' and the vision of a new world came near to the eager and passionate hearts of many peoples. Lincoln and Wells, Amiens and Chartres, Florence and Assisi tell us of the glory of that vision ; and bear witness of its flight : for with Gilbert, Galileo, Harvey and Newton the Middle Ages themselves became a phantom, and again the spirit of a new world appeared. Thus in the phases of time the world dies and is born again ; fulfilling greater destinies. But the new are born in the cold bed of the elder worlds, and the young life is chilled, or a lustier offspring turns unnaturally to curse the dead ; so in their decrepitude lay the Middle Ages upon modern life ; and the Middle Ages were accursed, until certain pious men sought to reanimate their vestments and their formulas, and to set the hands back on the dial of the 8 centuries ; as many minded man seeks wistfully to reanimate the simple wonders and beliefs of his childhood. Their ministry was no more than pious ; the method of modern history wins the fruits of the past while casting away the shadow of its withered branches. This comparative method, first applied to the art and romance of the Middle Ages, so that every dilettante may now discourse to us of their evolution, has been applied also to the thought of the period ; but its results, laid up in the closets of a few scholars, are as yet unfamiliar. It may then become one, who in no sense a scholar has strayed into these secret places, to try to distribute some lessons of the medieval thought which, to many of us, seems as sere and outworn as did the relics of Gothic shrines to our great-grandfathers. For, as in those medieval generations which lay nearest us the furnace had cooled, impatiently we had thrown metal and dross aside, and let our contempt for the dryriess and pedantry of its latter days prevent our vision of the earlier time when the passion for knowledge bore up the world, and sought even to contain it. That dogma is not eternal is manifest to every wanderer in the streets of Toledo, yet the historian may well recall us to 9 the study of a time when, by mystical or intellectual inspirations, men strove eagerly to know the meaning of life, its origins, and its issues ; and may lead us to the discovery of the seeds and wells of its fertility. The Greeks prophesied that before man can determine his place and service in this world he must form some theory of the world as a whole ; the ages of faith prophesied that great deeds must be born of great faith and of great conceptions. To those who live only in the past, or only in the present, there seems in the discriminations of the comparative historian to be a certain cold-bloodedness. Are not the ears of this critic, so aloof from the murmuring of creed and con- troversy, are they not deaf to the voices of the spirit which he would interpret to us ? A dis- tinguished bishop who was among my hearers, with the fervour and gentle humour so well known in him, rallied me not for celebrating science but for putting religion to rout. Yet in our own day surely the argument is changed, not in form only but in very nature ; so changed by the concep- tions of evolution, which have entered the mind of churchman and layman alike, that not a few 10 speculative beliefs are changing sides without the knowledge of the disputants ; and he who thinks himself a defender of the faith may have joined the revolt. But if we no longer carry the colours of the troops of the past we shall collect our lessons from its strategies ; and for one of these lessons a prelate of the King will give thanks with me, that his supremacy has palsied the arm of the inquisitor to strengthen that of the apostle. An unsystematic reader of a subject finds it out of his power to make due acknowledgment of the help and advantage derived from expert authors. Much of the matter had seeded itself insensibly in his brain in the course of general reading and conversation ; much of it again had been obtained more carefully from sources now forgotten. To the following authors I know I am profoundly indebted, as I am to many others to whose names and works I can now give no reference : Haurdau, La Philosophie Scolastique, Ed. 1872 ; Jowett, Dialogues of Plato (vol. in. p. 523); Jourdain (Amable), Recherches critiques, Paris 1848 ; Jourdain 11 (Charles), Excursions historiques, Paris 1888 (and the Philosophic de St Thomas of the same author) ; Ampere, Histoire litt. de la France avant le xnme siecle ; Brucker's Historia Critica Philosophise (English Ed., 1791); Renan, Averroes, Paris 1866 ; the Philosophic pe'rip. apud Syros ; and the Peuples Sdmitiques dans 1'histoire de la civilisation, of the same author ; Roger Bacon, Westminster Review, 1864, two Articles (by Thomas Marshall, M.A. Oxon.) ; Schmidt, Essai sur les Mys- tiques du xivme siecle ; Benn, A. W., The Greek Philosophers, London 1882 (and many helpful essays in periodical literature) ; Zeller, Die Philosophic der Griechen, 1881 ; Krische, A. B., Theologische Lehre d. Griechischen Denker, Gottingen 1840 ; Ueberweg, Grundriss d. Gesch. d. Phil, des Alterthums, Berlin 1867 ; Gerlach und Traumiiller, Gesch. d. physik. Experimentierkunst, Leipzig 1899 ; RashdalTs History of Universities; Haeser, Geschichte der Medicin, Jena 1875-82; Baas, J. H., Gesch. d. Medicin, Stuttgart 1876 ; Idem, Die geschichtliche Entwicklung des arzt- lichen Standes, Berlin 1896 ; Charles Daremberg (all his works) ; Rousselot, Etudes sur la philosophic dans le Moyen Age, 1840 ; Pattison, Casaubon, 1875 ; Meunier, Francis, Essai sur la vie et les ouvrages de Nicole Oresme, Paris 1857. Descartes, Epist. Cartes. 4to. Amst., 1668; Plumpius, Fundamenta Med. Fol. Lovan., 1652; Sylvii Op. Omn., 1679, p. 875; Haller, Elein. Physiol, 1757, I. 3; Tiede- mann, Physiologic de Thomme, Paris 1831, I. 41 ; Delle Chiaja, Instituzione di Anatom. e Fis. Comp., 1832, 12 i. 13. (The six last works are cited as being especially useful, among many others, to show the extent to which modern physiology, from Harvey onwards, is based upon vivisection ; and that it could not have arisen or thriven otherwise. It was by the test of many vivisections that Plumpius was led to the honourable withdrawal of his opposition to Harvey.) INTRODUCTION1. IN the many Harveian Orations which have been delivered since the death of the founder of modern physiology the direct aspects of his honour and of his work have been exhausted ; of late years the orators have concerned themselves with indirect aspects. Some of my friends have said to me that they lack a per- spective view of Harvey and his work ; that even highly educated men have little sense of his relation to medieval thought, or of the evolution of medieval into modern thought. Of the several stars of the constella- tion— of Copernicus, Gilbert, Galileo, Harvey — they had some knowledge ; but how came Harvey to be at Padua ? how did science spring up in North Italy ? did science arise out of the womb of medicine, or contrariwise ? why 1 To bring the oration within the time allotted, this portion, and the paragraphs on astrology added as an appendix, were omitted. For the same reason the paragraphs on scepticism (p. 82) were also omitted but by inadvertence have held their continuity in the text. It is customary to print the text as delivered ; and this must be my excuse for the cumbrous apparatus of notes, much of which might have been taken into an enlarged text. The notes are necessary to fortify statements which orally may pass, but do not satisfy a reader. 14 did natural science not flourish in the thirteenth century, and was it not a great misfortune for Europe that it did not then flourish? what were the systems of thought which in the Middle Ages preceded, encouraged or thwarted the travail of the human mind, and what of good or ill do we owe to them ? These and such ques- tions it seemed not unfitting that a Harveian Orator of this latter day should consider. Now on the philosophy of the Middle Ages, and on its relation to the era of positive science of which Harvey was perhaps the chief pioneer, there lay in a drawer in my cabinet the confused and occasional notes of many years. An interest in this thorny subject, sown in my mind at first by accident, and reawakened by these enquiring friends, had for me the charms of an old fancy, and I trust some brief essay thereon may have a temporary service ; if, that is, I can touch the imagination of my hearers, and after some broken fashion bring before them a vision of the nations swayed hither and thither upon the face of Europe by a thirst for knowledge of a kind different, both in its methods and in its aims, from our own. This oration cannot have the merit of an original study. Had I the equipment I have not the leisure to carry my investigations to the sources. Yet I may have attained to some maturity of judgment herein by long occupation of my mind since, in 1863, my old friend Mr Thomas Marshall of Leeds, sometime of St John's College, Oxford, interested me in the life and work of Roger Bacon, the only eminent forerunner of the great naturalists of the seventeenth century. 15 The art of the Middle Ages and the social and political history of the time have fascinated modern Europe; for medieval thought, though its phrases sur- vive in their mouths, few persons have shown any care : yet to these conflicts we owe what we are. No great battles of mankind have been fought in vain; none of its great captains has deserved oblivion. Yet we shrug our shoulders at their uncouth or outlandish names ; we assume that from their chairs there issued naught but rhetoric, casuistries and fallacies, and that their multitudinous disciples were silly moths. Each period of human achievement has its phases j of spring, culmination, and decline ; and it is in its decline that the leafless tree comes to judgment. In the unloveliness of decay the Middle Ages are as other ages have been, as our own will be : but in those ages there was more than one outburst of life ; more than once the enthusiasm of the youth of the West went out to explore the ways of the realm of ideas; and, if we believe ourselves at last to have found the only thoroughfare, we owe this knowledge to those who before us travelled the uncharted seas. If we have inherited a great commerce and dominion of science it is because their argosies had been on the ocean, and their camels on the -desert. "Discipulus est prioris poste- rior dies " ; man cannot know all at once ; knowledge must be built up by laborious generations. In all times, as in our own, the advance of knowledge is very largely by elimination and negation; we ascertain what is not true, and we weed it out. To perceive and to respect the 16 limits of the knowable we must have sought to trans- gress them. We can build our bridge over the chasm of ignorance with stored material in which the thirteenth century was poor indeed, we can fix our bearings where then was no foundation ; yet man may be well engaged when he knows not the ends of his work; and the schoolmen in digging for treasure cultivated the field of knowledge, even for Galileo and Harvey, for Newton and Darwin. Their many_£mirs. came not of indolence, for they were passionate ; not of hatred of light, for they were eager for the light ; not of fickleness, for they wrought with unparalleled devotion; nor indeed of ignorance of particular things, for they knew many things : they erred because they did not know, and they could not know, 'the conditions of the problems which, as they emerged from the cauldron of war and from the wreck of letters and science, they were nevertheless bound to attack, if civil societies worthy of the name were to be constructed. How slow in gestation is the mother of truth we may see by comparing the schoolmen of the second medieval period with those of the first ; in the enlargement of their view, the better furniture of their minds, and the deeper meaning of their distinctions : and when we compare with these later schoolmen the naturalists of the seventeenth century, we find not new acquirements only but also a new direction of the pursuit of truth. It seems hardly comprehensible that great and stable societies have been built up on transcendental schemes of thought, upon conceptions poised as it were in the air. 17 Without a system of morals no civil society could exist ; yet if mankind must have waited for civil polity until some such system were built up from below, of scientifi- cally tested materials, social constructions would have been virtually impossible. In morals, as in the arts, the art precedes the science ; the intuitions of genius imagine social schemes of provisional validity, and new and lofty standards of fitness. But a social fabric thus born of a vision can bear no rough handling ; and even the solid builders who would make a more permanent foundation upon positive conceptions, while seeking more or less deliberately to underpin the fabric, may, and often do, shake it to ruin. Hence in all guardians of morals the dread of meddling with the reigning vision of truth ; hence, its sanctity, that no man shall try the stuff of which it is made. And the dangers of heresies from within are more fearful than those of alien attacks ; social cohesion, the end of it all, is thereby more exposed to disintegration. Yet nevertheless, as the generations of men change, and as knowledge increases, men see from new points of view ; and thus while for some the reigning vision retains its apparent solidity, for others its rays are broken or dissolved. Even John Henry Newman was compelled to teach the relativity of truth, and that a doctrine of development must be accepted. For every provisional synthesis then the time must come when the appari- tion of truth can no longer command united allegi- ance, and criterions begin to encroach upon sanctions. Broader and more stable foundations have, it is true, A. 2 18 been rising almost insensibly, yet it may be long ere the superstructure rise into the heavenly light ; in the lower work many will see no beauty and no hope, others will see safety in its enlargement and solidity. By these indeed the visions of the imagination are apt to be forgotten, or in the pressure of intellectual veri- fication even despised ; the mean level of conception may not indeed be lower, it may haply be higher, yet the highest, wherein truth may be revealed by illumin- ation, is not divined in its full force, abundance and life. Great seers are wont to leave to others to find out, or even to care, what bottom they stood upon ; yet only through transitory periods of a humbler duty than theirs can the bases be laid and enlarged for times of richer fruition. One of the profoundest of modem sayings was that of Freeman — that the end of modern material pro- gress is to bring large societies up to the level of small ones, • This is the day of a great celebration ; that on this anniversary I am worthy to take a place in the succession of your Orators is more than I dare to believe, that you have deemed me worthy is my encouragement. In private duty also I am bound to honour one of the greatest of the sons of the University of Cambridge, and the greatest member of the ancient and honourable house of Gonville and Caius College. 19 In some respects I am ill equipped for my office; of the history of the practice of Medicine from the time of Galen to the time of Harvey I am almost ignorant, I fear wilfully ignorant. Well indeed may we turn our eyes away from those centuries wherein one of the chief callings of man fell into unexampled and even odious degradation ; yet I trust that in me this igno- rance and this aversion may be compensated by some familiarity with the history of thought in the Middle Ages, a familiarity acquired during thirty- six years of abiding interest, and occasional study. The discovery of the circulation of the blood by William Harvey is eommonly regarded among scientific discoveries as pre-eminent if not unique. I can quote but two opinions on this matter, both taken beyond our own land. In France, Dr Dar- emberg exclaims " Voici Harvey ! Comme au jour de la creation le chaos se de*brouille, la lumiere se s^pare des tenfcbres ! " In Germany, Dr Baas says that Harvey stands alone in respect of the world of life ; that his discovery of the inner working of the microcosm takes a place equal to, if not indeed higher than, those of Copernicus, Kepler and Newton in respect of the macrocosm. It will be 2—2 20 my endeavour to show that these judgments are historically justifiable. To put the discovery of the systemic circu- lation of the blood in its true light, we must have some notion of the history of philosophy, science and medicine. Medicine, and herein it is in contrast with Theology and Law, had its sources almost wholly in the Greeks. Not only in the doctrine of the four elements of Empedocles, a doctrine which has survived almost to our own day1, and in the physical theories of Heraclitus and Leucippus, did medicine, for good or ill, first find a scheme of thought, but in the schools of Hippocrates and of Alexandria it was based also, and far more soundly, upon natural history and anatomy. The noble figure of Galen, the first experi- mental physiologist and the last of the great Greek physicians, portrayed for us by Dr Payne in the Harveian Oration of 1896, stood eminent upon the 1 The "humoral doctrine" is imperfectly known. The four elements are earth, water, air, fire ; the four qualities are hot, cold, moist, dry ; the four humours are blood, phlegm, yellow bile, black bile. By permutation of these were obtained the endless elaborations of the galenist doctrine which for many centuries blinded Europe not to the truth only, but also to the clinical and physiological methods, example, and attain- ments of Galen himself. 21 brow of the abyss when, as if by some convulsion of nature, medicine was overwhelmed for fifteen centuries. To the philosophy of medicine, Galen had given more than enough ; to its natural history he had contributed in the following of Hippocrates ; to its discoveries he had given the greatest of all means of research, individual genius ; to its methods he had given, but in vain, that indispensable method, practised first perhaps in history by Archimedes and the Alexandrians, of verification by experiment; a method, after Galen, virtually lost till the time of Gilbert, of Galileo and of Harvey. In the growth of human societies small civilisa- tions, however exquisite, have been sacrificed to the formation of vaster and vaster congregations of men ; thus only, it would seem, is an equi- librium to be reached of sufficient stability for the highest ends of mankind. Greece, beautiful as was her bloom, penetrating as was her spirit, perhaps because of her very freedom of thought, never became a nation ; her city states were too wilful to combine. The Macedonian power broadened the foundation of polity eastward and westward ; and this work was carried as far perhaps as sword and fasces could carry it by the power of Rome. 22 But even the Roman peace, bought as it was at the cost of learning and the arts, was but a mechanical peace ; in the wilder, more turbulent and more heterogeneous peoples of the later Empire the bodies but not the wills of men were in subju- gation. The great system of Roman Law, which Numa, the Moses of Rome, had invested with supernatural awe, had become but an external rule ; even in Rome herself, poorer in people, poorer in commerce, poorer than ever in ideas, the sanction of patriotism was failing, and her citizens were held together for the most part by their baser and more dangerous passions1. For Eastern Europe the University of Constantinople established a compact and uniform system of thought, subtle prolix and acquisitive rather than original or profound ; but in the West, under the Frank and later Northern devastations, the very traditions of learning and obedience were broken up ; schools were closed, and even the art of writing was almost lost. Then it was that the cohesion and development of Western Europe 1 "Nee ullum satis validum imperium erat coercendis seditionibus populi, flagitia hominuin ut caeremonias deum protegentis." Tac. Ann. in. 60. 23 were saved by a new and a wonderful thing. From the East, the home of religions, had spread, like an exhalation, Christianity, that religion which proves by its survival that it is the fittest sanction for the will of man. This religion, enter- ing as a new spirit into the ancient fabric of Roman Empire, was to hold men's service in heart and soul as well as in body; yet to this end no mere mystic or personal religion could suffice : clothing itself with the political and ritual pride and even with the mythology of the pagan Empire it inspired a new adoration ; but it imposed also upon Europe a catholic and elabo- rated creed. To preserve the authority of the common faith not only must every knee be bowed, not only must every heart be touched, but to build and to repair its fabric every mind must also bring its service. How the scheme of the Faith was built up, how oriental ecstasy and hellenistic subtlety, possessing themselves of the machinery of Roman pomp, were wrought to this end, we may briefly consider. As, politically, under Diocletian and Constantine the ancient world gave place to the new, so in the third century philosophy was born again in 24 neo-platonism1, the offspring of the coition of East and West in Alexandria, where all religions and all philosophies met together. The world and the flesh were crucified that by the spirit, man might enter into God2. Pure in its ethical mood, neo- platonism, says Harnack, led surely to intellectual bankruptcy; the irruption of the barbarians was not altogether the cause of the eclipse of natural knowledge : to transcendental intuition the wisdom of the world had become foolishness. Yet even then, as again and again, came the genius of Aris- totle to save the human mind. The death of Hypatia was the death of the School of Alexandria, but in Athens neo-platonism survived and grew. Proclus, ascetic as he was, was versed also in Aristotle ; and he compelled the Eastern mysteries into categories : so that on the closure of the School of Athens by Justinian (A.D. 529) a formal philosophy was bequeathed to the Faith ; the first scholastic period was fashioned, and the 1 It must not be supposed that the idealism of Plato and the mysticism of the East were alike, or even akin. Plato was a Greek ; his mind, as we appreciate such qualities, was sane and lucid : he had no yearning whatever for absorption in the Infinite ; but rather, like Aristotle, for a noble life. " Oftener on her knees than on her feet Died every day she lived." Macbeth iv. 3. 25 objects and methods of enquiry were determined for thirty generations. From Aristotle Europe adopted logic first, and then metaphysics, yet both in method and in purpose Origen and Augustine were platonists; rationalised dogma lived upon dialectic, and conflicted with mysticism ; but logic, dogma and mysticism alike disdained experience. Thus, no mere external sanction, stood the Faith ; threefold : from the past it brought its pompous ritual, it appealed by its subtle dogmatic scheme to the intellects, and by its devotion to the hearts of men. Through the mirage of it, when its substance had waned, Copernicus, Galileo, and Harvey had to steer by the compass of the experimental method. This was their chief ad- versity, and of other adversities I have to speak. The visitor to the Dominican Church of St Catherine at Pisa will see on its walls St Thomas of Aquino with the Holy Scriptures in his hand ; prostrate beneath him is Averroes with his Great Commentary, but beside him Plato bearing the Timseus. It was the fortune of the Faith that, of all the treatises of Plato, the Timseus, the most fantastic and the least scientific, should have been set apart to instruct the medieval 26 world ; that the cosmical scheme of the Timoeus, apparelled in the Latin of Chalcidius,— for there were then no Greek texts in the libraries of the West, — should for some 500 years have occupied that theoretical activity which Aristotle regarded as the highest good of man1. Again, those works of Aristotle which might have made for natural knowledge fell out of men's hands'^, while in them, as Abelard tells us of himself, lay the Categories, the Interpretation, and the Intro- duction of Porphyry to the Categories, all in the Latin of Boetius 3 : treatises which made for 1 I see in recent reports of Egyptian exploration that at Oxyrhynchus Plato was represented with curious persistence by the Phsedo and the Laches ; and these treatises appear in the early Fay yum papyri. 2 A few axioms, collected from the physical and meta- physical treatises (perhaps by Cassiodorus from Boetius), were current from an early date. The translations of Boetius must for a time have lain in some neglect ? 3 Alcuin had but a translated abridgment or summary of the Categories, attributed to Augustine ; and in a MS. of the tenth century we find no more than this. Boetius' full trans- lation of the Categories was not current till the end of this century, when all the logic of Aristotle was in the hands of the doctors. In the earlier Middle Ages, as in the writings of John of Salisbury and of William of Conches, we hear even more of Boetius than of the master himself. Virgil, Seneca and Cicero also were the sources of much of the culture of this period. Alcuin was a grammarian ; he taught 27 peripatetic nominalism, but whereby men were versed rather in logic and rhetoric than in natural science. Thus Plato's chimera of the human microcosm, a reflection of his theory of the macrocosm, stood beside the Faith as the second great adversary of physiology. The influence of authority, by which Europe was to be welded together, governed all human ideas. As in theology was the authority of the Faith, so in the science and medicine of the first period of the Middle Ages was that of the neo-platonic doctrines, and, in the second period, of the Arabian versions of Galen and of Aristotle; furthermore in this rigid discipline me- tallic doctrine almost necessarily overbore life and freedom. It is not easy for us to realise a time when intellectual progress — which involves the successive abandonment of provisional syntheses — was unconceived ; when truths were regarded from Priscian and Donatus, improved the eighth century Latin, and probably made Virgil and Cicero known in Gaul and Britain. He knew but little Greek, as we infer from his quotation of the names of the Categories. Erigena knew more Greek and carried some of it to the Court of Charles the Bald. See note 2, p. 65. Alcuin probably did not visit Ireland. Boetius had translated also both Analytics and the Topics. 28 as stationary ; when reasons were not tested but counted and balanced ; when even the later Aver- roists found final answers either in Aristotle or in Galen1. Thus in the irony of things it came to pass that Harvey was withstood by the dogma of Galen who, in his own day, had passionately appealed from dogma to nature. Porphyry of Tyre, who lived in the 3rd century, may be called the founder of both Arabian and Christian scholastics. He was an Alexandrian, but of peripatetic rather than platonic opinions. In the Isagoge, or Introduction to the Categories, already mentioned as translated by Boetius about 500 A.D., he set forth plainly a problem which during the Middle Ages rent Western Europe asunder ; a problem which, says John of Salisbury2, 1 Yet Roger Bacon seems to have apprehended both pro- gress and the relativity of truth. Before Newman, he declared that God makes no full revelation but gives it in instalments ; * and in another passage he speaks of the judgments of Aristotle, and of other great teachers, "secundum possibili- tatem sui temporis aliud tempus fuit tune, et aliud mine eat " — a remarkable saying. Of the Saints he says " they had their time, we have our own." Vid. also note, p. 80. 2 Modern French historians do us the honour of annexing our heroes ; in respect of the scholars of the Middle Ages M. Charles Jourdain has set, or followed, this example. John of Salisbury, that charming child of renascence, born out 29 engaged more of the time and passions of men than for the house of Csesar to conquer and govern the world ; one indeed which even in our day and country is not wholly resolved. The controversy lay between the Realists1 and of due time, was first claimed as a Frenchman ; then, as this "provenance" becomes untenable, he, and others, are called "Anglo-French." The University of Paris in the xiith century was no more France than Rome was Italy. In our sedentary arable life we do not realise the nomad habits of our forefathers. Edward the First would inhabit six distant ^ castles in less than as many weeks; indeed Great Britain itself was then no island. The heroes, nay the armies, of Froissart's Story fly about the world in their seasons like migrating birds. All keen scholars of the West went to the University of Paris, the daughter of kings and popes, and the intellectual centre not of a strip of kingdom between Anjou and the Empire, but of Europe itself. And of the scholars of Paris, Englishmen were, we hear, the most tur- bulent, but the boldest in argument and the most greedy of learning ; this last character perhaps it is that now-a-days looks least English. Kuno Fischer admires the procession of great Englishmen down the highway of medieval thought, from Erigena to Francis Bacon. John was born at Salisbury, spent thirteen of his early years at the University of Paris, the best of them in the stormy service of Thomas Becket, and but the last five as Bishop of Chartres. We do not call Lanfranc ^ an Englishman, nor even Adrian the Fourth an Italian. 1 The name Realism has been improperly used — improperly because previously engaged — to signify the conception of an objective world, from the play of which our impressions arise, and of which our impressions are, if not likenesses, at any rate symbols, as opposed to the name "Idealism" which, with a like violence, has been turned to signify the conception that 30 the Nominalists ; and the issues of it, in the eleventh century, — at which time the "Dark Ages" passed into the earlier of the two periods of the Middle Ages, — were formulated on the realist side by William of Champeaux, while the Breton Rous- selin, or Roscellinus, had the perilous honour of defining them on behalf of the nominalists1. To see the depth of the difference we must step back a little, to a time when metaphysics and psychology were not distinguished from other spheres of science2, and all research had for its object the nature of being. Plato himself held ideas not as mere abstractions but in some degree as creative powers ; and we shall see how potent this function became in the thought of the Middle Ages when, the universe of things is but a picture produced by the evolution of the phenomena of consciousness. The proper names for these opposite conceptions are of course Nou- menalism and Phenomenalism. Realism proper as a habit of thought, whatever may have been its provisional uses, is now a mischievous habit; noumenalism is a harmless amusement. 1 Roscellinus, the Roger Bacon of the eleventh century, learned, rebellious, lucid and heroic, withstood the Church for philosophy as did Bacon in the thirteenth for natural science. It would seem that in heroism at any rate Abelard was below his master. 2 Vid. p. 50. 31 in the ardour of research into the nature of being, the modes of individuating principles were distin- guished or contrasted with an ingenuity incom- prehensible to Plato or Aristotle, or at any rate undesired by these greater thinkers. Aristotle avoided the question whether form or matter individuate ; he held that there is no form and no matter extrinsic to the individual. But by the medieval realist every particular, every thing, was regarded as after some fashion the product of universal matter and individual form. Now "form" might be regarded, and severally was regarded, as a shaping, determinative force or principle, pattern type or mould, having real existence apart from stuff, or, on the other hand, as an abstract prin- ciple or pattern having no existence but as a con- ception of the mind of the observer. The realists roundly asserted that form is as actual as matter, and that things arise by their participation — with- out whiteness no white thing, without humanity no man ; and not individuals only : for the realist, out- platonising Plato, genera and species also had their forms, either pre-existent ("universalia ante rem"), or continuously evolved in the several acts of creation ("universalia in re"). Indeed for the 32 extreme realist every " predicamental modality " was "aliquid ens separatum"; for instance, the soul, the active intellect, the passive intellect, and so on : conversely, by fusing idea with will, for other philosophers realism would get pushed back into efficient reason or divine will, and almost vanish1. By this latter route the Sorbonne, originally opposed to the Thomists, became nominalist after all ; as did those once pious realists the Augustinians and Cistercians. Setting aside then the extreme nominalists, who would have dissolved thought by declaring all creatures to be so individual as to be incomparable, — " pulverising existence into de- tached particulars," as some one has put it — and that names of kinds are mere nouns, or indeed mere air (" flatus vocis "), the prevalent nominalists were content to deny to ideas, forms, principles, or abstractions any other existence than as functions 1 The opponents of the theory of the Mass are apt to charge the Roman Church with the proposition that therein the ele- ments are changed into "real" flesh and blood. In the nineteenth century, as in the thirteenth, this Church has not, I believe, determined whether the "real " substance be corporeal or incorporeal, separable or inseparable from the sensible pro- perties of things; whether in a word it be something or, as many of us would say, nothing at all. Spinoza regarded "substance" as intelligent and extended. 33 of the human mind — as subjective conceptions. For Ockham, says Haur^au, an idea was but a modality of the thinking subject. Abstractions then for these thinkers were but mental machinery for analysis of the concrete. Aristotle was as obscure and inconsistent in his language herein, and often elsewhere, as he was profound and scru- pulous ; but when his works came to be studied as a whole, and in the original tongue, the influence of his method, rather than the close consistency of his language, told against realism : virtually he was a conceptualist, and he found reality, where Plato denied it, in the particular object of sense1. 1 Thus it was difficult to claim his authority for one side or the other. The metaphysical treatises were not known till the later part of the twelfth century. (See p. 75, note 2.) At the outset of the Physics Aristotle discusses what nature is in itself, and defines first elements ; in the Second Analytics on the other hand, although thinking of science as deductive and expository, he strongly opposes the primary existence of ideas, though these are predicable of many individuals. By excess of logical formations, the division of properties, the use of such terms as "ylvr) viroKeifieva" &c. &c., he laid himself open to misconception, and so was readily platonised by his commentators. It would seem indeed that for Aristotle uni- versals were not merely propositions obtained by negation of individual variations, but something more active. A VOTJO-IS became somehow a TTOI'TJO-IS; e.g. "T) drjuiovpyijo-acra (frvo-is" His position may be appreciated briefly thus : — In the Cate- gories Aristotle speaks of individuals as primarily existent, A. 3 34 Even Francis Bacon, who was deeply indebted to Aristotle, never extricated himself from the tangle of form, cause and law1. Now this was a great argument, no empty dispute ; the bones of dead controversies cumber / the ground, but no controversy was empty which moved profoundly the minds and passions of men : both for ecclesiastical and secular thought the dispute was grave. While realism was essential to the Church — for instance, on realist grounds \ St Anselm defended the medieval doctrine of the Trinity against Roscellinus; the Church herself while in Met. Z, and elsewhere, the primary existent is the form. The inconsistency is, however, more apparent than real ; for in the Categories it is the individual so far as he represents his natural kind which is primarily existent, whilst the form which in the Metaphysics is primarily existent occurs only in the individual. This terse appreciation is one of my many debts to Dr Jackson. 1 It were almost to be desired, for our own lucidity, that we could get rid of the words cause and law, and use language significant of order only. Aristotle's influence has weighed heavily in favour of studying " Causes " rather than sequences ; thus it is hard to clear our own minds, and impossible to clear the minds of our pupils, of a genetic notion of causation — that an effect comes, as it were, from the womb of its causes. Even Ockham taught as if causes contained their effects. Mr Marshall (West. Rev. loc. cit.) is of opinion that Roger Bacon by his "non oportet causas investigare" intended to confine scientific thought to the relations of phenomena. 35 claimed a real existence apart from the wills of suc- cessive generations of individual and variable men; she taught that Man had fallen not only in many or all individual cases, but as a kind having a real existence1, and again that in the Mass there is change of hypostasis2 — while then realism was essential to the Faith, yet if forms pre-exist ("ante rem") then the acts of God must be predetermined — "fatis" non "avolsa voluntas" ; or if forms are only "in re" God must be form, living in each and every act and thing, which is Pantheism (" materia omnium Deus"): an impersonal conception and a dissolution of dogma which the Church must and did abhor. " Pessimus error " — there is the abyss, cried Albert, avoiding it by dialectical juggles. Erigena, the bril- liant prophet and protestant3 of the first period of 1 As St Anselin put it, "Participatione speciei plures homines sunt unus homo." Out of humanity individual men proceed. 8 Vid. p. 32, note. 3 Erigena, "the miracle of the Holy Ghost"; a figure of almost mythical grandeur, arising in the far west, full of new learning, of lyric enthusiasm, and heroic courage. He did not protest, with St Columba, against the Papacy only ; he pro- tested against authority, and he protested against mighty ignorance ; neither of which should withstand the persuasion of right reason. "Ratio immutabilis...qu3e...nullms auctori- tatis adstipulatione roborari indiget." His works were pro- scribed and burned. 3—2 36 the scholastic philosophy, was virtually a pantheist after the pattern of Parmenides1 ; as Spinoza was the last great realist. David of Dinan again was such a pantheist, though luckily for him the Church did not find it out till he was dead; and he was martyred only in his bones. Indeed the great Robert of Lincoln barely escaped the accusation of pantheism under the wing of Augustine. The heresies of David, and of Amaury, caused the reaction of the first years of the 13th century against Aristotle. Amaury seems indeed to have cleared out Christian dogma pretty thoroughly, and to have preached the coming of science as the " third age " of the world. Many of his followers were sent to the stake ; by the Synod of Paris (1209) the works of Aristotle were proscribed, and many copies of them burned. This proscription was virtually withdrawn by Gregory the Ninth in 1231 ; and Hales, Albert and St Thomas devoted themselves again to the study of Aristotle, and 1 The one, to which alone Parmenides and Melissus attri- buted existence, was a material although an incorporeal unity. We must beware of accepting "matter" in the current dualist sense; for Aristotle himself A?/ was hardly distinguishable from 8vvap.is 1 37 established his supremacy1. Indispensable then as realism was for the Church, its creed, and 1 With every allowance for the phases of church and school in successive academical generations it seems strange that in 1209 Aristotle should have been forbidden under excommu- nication, and in 1231 restored to such favour that for the dis- ciples of Albert and St Thomas the master almost attained the authority of a father of the church ; the explanation probably is that " Aristotle " meant for a time the paynim interpretations of Toledo, particularly of the Physics (the Metaphysics were not translated from the Greek till about 1220) ; and meant not this only, but also liberal quotation and incorporation of the writings of Arab philosophers. To show how learning, even in the University of Paris, lay under ecclesiastical control, some extracts from the Edicts of the Synod of Paris and of Gregory the Ninth may be cited in illustration : — After direct- ing that "Corpus magistri Amaurici extrahatur e cimiterio, et projiciatur in terram non benedictam " the Synod farther orders that the " Quaternuli [" Quaternuli " is translated by Ducange, Quatuor quartse chartae, sen octo folia : i.e. the octavos] magistri David de Dinant, afferantur et comburantur; nee libri Aristotelis de naturali philosophia, nee Commenta legan- tur Parisiis, publice vel secreto. Et hoc sub pcena excom- municationis inhibemus De libris theologicis scriptis in romano, praecipimus quod episcopis diocesanis tradautur, et Credo in Deum et Pater noster in romano, praeter vitas sanctorum." The order two years later confirming these prohibitions differs but in form. Even the Bull of Gregory in 1231, relieving the schools of this proscription, says, "Ad haec jubemus ut magistri artium unam lectionem de Prisciano et unarn post aliam ordinarie semper legant, et libris illis natura- libus, qui in concilio provincial! ex certa causa prohibit! fuere, Parisiis non utantur, quousque examinati fuerint, et ab omni errorum suspicione purgati." The pope adds paternally, "Magistri vero et scholares theologiae, in facultate quara 38 its sacraments, yet therein it found itself in a dilemma between the conceptions of a Creator working under conditions, and of a spirit imma- nent in matter ; and when theological philosophy culminated in St Thomas, and was fixed by him as it now rules in Rome, this difficulty was rather con- cealed in his system than resolved1. Every scheme of profitentur, se studeant laudabiliter exercere, nee philosophos se ostendant, sed satagant fieri theodocti : nee loquantur in lingua populi, et populi linguam hebrseam cum azotica con- fuudentes" [azotiea or arethica means the profane tongue (Ducange) ; Hebrew being a Sancta lingua]. The pantheistic outburst of the later twelfth century, although deriving in part from Erigena, was probably fed by the commentary of Alexander of Aphrodisias. This commentary was widely read in Arabic and Arab-latin translations, the latter of which were made, as we know (v. A. Jourdain, p. 123 and seq.), by Gerard of Cremona (d. 1187). Alexander's more material interpretation of v\rj involved the return of All into God; hence no resurrection, no future life. In his followers these doctrines become grosser and grosser, and, fused with other Arabian doctrine, prepared for and afterwards strengthened the Averroism of Padua, in the xv — xvith century, in which system it was taught that the universal soul, dipping for the time into the individual man, is at death resumed into the universal soul. This virtual denial of personal immortality was of course bitterly resented by the Church. (Vid. p. 68, note.) Thus from the thirteenth century onwards pantheistic infidelity survived and even defied the menaces and the punishments of the Church. 1 Both Albert and Aquinas were inconsistent. Haureau points out that St Thomas was a vitalist in physics, an animist in metaphysics, a nominalist in philosophy, and a realist in 39 thought must make some declaration on the nature and place of universals ; the problem was no hair splitting1, it dealt with the very nature and origin of being ; it agitated the minds of thinking men at a time of the most fervid and widespread en- thusiasm for knowledge which the Western world has ever known, — at a time when Oxford counted its students by thousands, and when in Paris a throng athirst for knowledge would stretch from theology. "II a cherche a reconcilier des morts (i.e. Plato and Aristotle) qui, toute leur vie, se sont contredits." But even sceptics contradict themselves ; and it is fair to add that St Thomas pushed universals back to immanence in the Divine mind. For Plato the ideas are thoughts of universal mind ; for Aristotle God, or Nature by its thoughts or plans determines the lines of phenomena : thus Plato and Aristotle were more alike than Thomas knew, or Haureau admits. There was no such thing of course as The Scholastic Philo- sophy, of which I read again but the other day in a modern work. Scholasticism is the very various teaching of the schools of the xi — xvth centuries; though its general tendency was to search rather into the origin and nature than into the functions of being. The philosophy of the thirteenth century on the whole was eclectic ; — though perhaps eclectic by con- fusion rather than by reconciliation. The rule of authority prevented an appreciation of the relative values of opinions; the recognised authorities were equally true, and had to be dovetailed together somehow. Critical interpretation had not begun. 1 The objection should not lie against hair splitting, for thought cannot be too penetrating ; but against the splitting of imaginary hairs. 40 the cloisters of the Mathurins to the faubourg of St Denis1 ; and, in respect of our theme of this day, we shall see that even Harvey was embarrassed by certain aspects of it. For, to resume, closely allied to the argument concerning universals was that concerning "form and matter." Whether the terms used were "form and matter,'7 force or energy or " pneuma " and matter, " soul or life " and " body/' " determinative essence^ and determinate subsistence/' " male principle and female element/' " archseus and body," the potter and the clay of the potter ; or whether again they were "type and individual," "cause and effect/' " law and nature/' " becoming and being," or even the "thought and extension" of Descartes, the riddle lay in the contrast of the static and dynamic aspects of things ; in the incessant formation of variable and transitory individuals in the eternal ocean of existence2. " Spiritus intus alit, totamque infusa per artus Mens agitat molem, et magno se corpore miscet." 1 M. Charles Jourdain thus describes the procession of Rector, doctors and disciples of the University of Paris at the beginning of the fourteenth century. At the end of this century its decay began. 2 For Aristotle the principle of individuation was matter and form (vid. note, p. 33) ; for Averroes it was form ; for 41 For early thinkers, untrained in the methods and unaware of the limits of thought, even for the great and free thinkers of Greece, a cap- tivating analogy was irresistible1 ; while inventing schemes of thought they believed themselves to be describing the processes of nature. Moreover it has been the temptation of philosophers of all times, and even of Harvey himself than whom none had put better the conditions of scientific method, to suppose that by means of abstraction kinds may be apprehended; that thus they may get nearer to the inmost core of things ; that by purging away the characters of individuals they may detect the essence and cause of individuation St Thomas it was matter. For all "vitalists" the identity of form, soul and life is essential ; thus Stahl regarded soul as bestowing on body all activity, as determining all vital functions. In Aristotle ^xt is untranslatable = anima and animus — soul and vital principle. Uvcvpa again in various writers may mean anything, from air to spirit or other essence; cf. Arist. De Generat. An. n. 3, and the "aura" of Harvey, and even of Haller in the same connexion as the fertilising element. 1 Not for all, not for the greatest of them ! Aristotle, in vain, warned later generations against prophesying what seems likely, instead of looking to see how things come about : — " OVK aXrjdrj \fyovTes, aXXa ^avrevofifvot TO crv/ijS^tro- pfVOV £K TWV (IKOTtoV, KQ\ irpO(T\a.nfta.VOVT(S (OS OVTWS *XOV ""P*" yivofjifvov otra>9 t8eTi>." (De Gen. Anim. iv. i.) "Croire tout ce qu'on reve," if useful and possibly admirable in its day, in "neo- Hegelians" is a little stale. 42 ^0709) : not perceiving indeed that the content of notions is, as Abelard had pointed out plainly, in inverse proportion to their univer- sality. Like Sidney's hooded dove, the blinder they were the higher they strove1. For example : from a lump of silver a medal is struck ; from many lumps of silver many medals are struck, each different from the other : let us eliminate as accidents the notions of silver, of the blow of a hammer, even of particular features of the devices, and we shall reach the idea of an agent with a type or seal, or of such an agent with many seals, or ideas, who may thus individualise indifferent matter ; or, to penetrate deeper into abstraction, who may transfer forms of his own activity to motionless 1 Thus, in ascending from general to more general, in the most general will be sought unique and perfect being; the primary cause and sole object of science — the avTo£wov of the Alexandrians : whereas by successive eliminations utter ab- stractions would become utter vacuity. To such realists all subordinate beings are integral parts of the primary being. It would serve no useful end here to analyse these doctrines, or to indicate the pythagorean or stoical elements of them ; for platonists and realists had their schools and degrees of subtlety ; and Plato himself was inconsistent. Some brought secondary agents — demiurges or angels — into more creative activity, others carried creative reason back to the ideal good, and so on. 43 stuff. It is my part to-day to show that before motionless stuff— before the problem of the "pri- mum mobile" — even Harvey himself stood help- less ; helpless yet fascinated by the indulgence of invention when, in the De motu cordis, or the De generatione, he permitted himself to carry contemplation beyond the sphere of his admirable experiments. "Natural, vital and animal spirits" indeed he would have none of ; saying well that he should want as many spirits as functions, and that to introduce such agents as artificers of tissues is to go beyond experience : yet in his need of a motor for his machine he was not able to divest himself of the language nor even of the philosophy of his day ; he referred the cause of the motion of the blood, and therefore of the heart, to innate heat1. In his day he could not but regard rest and 1 Held by Gilbert, and attributed to Averroes ; but older than Averroes. In turning to Francis Bacon's hypothesis I read (Ed. E. and S. ii. 263. Hist. Densi et rari— chapter/' Dilatationes per spiritum innatum se expandentem," a Paracelsian sort of chapter) " Pulsus cordis et arteriarum in animalibus fit per irrequietam dilatationem spirituum, et receptum ipsoruin, per vices." The muscular quality of the heart was known to Galen, forgotten, and rediscovered, Spiritus vitalis, for Bacon, was "aura composita ex flamma et aere" (cf. ^En. vi. 747). Glisson has been fortunate in two generous judges, in Haller 44 motion as different things ; and motion as a super- added quality. In denying the older opinion1 that the heart is the source of motion, of perfection2 and of heat, he put the difficulty but one stage back ; and, when in the treatise on Generation he pro- pounded his transcendental notion of the impreg- and Virchow ; it would ill become me to depreciate a distin- guished Fellow of my own College, and as a clinical observer Glisson had considerable merits ; but as a physiologist he was sunk in realism. He was happy in the invention of the technical term "irritability," but for him this virtue was as metaphysical an essence as the vital spirit; his prime motor was not physical. As a philosopher I fear the inde- pendent reader of his works will find him fanciful and wearisome. 1 Herein Harvey's sagacity brought him towards the truth. "Air," he says in the De generatione, "is given neither for the cooling nor the nutrition of animals it is as if heat were rather enkindled within the foetus (at birth) than re- pressed by the influence of the air." Boyle (who says that he worked under the influence of Harvey's discoveries) carried this matter forward by most interesting and sagacious experi- ments with his air-pump. For the layman, I may add that (to speak generally) before Harvey's time respiration was regarded not as a means of combustion but of refrigeration. How man became such a fiery dragon was the puzzle ! 2 Perfection was attributed, not only by medieval philo- sophers but also by Plato and Aristotle, to the circle. Cir- cular movement was therefore the most perfect, and therefore again must be that of the planets. This is a good illustration of the almost necessary tendency in the earlier excursions of thought to equate incoordinates, and to fill gaps in reason- ing from alien sources. 45 nation of the female by the conception of a " general immaterial idea," we find in him jrealism still very much alive indeed. Had Harvey been content with innate heat he would have done well enough ; but the innate heat of the blood, as he explains it, is not fire nor derived from fire ; nor is the blood occupied by a spirit, but is a spirit : it is also "celestial in nature, the soul, that which answers to the essence of the stars is something analo- gous to heaven, the instrument of heaven." In denying that a spirit descends and stows itself in the body, as "an extraneous inmate," Harvey advances beyond Cremoninus, who then taught in the chair of Averroistic philosophy in Padua ; for, says Harvey, I cannot discover this spirit with my senses, nor any seat of it. In another passage indeed Harvey warns us "not to derive from the stars what is in truth produced at home " ; in yet another he tells us that philosophers produce principles as indifferent poets thrust gods upon the stage, to unravel plots and to bring about catastrophes : yet he concludes that " the spirit in the blood acting superiorly to the powers of the elements, the soul in this spirit and blood, is identical with the essence of the stars." 46 Thus the riddle which oppressed these great thinkers, from the lonians to Lavoisier, was in part the nature of the "impetum faciens1" — of the Bil- dungstrieb. What makes the ball to roll ? Does heart move blood or blood move heart ; and in either case what builds the organ and what bestows and perpetuates the motion? Albert of Cologne, and at times even Aristotle, as we have seen, were apt to leave moving things for abstract motion, and to regard formulas as agents. Telesius again, the first of the brilliant band of natural philosophers in Italy of the xvith and xvnth centuries, was still seeking this principle of nature in the " form " of the peripatetics. Gilbert regarded his magnetic force as " of the nature of soul, sur- 1 Not only movement but also formative activity. The rfjs Kivija-fcos is the efficient cause of Aristotle; for him final causes direct motion — the ov evev 0avfuis tos eTredvprjo-a TOVTTJS TJ}? s i&ropiav K.T.X/' 2 The encyclopedic method, followed by Francis Bacon, and perpetuated even in the nineteenth century by some German metaphysicians, was not the mere collection of matter from any or all quarters, after the manner of Pliny; nor again mere omniscience ; but was the demonstration of a cosmical theory from all departments of knowledge. When knowledge was a theological philosophy theologians were bound to supply thinking men with " Summae," or comprehensive applications and casuistries of it. Hugo of St Victor (d. 1141) and Robert Pullen (d. 1150) were the first scholastic Summists. 3 Aristotle made many experiments, but experiments are not necessarily verification ; and for the most part his were not. It is not experiment which makes science but the experimental method. Dr Payne, in the Harveiau Oration of 1896, reminded us that among the ancients the forerunner of Harvey in this method was Galen. 56 meagre and might be a mischievous amusement ; and it sought to confine speculations to final causes, that is to the animation of the world by an intelligent Being, as man animates his own instruments : though, as Roger Bacon de- clared, final causes must have physical means. Even Locke thought nature to be hopelessly com- plex, and urged that ethics is the proper study of man. The asceticism derived from the East, dis- dainful of carnal things, brought the dualism of matter and spirit into monstrous eminence ; and, in respect of medicine, in a few generations it turned the cleanest people in the world into the most filthy1. Moreover, are we not bound to admit that, as ultimate analysis was dangerous to the synthesis of the Faith, so for unwieldy and un- stable societies in which ethical and political habits had not yet become engrained, to descend from transcendental explanations to explanations by lower categories was fraught with some danger to lofty and imposing standards of custom and conduct? Nature is too base, says St Anselm, 1 Those who are curious in manners will observe that during the last few years the medievalising clergy in England have discarded that fair linen which in the elder clergy was the emblem and the example of cleanliness. 57 for us to argue from it to God ; we must argue from God to things. Analysis is a disin- tegrating function ; the departure of the scientific enquirer is rather from below upwards : it is not only his bias but also his deliberate method to decline to use the discipline and the conceptions of higher categories until he is satisfied that those of the lower are inadequate. A certain natural process may not be attributed to those of chemistry until those of physics are proved to be inadequate ; to another process biological conceptions and methods are denied until those of physics first, and then of chemistry, have been tried and found wanting ; psychological conceptions are denied to another until in their turns the physical, the chemical, and the physiological are exhausted1 ; and so on : and within each category the same economy prevails. Now this scientific economy, perhaps first formulated, or effectively used, by William Ockham, in the phrase "entia non sunt multiplicanda " — known as " Ockham 's rasor" — is what is called now-a-days " materialism " ; and there is no doubt that the method, legitimate, nay, 1 "Nemo psychologus nisi prius physiologus," said Johannes Miiller. ^?. OF THE UNIVERSITY 58 imperative, as it is in natural science, may in custom and conduct -engender a personal and collective habit of apprehending in lower cate- gories, and even of contentment in them until strong reason be shown to go higher1. A higher order of ideas is put in a lower order of language ; the "6809 6t9 TO /care* " of Heraclitus. The danger of this attitude lies in loss of effort, of aspiration, and even of imagination ; he must stoop on the weary oar who, knowing no anchorage, is ever stem- ming the drift. Notwithstanding is there in history any lesson sadder than this, that where ideals have been loftiest sin and failure have most abounded ? a lesson from which Carlyle learned that " the ideal has always to grow in the real, and often to seek out its bed and board there in a very sorry way." Almost to this day then the mechanical arts, presumably concerned rather with the lower cate- gories, have been regarded as base ; and the craft even of the laboratory as unworthy of great souls. Anatomy had to labour against antipathy both eccle- siastical and popular ; chemistry and mechanics were 1 For example, one man, fixing his eyes on a sublime ideal of holiness, confesses on his knees that he is a miserable sinner; another, surveying men about him, repudiates this imputation : it is a matter of parallax. 59 gross pursuits, unless endowed with the perilous distinctions of alchemy and sorcery. Unfortunately this charge upon the dignity of man was made heavier rather than lighter by Petrarch, and by the later humanists of the Renascence ; even in the 17th century we find in Oxford that Boyle was bantered by his friends as one "given up to base and mechanical pursuits." As Boyle himself put it in his delightful way — " There are many Learned Men who are apt to repine when they see any Person capable of succeeding in the Study of solid Philosophy, addicting himself to an Art (Chemistry) they judge so much below a Philosopher, and so unserviceable to him. Nay, there are some that are troubled when they see a Man acquainted with other Learning countenance by his example sooty Empiricks '' "whose Experiments may indeed be useful to Apothecaries, and perhaps to Physicians, but are useless to a Philosopher that aims at curing no Disease but that of Ignorance ." 1 Boyle, Essays, 2nd Ed. 1669, p. 119. In his Edition of 1661 Boyle speaks of the discovery of Harvey "our English Democritus" (published 1628) as commonly accepted. Where- by, he says, other "very plausible and radicated opinions" (the old schemes of the circulation)... "are generally grown out of request." 60 Lord Herbert of Cherbury, who early in the seven- teenth century attended lectures at Padua, opined that natural science deals with "ignoble studies, not proportioned to the dignity of our Souls/' In the eighteenth century indeed, grave English physicians, humanists who forgot how Aristotle had exclaimed that marvellousness lies in all natural phenomena, scorned the trivial curiosity of John Hunter respecting flies and tadpoles. It is part of my argument to-day to point out one evil of many which this prejudice has wrought for medicine. The progress of an applied science dependent as it is upon accessions of advantage from other arts, yet on the whole is from the simple to the complex ; from facts of more direct observation to those of longer inference : and this path was the more necessary when the right method of inference — the so-called inductive method — had not been formulated, and indeed was barely in use. Now in medicine, from Homer to Lord Lister, direct observation and the simpler means of ex- periment have obtained their first-fruits on the surface of the body. In Homeric times surgery was the institution of medicine, and kings con- 61 earned themselves with the practice of it From Erasistratus to Celsus physicians of all schools practised medicine and surgery as one art. Galen urges the unity of medicine, and Littre points out that this unity is maintained in the Hippocratic writings. In the Middle Ages the ascetic contempt for the body — partly Stoic, chiefly oriental, — the barren alliance of medicine with philosophy, and the low esteem of mechanical callings hid from the physician the very gates of the city into which he would enter. Francis Bacon says of the phy- sicians of Harvey's day, that they saw things from afar off, as if from a high tower ; and, again, that after the manner of spiders they spun webs of sophis- tical speculation from their own bowels. Surgery, by virtue of its imperative methods, was kept clear of philosophy on the one hand and of humanism on the other ; and in Paris the establishment of the College de St Come, afterwards the Academy of Surgery, protected the higher surgery against the rabble of barbers. Upon the raft of anatomy and surgery, with some clinical aid from Salerno, positive medicine crossed the gulf between Byzantine compilations, monkish leechcraft, Arab starcraft 62 and alchemy, and the scientific era of Harvey1. But physicians were not only blind to the great services to the whole art of medicine of the surgical school of Lanfranc in the fourteenth century, of Guy de Chauliac in the &fBeenth, and of Pare and Gale in the sixteenth century, advances even accelerated in the seventeenth, but they ignored also their very origin, and even withdrew from fellowship with the surgeon ; to our grievous harm from those days unto our own2. Surgery was excluded from the Faculty of Medicine of the University of 1 Haeser says (vol. n. p. 433) : " Einen sehr bedeutenden Aufschwung nahm die Chirurgie im Zeitalter Harvey's bei den Englandern, unter denen bis dahin kein Wundarzt ersten Ranges aufgetreten war. Nach kurzer Zeit erlangten die englischen Chirurgen durch allgemeine Bildung, griindliche Kenntniss der Anatomic, und praktische Gelegenheit ein entschiedenes Uebergewicht iiber die bis dahin herrschende franzosische Schule." Cf. also Baremberg, Hist, et Doct. vol. i. p. 281 et seq. 3 In the Medical Magazine (May, June, July, August, and Sept. 1899) is an interesting essay by Mr D'Arcy Power, " How Surgery became a profession in London." Mr Power tells us that a scheme for the unity of the medical profession in London was set on foot in 1423, when the surgeons were the more highly organised body. A " Rector of Medicine " was indeed elected (Master Gilbert Kymer). It is not known how long the conjoint faculty of medicine and surgery lasted in London; but unhappily for our profession it seems to have been dissolved in a very few years. 63 Paris ; and from the Royal College of Physicians of England, which was, and is still, enabled by charter to teach surgery, and to grant licenses therein. Fabricius, the master of Harvey, was fortunately as great a surgeon as anatomist, and such was Fallo- pius. In this College Harvey lectured on anatomy and surgery, and he left his surgical instruments to us ; for us Caldwal founded a lectureship in surgery which has been allowed virtually to lapse. From the progress of anatomy which, under the protection of the Italian nobles as formerly of the Alexandrian, went hand in hand with surgery, physicians drew then little advantage ; and so in part perhaps it came about that although Vesalius, Fallopius, and Fabricius broke up the traditional anatomy of Mundinus, yet anatomy did more even for the fine arts than for physiology ; and medicine at the end of the Middle Ages had not recovered the standard of Alexandria. Against this adversity also had to contend the founder of physiology whom to-day we celebrate. Such were the chief adversities (vid. Appendix on Astrology) under which the naturalist suffered, but natural knowledge was never stifled ; let us now turn our eyes to another point of view, from 64 the oppression to the gradual enfranchisement of knowledge. Necessary for the welding of western society in the Middle Ages as was authority in all spheres of thought and action, and, heavy as the price of its inertia has been since its work was done, yet in the celebration of the founders of natural science it would be untrue to assume that before them, even in the earlier scholastic period, the indomitable spirit of man had lain under tyranny in silence. " Mevei TO Oelov 8ov\ia irep ev $pevt" The way had been prepared for them. By the Crusades of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries fury and devas- tation were diverted in part from Europe, and hurled upon Asia ; which soon closes up again. The naive serenity of the Faith was gone, but as its great minsters arose it forgot its dangers ; and the social bonds of orthodoxy rudely shaken were renewed. The Schools grew as great as the churches : Naples, Pa via, Bologna and Padua ; Paris, Orleans, Bourges, Toulouse, Montpellier, the Sorbonne ; Oxford and Cambridge. Even the Friars Preachers and Minors were driven to fight with the new weapons ; first rivalling the univer- sities, then possessing themselves of their chairs. 65 But philosophy, which had lent much to the Faith *, gained nothing from it ; and to philosophy rather than to the Church the sciences looked for their principles and methods. In physics the experi- mental method was creeping into life ; and the substance as well as the form of old controversies was changing. Thus through all these generations was rising a leaven of free thought, and its reforms may roughly be put in a twofold division, into the reform of tradition, and the reform of method ; the reform of texts being again divisible into two periods— the Arabian, or second scholastic, and the modern or Renascence period. The chief monuments of learning were stored in Byzantium2 until Western Europe was fit to take care of them. In the peace of Theodoric, in the peace of Charle- magne, under Alfred at Winchester, the arts and 1 This relation was somewhat one-sided : the philosophers forged doctrines and presented them to the Church ; where- upon the Church consecrated them to eternity, and the philosophers were not allowed thereafter to improve or to restore their own creations. " La theologie n'est quelque chose qu'a condition d'etre tout." 2 As Erigena and Rabanus knew some Greek, Ireland, like Edessa and Bagdad, seems to have shared the honour of preserving original texts ; we may infer from the doc- trines of Erigena that in Ireland the Timseus was the chief of them. A. 5 66 sciences had scarcely found breathing-time, and no sure establishment1. Cassiodorus is said to have directed the Benedictines of the sixth century to read Cselius Aurelianus, a Roman adaptor of Soranus of Ephesus ; but medical lore consisted of little beyond some relics of the Roman schools, handed on in prose or verse compilations which the teacher read to his class, and explained so far as he could. It seems that medicine was not taught formally until so ordered, in 805, by CKarlemagne ; probably by the advice of Alcuin, the founder of the learned tradition at Fulda, the founder, we may almost say, of the neo-latin period, and some time headmaster of my own school of St Peter at York. The influence of the School of Salerno, relatively excellent as it was in the domains 1 See Baas, Geschichtliche Entwickelung des arztlichen Standes, 1896, p. 128. Charlemagne journeyed in Italy where some schools still existed, and where Priscian, Donatus, Boetius, Cassiodorus, Augustine, even Virgil and Cicero were read ; thence he called teachers to his palace schools ; and to Lyons, Orleans or Tours. How Paris became the centre of enlightenment in the Western world is not clear. The " palace school " probably was of no place, but of the royal retinue; that the School of Paris was made up of those of St Genevieve, St Germain des Pres and the Cathedral school seems not to be a very probable con- jecture. 67 of clinical medicine and of public health, never made its way into the general stream of Western culture. Religious wars and persecutions had driven Greek learning eastwards, as in the case of the Nestorians from Antioch to Persia ; Hebrew and Syrian sages1 translated some classical texts, and 1 The " Arabs " were a mixed throng of orientals ; some of them were Aryans, as the Persians and Nestorians ; some were Arabs, Syrians, or Hebrews. The Xestorians were eminent as physicians, and it is interesting to this College to know that one of the best translators of Aristotle into Arabic was Johannitius, a Nestorian physician. The Eastern peoples, as the Western, owed all to the Greeks except a double measure of dialectical ingenuity, which was their own, and is their own to-day. By the incisive methods of Aristotle the Christian neo-platonists had been variously carved into heretics — such as the Monophysites ; and these when driven eastwards carried Greek to Edessa and Bagdad : from these centres it was, and from Nisibur in Persia and elsewhere, that the " Saracens " drew their culture. Aristotle was first translated into Arabic in the reign of Al Mansur, the son of Harun al Raschid (813 — 833) ; Avicenna carried the Aristotelian encyclopedia to its culmination ; and Cordova in the tenth century was as full of fervid disciples as was Paris in the thirteenth. The Arabian medicine was Aris- totle and Galen. The Arabian philosophy was originally built upon the Alexandrian emanations and hypostases (the soul of the universe, intelligence the first of creatures, nature and mutability, and so forth). Essences and forms were produced, as the ** intelligibilia " of " real " knowledge, till, as some one has wittily put it, " universals became almost palpable." Avicenna indeed approached understanding from the senses, and Aver- roes accepted this right position ; but he taught the permanent subsistence of intelligence, as a sphere in a hierarchy of 5—2 68 from these again the Arabs, in their brief and brilliant culture, made translations ; for no Arab sage knew Greek. The palace of the Spanish Caliphs in the tenth century was a workshop of translators, and a huge storehouse of books. The learned and ubiquitous Jew carried texts and translations from Bagdad to Morocco, and from Morocco to Toledo, Paris, Oxford and Cologne ; but translations made in Bagdad in the ninth century 'did not reach Paris till the eleventh or twelfth. Among the earliest of these renderings in the West were works on medicine, mathematics, and astronomy, which in the Schools of Toledo and Cordova, by Constantinus Africanus at Monte Cassino (including certain treatises of Hippocrates and Galen), by Gerard of Cremona (a Salernitan spiritual principles independent of matter and persons. In no long time this was turned into the unity, as opposed to the individuality, of the soul ; the universal soul dipping as it were into the individual, and at his death returning into the uni- versal ; a virtual denial of personal immortality. Hence the bitter defiance of Albert and St Thomas. The Averroistic doctrines were enthusiastically propagated on the other hand by that " malleus Ecclesiae Romanae " Frederick the Second (1212 — 1250). The Arabian science consisted in medicine, mathematics, astronomy, and alchemy. Averroes it was who first asserted the independence of the spheres of science and religion ; a division popular at the present day, and one which lent itself to many a convenient subterfuge, in Padua. 69 scholar), by Michael the wizard1, and by other hands, were converted into Latin; and, thus doubly dis- guised, and half buried in glosses which not only overlaid the text ("oscura glossa dov' £ piana la lettera") but often supplanted it, were received with pathetic eagerness by the ardent scholars of the West. Aristotle, for instance, was now taught in the schools of the West from a Latin translation of a Hebrew translation of an Arab commentary upon an Arab translation of a Syriac translation of the Greek text*. Even in the sixteenth-century medicine and anatomy were taught wholly from books ; and teachers were forbidden to use other than prescribed books. Students began with the "Articella" of the Venetian physician Gregorio Volpi, a compendium of translations with wood- 1 Dante, Inf. (xx. 115). Michael Scot translated Averroes from Arabian to Latin ; also the De ccelo and De anima of Aristotle, which reached Roger Bacon about 1230. Thus we may regard Michael as the founder of Paduan Averroism. All persons who busied themselves with natural experiment in the Middle Ages were accused of magic ; even Albert did not escape the suspicion or the credit of sorcery. 2 Renan, Averroes. And .to like eflect M. Haureau says, " Le peripateticisme d'Averroes ne differe pas moins de 1'antique doctrine du Lycee que 1'Alhambra du Parthenon " ; and he compares " le peripateticisme d' Albert et d'Aquinas " to the " monuments fiers et bizarres du Gothique du xnime siecle." 70 cuts, published in 1491 ; they advanced to the Aphorisms, the Diet in Acute Diseases and the Prognostics of Hippocrates, overlaid with Syriac, Arabic and Spanish apparatus and glosses ; to the Ars Parva of Galen ; to the first and fifth Canons of Avicenna, with glosses ; to the ixth Book of Rhazes, Honein, Aegidius Corboliensis, and perhaps some of the translations of Constantinus Africanus1; — this was the lore that ruled the medical schools even to the birth of Harvey. Disputations among the stu- dents were incessant, both "inter se" and "sub cathe- dra"; but it is doubtful whether these did more than V sharpen their dialectical wits. Botany, regarded by the galenists as the secret of the divine dispen- sary, was always more forward ; every medical school had its physic garden, professors carried their students abroad to gather herbs, and Herbals, Dispensatoriums and Krauterbiicher were much in 1 I may venture to quote again the " locus classicus " : — "Wei knew he the olde Esculapius, And Deiscorides, and eek Rut'us, Old Ypocras, Haly, and Galien ; Serapion, Razis, and Avicen ; Averrois, Damascien, and Constantyn; Bernard, and Gatesden, and Gilbertyn." Chaucer, C. T. Prol. 429—434 (Skeat's Ed.). 71 advance of the Bestiaries, mostly after Pliny's kind, the chief of which, largely an original work, was that of the well-known Conrad Gesner. Some hundred years before the appearance of the Arabian Aristotle, which marked the second scholastic period, we have seen that the shadow of the Faith and the savagery of the peoples had -not quelled such teachers as Roscellinus and Abelard, who fought for rationalism so sturdily as even then to threaten the ascendency of realism and the persuasion of supple and plausible demagogues like Auselm of Laon — that "sterile tree" as Abelard called him, — and actually to determine the first period of the Middle Ages. Happily the Arabian scholastic philosophy took its root in Alexandria when neo-platonism had veered towards Aristotle1, and it was more uniformly peripatetic than the earliest Christian Scholas- ticism. It is one of the notes of the greatness of Aristotle that, even thus garbled and glossed, his power made itself felt by the mouths of the great Franciscans Alexander Hales, Roger Bacon, and William Ockham. The Organon had been expounded in Paris in 1180, and about the same 1 See pp. 24 and 28. 72 time Alexander Neckam cited the Posterior Ana- lytics, the Topics and the De aniina\ but Hales was in possession of the whole, or almost the whole, of a more or less corrupt Aristotle, which he turned upon theology. Roger Bacon was the first of the natural philo- sophers of the West, and the only eminent fore- runner of Harvey and the other pioneers of natural science in the seventeenth century. As erudite as Albert, Bacon was more inventive, freer of spirit, more disposed to scientific method, better aware of the hollowness of authority, better aware that truth can be found only in free reason guided by experi- ment. Unfortunately as an author he was as dull and ineffectual as Francis Bacon was rich, animated and impressive. That indeed this premature renascence, without scientific methods or sound tradition, should have failed1, that its light was but the phantom of dawn2, is no matter for surprise ; yet from this time forward the 1 As a school of thought; in fine art of course it was glorious. 2 Ozanam (Doc. inedits, quoted by Rashdall, p. 78) says this early light was " une de ces nuits lumineuses ou les dernieres clartes du soir se prolongent jusqu'aux premieres blanch eurs du matin." 73 methods of Cyprian and Athanasius lost their undisputed sway. This earlier renascence made the v second period of the Middle Ages : the period distinguished by the Arabian version of Aristotle ; by a check to the chimeras of realism ; by some liberty of secular knowledge, for even vX bishops came out of the Mussulman school of Toledo and arrayed themselves in vestments of Arab work decorated with sentences from the Koran ;' and again by the coming of the friars, the Dominican and Franciscan especially, whose influence upon the thought of the Middle Ages was considerable, and soon rivalled even that of the universities, wherein later, as we have seen, they filled some of the chairs. The issues of all schemes of thought led indeed as inevitably to natural science, as all ways to Rome. The logic and rhetoric of the learned Dominicans — the watch-dogs ("Domine cani") of the Lord against the wolves of heresy, — culminating in the systems of Albert and St Thomas, by their rationalism defined, and in defining restricted, the dominion of the Faith. Keen defenders of the Faith recog- nised this danger, and whimpered even against Albert that " philosophiam profanam in limen 74 SanctaG Theologies intromiserit ;...in ipsa sacraria Christ!1." Men got used to reason, and great pro- testants, such as Robert of Lincoln, had put justice 1 Albert — " nostri temporis stupor et miraculum ! "—is an attractive figure, and deserves his renovvp as the greatest of the medieval sages. His endowments were richer and wider than those of the great Italian logician, his pupil, whose name has had a greater vogue, and whose doctrines are still the accepted discipline of the Church of Rome. Albert restored Aristotle, and in astronomy and chemistry sought for truth in nature. That St Thomas was a man of the highest intellectual power and attainments, an eminence which is claimed for him by many scholars, as by Mr Vernon in his edition of the Paradise, I cannot admit ; unless it be to a critical scholar who has mastered the contents of his many folios, if such a scholar there be. For my part, after reading much of what is written of St Thomas, I have but done what was possible to me in other such cases ; that is, I have run my eye over the titles of his books and chapters, and formed some rapid judgment here and there of the ways of his thought. Now I venture to assert that the ways of the thought of Aquinas, subtle and symmetrical as they are, lie wholly within the formulas of his age. He left science for logic, the stuff of thought for its instrument; satisfying himself with such tinkling cymbals as "Nihil potest per se operari, nisi quod per se subsistit ;...Impossibile est quod forma separetur a seipsa...qu<>d subsistens per se desinat esse"... and so forth. Albert though a less symmetrical is a more original genius. To Aquinas indeed I should hesitate to attribute genius ; to Albert it seems to me this title may be granted, if with some hesitation. " Vir famosus et erroneus" was Roger Bacon's summary of Albert's career, but Bacon was scarcely an indifferent witness. 75 and honour before ecclesiastical politics1. Then the few Greek texts found their way into the West, and in the thirteenth century Albert and Aquinas possessed themselves of Greco-latin translations of some treatises of Aristotle2. And in the history 1 Among the MSS. in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, are letters of Innocent IV. to the Archdeacon of Canterbury (and others), " Ut (Episc. Line.) nepotem suum Frederi- cum (of Lavagna) in canonicatum in ecclesia Lincolniensi, proximo vacaturum, inducat, et Resp. Episc. Line, in qua probat talem provisionem esse contra voluntatem et cultus Dei; ideoque negat se concessurum." I see that the authenticity of some of these letters has been called in question by M. Charles Jourdain, but in any case they are contemporary, and conso- nant with Robert's acts and character. Moreover, two years before, Innocent had suspended the bishop for refusing to induct an Italian, ignorant of English, to a rich benefice in his diocese. I find that Dr Luard, in 1880, had no doubts of the authenticity of these letters (Encycl. Brit. xi. 211). Mons. Charles Jourdain's collected essays, in which he discusses their authenticity, were published posthumously in 1888; but his Editor makes the slovenly omission of the dates and places of the first publications of the several essays. 2 There were three ways of access to the Greek texts of Aristotle : by the Arab-latin translations ; by translations into Latin direct from the Greek ; and by the use of the Greek text itself. These means were modified again by the chances of access to particular authors, and, as in the case of Aristotle for example, to particular treatises. To ascertain the dates of access to these new sources I have made some search; and herein I have found great help in the "Recherches critiques" of Ainable Jourdain. We must remember that though the source of Western culture is not Latin, but Greek, yet its meagre channels in medieval Europe 76 of the comparatively unlearned Friars Minors we find, as elsewhere in the history of thought, that were Latin ; its best tradition lay in Lucretius, Cicero, Seneca, Virgil. The ill-starred Boetius was the last of the Grecians. Greek was driven East and West : West into Ireland, where in the ninth century a few Greek MSS. survived, and were read in the original by Erigena and his disciples ; but this Irish Greek tradition was soon lost, and there were no teachers of Greek. Yet it seems certain that, in Oxford, Robert of Lincoln and Adam Marsh had at any rate learned assistance in the production of some Greco-latin translations of Aristotle, of the Ethics for example. Dr Jackson has pointed out to me a passage in Aquinas' Commentary on the Ethics, where " the presentation of the right reading misspelt, and of a ludicrous etymology side by side with one which is very nearly right, seem to show that, whilst Aquinas had about him people who knew Greek, he himself had no substantial knowledge of it." Grosseteste himself may have had some efficient know- ledge of Greek ; " vir in latino et in greco peritissimus," says Matthew Paris. Dr Jackson (in a private letter) feels assured that " Roger Bacon was plainly a competent Greek scholar. Of this there is proof in the Opera inedita, edited by Brewer for the Master of the Rolls." We know also that more than one scholar of the 11 — 12th centuries travelled in the East, though, as Dr Daremberg says, travellers to the East were more apt to bring back false relics than genuine manuscripts. There was a small Greek community and a Greek monastery at Auriol, near the old colony of Marseilles. Still, for lack of masters and materials, Greek then was a very rare accomplishment ; and it is manifest, from much internal evidence, that Albert had no Greek ; though he certainly possessed Greco-latin translations of some few Aristotelian treatises by other hands, of the De anima and of the Physics for example, whence he makes quo- tations without interspersion of Arabic titles, proper names, nouns and terms, such as he rather helplessly reproduces in 77 mysticism was less unfavourable to natural science than the passionate dogmatism of Clairvaux, or the dogmatism by ratiocination of St Thomas ; the Victorians, as Gerson after them, despised reason rather than feared it ; they would not accept the services of philosophy even with its wings clipped. "Cujus laus est ex ore infantum, Haec est sapientia"! Mysticism makes for individual religion, as with Glisson and Newton, rather than for a Church, his rendering of the ninth book of the De ccelo and elsewhere. We know from other sources that a few treatises, such as the De anima, and the first two books of the Ethics, existed in Greco-latin rendering before the Arab-latin versions of Michael Scot and others (1220—1225). In later life Albert had the assistance of Aquinas to whom we have attributed some knowledge of Greek ; for we find Aquinas, with the countenance of Urban the Fourth, not only searching Europe for Greek manuscripts, sending emissaries to Spain to make versions for him, and supervising the prepara- tion of translations directly into Latin, but also personally comparing the Latin translations with the Greek texts of the Ethics and Politics, and recording variants; variants which Albert copied from his disciple. (It may be worthy of remark that even so late as 1586 there were no Greek types in Oxford, and that in 1599 Casaubon (Life by Pattison) could find no compositors for Greek in Lyons.) The great debt of the West to the Arabs was a new enthusiasm for learning, and for the "Princeps philosophorum"; not their travestied texts and unwieldy commentaries, which Roger Bacon, probably perceiving that his contemporaries swore by the Arab rather than by the Greek, wished he could burn. 78 as Albert was clear-sighted enough to foresee ; if science undermines dogma, mysticism relaxes or neglects it : hence, as clerks only could teach, it may have been that independent thinkers like Hales, Roger Bacon, and Ockham entered the Fran- ciscan order1. Indeed the science of Pietro di Abano 1 To wonder why Roger Bacon became a clerk and a Franciscan is to look upon the thirteenth century with the eyes of the nineteenth. The vision of St Francis had not grown dim ; the strange beauty of his life held men captive still, and his cheerful natural religion still animated his disciples. None could have said more truly than St Francis "While others fish with craft for great opinion, I with great truth catch mere simplicity." The grey friar of the fourteenth century, as we know him in Langland 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 in orders, for the most part in holy orders ; for instance, the following extract, of date 1849, which I owe to the kindness of Dr Donald MacAlister, " Cseterum neminem in socium un- quam admitti volumus qui non sit aut Theologian) professurus et sacros ordines post certum temporis intervallum inferius definiendum suscepturus aut e Collegio discessurus, nisi unus e duobus sociis qui Medicine aut ex illis duobus qui Juris Civilis studio deputati sunt, electus fuerit." (Stat. Coll. Div. Joh. Evan. Cant. cap. xii. 28 April, 12 Viet. 1849.) To this 79 (1250 — 1320), which laid the foundations of medi- cine at Padua, and inspired the frescoes of the Salla della Ragione, was occult and mystical. 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 1 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 au