The Popes and Science Part 28

"During the first half-century," Bourne continues, "after the application of steam to transportation Mexico weltered in domestic turmoils arising out of the crash of the old regime. If the rule of Spain could have lasted half a century longer, being progressively as it was during the reign of Charles III; if a succession of such viceroys as Revilla Gigedo, in Mexico, and De Croix and De Taboaday Lemos, in Peru, could have borne sway in America until railroads could have been built, intercolonial intercourse ramified, a distinctly Spanish-American federal State might possibly have been created, capable of self-defence against Europe, and inviting cooperation rather than aggression from the neighbor in the North."

If the effort to understand Spanish America now so manifest will only go to the extent of having our people realize the full truth that until the nineteenth century English America was far behind Spanish America in facilities for higher education, in culture and literature, in the application of the arts to munic.i.p.al life and, above {499} all, in interest in science, then the prevalent impression that the Popes and the Catholic Church are opposed to genuine progress and true science will disappear. Catholic America was far ahead of Protestant America in scientific education and research until the untimely break from Spain left the Spanish-American countries the prey of political disturbances.

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APPENDIX IX.

THE DANGER OF A LITTLE KNOWLEDGE.

_Professor Draper's "The History of the Conflict between Religion and Science."_

What I have tried to emphasize in this volume is that the arguments advanced to show the opposition of the Catholic Church to science are founded on actual ignorance of the history of science or misunderstandings of particular incidents of that history. Not only was there no policy of opposition to science, but on the contrary encouragement of interest in scientific subjects, patronage of scientific workers and even definite endowment of scientific research by the ecclesiastical authorities. The tradition of Church opposition to science is founded especially on lack of knowledge of what was done for science in the medieval period and a misunderstanding of the medieval universities. This tradition owed its origin partly to the Renaissance, which, having rediscovered Greek, despised whatever Western Europe had accomplished during the preceding centuries and spoke of all that was done as Gothic, as if only worthy of barbarous Gothic ancestors.

Another large factor, however, in the creation of this tradition and one which meant more for us here in America than the Renaissance, was the religious revolt of the sixteenth century in Germany which has been called the Reformation. The reformers made it a point to minimize, if not actually to misrepresent, what had been accomplished under the old Church regime, and this Protestant tradition lived on here in America with much more vitality even than in Europe.

The consequence was the bringing up of a series of generations, who, if not actually believing as so many absurdly did, that the Pope of Rome was the Scarlet Woman and the Church the Babylon of the Apocalypse, were quite sure at least that no good could possibly have come out of the Nazareth of pre-Reformation times. It is only in recent years that we have come to recognize that all the talk about the Dark Ages is, as John Fiske said, simply due to ignorance of the time and its accomplishment. The later medieval period might well be called the "Bright Ages" for its art and architecture, its magnificent literature, its interest in education and {501} in scholars.h.i.+p, its development of democracy and its formulation of the great laws and const.i.tutions by which the rights of men were guaranteed in practically every country in Europe. Just as soon as this true state of affairs with regard to the medieval period is recognized, then all question of any policy of Church opposition to education and science disappears.

I have ill.u.s.trated the lack of knowledge of the true history of science as the basis of the arguments for the thesis of Church opposition to science in the present volume by impugning what President White advances as facts. It can be ill.u.s.trated still better, however, from another book written twenty years before President White's, even a little consideration of which shows how the whole status of the arguments with regard to the relations of Church and science has changed during a single generation. Our growing knowledge of history has literally taken away all the ground on which the older controversialists used to stand. This is the "History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science" by Professor John W. Draper, which was issued in 1874, just forty years ago, and already in 1875 had entered its third edition, so that the book sold almost as a popular novel at that time and evidently attracted wide attention. The volume was accorded the privilege of publication in the International Scientific Series, and as this set is among the recognized serious books of the time, some of them cla.s.sics in science and most of them representing important contributions to knowledge, no wonder most readers never thought of doubting its authority or above all questioning its "facts."

Some of Dr. Draper's work made him deservedly one of the best-known biological scientists of the United States in his time. He had had a very striking career. As a medical student at the University of Pennsylvania he reported in his thesis for the doctorate in medicine, which had become at this time usually such a commonplace statement of conventional science that it was shortly after given up as a requirement, a series of observations on absorption through membranes, using bubbles for his experimental work, that attracted the special commendation of the faculty and the attention of the scientific world.

He was not yet thirty years of age when he made the first photograph of a human being--that of his sister--ever made and in 1840 successfully secured the first photographs of the moon. During the next ten years he made a series of observations on the spectrum which attracted deserved attention and antic.i.p.ated not a little of Kirchoff's work. Melloni, himself a distinguished Italian physicist, reported these observations {502} to the academy of Naples. Draper's text-book of physiology was without doubt the best medical text-book issued in America up to that time and deservedly held its place for many years in our medical schools.

It was no wonder then that Draper received many distinctions in the shape of members.h.i.+p in foreign scientific societies, honorable mentions, and prizes. His works were translated into many of the European languages. Late in life he gave up his experimental and scientific work to devote himself to the writing of history. His history of the Civil War was widely read both in Europe and America.

His "History of the Intellectual Development of Europe," which only a little reading now in the light of recent knowledge of the Middle Ages shows us to be a caricature of the philosophy of history, was translated into several foreign languages and was probably more widely read than any serious work by an American author up to that time. What was very rare for an American book at that period it was read by a great many European teachers and students. All this gave added distinction to his writing on the subject of the relations of science and religion, and so it is easy to understand that he was considered by many to have made an almost final summary of this important controversy.

Professor Draper's book then became a sort of bible, that is a book of books, for a great many American teachers of science and, above all, for the younger generation of university lecturers who were to have the shaping of opinions among the students of scientific departments of our colleges and universities during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. It does not seem too much to a.s.sume that most of the maturer scientists who are now teaching in the university scientific departments of this country, read Professor Draper's book and were led by it to an almost unshakeable conviction that religion and, above all, the Catholic Church, fearful lest science should take men away from her influence, had been constantly opposed to all true scientific progress, and what was more unpardonable, that religion as represented by the Church had been for the same reason a bitter enemy of any and every social progress that might lead to the real development of mankind. For them under Draper's inspiration it seemed that the deliberate Church policy was that if men were not happy here they would look with all the more eagerness to happiness hereafter and take all the means offered by the Church to secure it. That such a conclusion impugned the motives of millions of men whom their own generation had thoroughly respected and yielded to the most {503} dangerous of human ideas, suspicion, made no difference. No good could come out of the Nazareth of the Catholic Church.

It is quite certain that a great many of the younger teachers of science of that time who are still alive, even when not entirely conscious of the source of their opinions as to the relations of science and religion and the Church and education, have at the back of their minds certain prejudices, founded on the influence produced on them during their plastic, formative state of mind by the reading of Professor Draper's book. Indeed, so firm is the feeling in many of these men, that this whole subject is settled for them beyond the possibility of any modification, that they have insulated their minds from any further currents of information.

Controversy is distasteful at best; to find out that one has been cheris.h.i.+ng a mistaken notion for years, is always disturbing as one grows older, and so it is not surprising that many of these men frequently use expressions with regard to the supposed relations of Church and science that are quite incompatible with what is now very generally known of the history of science. Their minds are made up, and they simply refuse to bring for a second time any of these subjects before the bar of judgment. Besides, though they would resent any such imputation as to their own state of mind, they have the feeling that people with religious convictions are p.r.o.ne to see only one side, and, therefore, anything that may be said on the other side is only a bit of special pleading for a conviction that no reasoning and no argument would change. They argue, as a consequence, that it would be quite useless for them to read the other side with any reasonable hope of getting at the real facts. This att.i.tude of scientists is very different from the open-mindedness that is supposed to be characteristic of the devotees of science; but it is very human.

Now the interesting fact with regard to Professor Draper's books is that Professor Draper, a scientist, did not know the history of science at all. He was entirely ignorant of the great advances that were even then being made, with regard to our knowledge of the growth of science during the medieval period. He thought that there was very little, indeed practically no science, during that period. Looking about for a reason, he made the Church a scapegoat. The publication during the past generation of many German volumes on the history of the different sciences--and these German students went straight to the original doc.u.ments--has shown us that there were magnificent developments of science during the medieval and early Renaissance periods, when the Church was in control of the educational inst.i.tutions and of every phase of {504} academic work. The story of the opposition between religion and science falls to the ground at once when these facts are known. Some of them were already in process of publication even in Draper's time, but he knew nothing of them. He was so sure that there was nothing to know in this matter, that he probably did not bother his head very much about trying to get the latest results of scholars.h.i.+p in the matter.

Professor Draper's summary of the relations of the Church to science or learning, and his declaration of her absolute refusal to recognize anything as scholars.h.i.+p, except what was deduced from the Scriptures, shows how far a man can go in his a.s.sumption of knowledge when he knows literally nothing about a subject. For him the Dark Ages knew nothing because he knows nothing about them. If they knew anything, he would know it, but he does not. Of one or two men he knows something, but they are exceptions to the general rule of absolute negation of intellectual interests and developments. Draper said: [Footnote 64]

[Footnote 64: Page 250.]

"In the annals of Christianity, the most ill-omened day is that in which she separated herself from science. She compelled Origen, at that time (A.D. 231) its chief representative and supporter in the Church, to abandon his charge in Alexandria, and retire to Caesarea.

In vain through many subsequent centuries did her leading men spend themselves in--as the phrase then went--drawing forth the internal juice and marrow of the Scriptures for the explaining of things.

Universal history from the third to the sixteenth century shows with what result. The Dark Ages owe their darkness to this fatal policy.

Here and there, it is true, there were great men, such as Frederick II and Alphonso X, who, standing at a very elevated and general point of view, had detected the value of learning to civilization, and, in the midst of the dreary prospect that ecclesiasticism had created around them, had recognized that science alone can improve the social condition of man."

Of course the man who wrote that either knew nothing at all about a whole series of triumphs of human intelligence, or else he deliberately put them out of his mind. One wonders if he had ever even heard of Dante, of whom more has been written than of any man who ever lived. Those triumphs of art, architecture, the arts and crafts, engineering, construction work of the highest genius, the Gothic cathedrals and the great public buildings, town halls, hospitals, university buildings, would surely have appeared to him as representing magnificent intellectual--and social--accomplishments, had he appreciated anything of their real significance or allowed himself for a moment to get out of the narrow circle of {505} interests in which he was unfortunately placed. Our architecture in his time was cheap; our art absent; our crafts lacked development; our civic and university architecture of the quarter century before he wrote was literally a disgrace, and of course Professor Draper could not be expected to appreciate the achievements of the Middle Ages in those departments in which his own generation lacked so much.

It is especially striking to take a paragraph of Professor Draper's, in which he sums up a whole movement, and place beside it a paragraph of a serious and informed student of the same subject. Professor Draper inherited the old traditions of lazy monks, living in idleness, a drain on the country, of absolutely no benefit to themselves or to others. Professor Draper wrote: [Footnote 65]

[Footnote 65: Page 267.]

"While thus the higher clergy secured every political appointment worth having, and abbots vied with counts, in the herds of slaves they possessed--some, it is said, owned not fewer than twenty thousand--begging friars pervaded society in all directions, picking up a share of what still remained to the poor. There was a vast body of non-producers, living in idleness and owning a foreign allegiance, who were subsisting on the fruits of the toil of the laborers. It could not be otherwise than that small farms should be unceasingly merged into the larger estates; that the poor should steadily become poorer; that society far from improving, should exhibit a continually increasing demoralization."

As a commentary on this, read the following paragraph from Mr. Ralph Adams Cram's book on "The Ruined Abbeys of Great Britain," in which he describes what the monasteries actually did for the people. Mr. Cram has made a special study of the subject in connection with the magnificent architecture which these medieval monks developed, and which he would like to have our people appreciate and emulate.

Professor Draper is much more positive, but Mr. Cram is much more convincing. [Footnote 66]

[Footnote 66: _The Ruined Abbeys of Great Britain_. New York: The Churchman Co., 1905, p. 458.]

"At the height of monastic glory the religious houses were actually the chief centres of industry and civilization, and around them grew up the eager villages, many of which now exist, even though their impulse and original inspiration have long since departed. Of course, the possessions of the abbey reached far away from the walls in every direction, including many farms even at a great distance, for the abbeys were then the great landowners, and beneficent landlords they were as well; even in their last days, for we have many records of the cruelty and hards.h.i.+ps that came to {506} the tenants the moment the stolen lands came into the hands of laymen."

Or, almost better still, read the following paragraph from an address at the summer meeting of the State Board of Agriculture of Ma.s.sachusetts, delivered by Dr. Henry Goodell, the President of the Ma.s.sachusetts Agricultural College, on the general subject of the influence of the monks in agriculture:

"Agriculture was sunk to a low ebb at the decadence of the Roman Empire. Marshes covered once fertile fields, and the men who should have tilled the land spurned the plow as degrading. The monks left their cells and their prayers to dig ditches and plow fields. The effort was magical. Men once more turned back to a n.o.ble but despised industry, and peace and plenty supplanted war and poverty.

So well recognized were the blessings they brought, that an old German proverb among the peasants runs, 'It is good to live under the crozier.' They enn.o.bled manual labor, which, in a degenerate Roman world, had been performed exclusively by slaves, and among the barbarians by women. For the monks it is no exaggeration to say that the cultivation of the soil was like an immense alms spread over a whole country. The abbots and superiors set the example, and stripping off their sacerdotal robes, toiled as common laborers.

Like the good parson whom Chaucer portrays in the prologue to the "Canterbury Tales":

"'This n.o.ble ensample unto his scheep he gaf That first he wroughte and after that he taughte.'

"When a Papal messenger came in haste to consult the Abbot Equutius on important matters of the Church, he was not to be found anywhere, but was finally discovered in the valley cutting hay. Under such guidance and such example the monks upheld and taught everywhere the dignity of labor, first, by consecrating to agriculture the energy and intelligent activity of freemen often of high birth, and clothed with the double authority of the priesthood and of hereditary n.o.bility, and, second, by a.s.sociating under the Benedictine habit sons of kings, princes, and n.o.bles with the rudest labors of peasants and serfs."

President Goodell has told the story of how the monks cleared and reclaimed the land, transformed fens into forests, marshes into gardens, and swamps into beautiful domains. As he says:

"A swamp was of no value. It was a source of pestilence. But it was just the place for a monastery because it made life especially hard, and so the monks carried in earth and stone and made a foundation, and built their convent, and then set to work to d.y.k.e and drain and fill up the swamp, till they had turned it into fertile plow land and the pestilence had ceased."

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President Goodell did not hesitate to proclaim that the monasteries were the early representatives of our agricultural colleges. They taught the peasantry of the surrounding country how best to grow their crops and what to grow. Because of their wide affiliations they were enabled to secure seeds of various kinds, and stock for breeding purposes, and so were able to teach the people what was best for particular neighborhoods, and not only show them how to raise it, but actually supply them with the necessary initial materials. It became a proverb that the monks and their people were the best farmers. When we ourselves were ignorant of scientific farming, we did not appreciate what the monks had done for agriculture. Now that our soil is becoming exhausted by unscientific and wasteful farming, the foundation of agricultural colleges leads the men who have studied the subject to appreciate what the monks really accomplished. Professor Draper not only cannot find anything good to say of the monks, but he can scarcely find anything bitter enough to say of them. On the other hand President Goodell, who has studied the situation from his point of view very carefully, can scarcely find words strong enough to praise them. He concluded his address as follows:

"My friends, I have outlined to you in briefest manner to-day the work of these grand old monks during the period of 1500 years. They saved agriculture when no one else would save it, they practised it under a new life and new conditions when no one else dared undertake it. They advanced it along every line of theory and practice, and when they perished they left a void which generations have not filled."

In the light of these few quotations even it is easy to see that Professor Draper's book is really quite an amazing work to have come from the hand of a man widely read, acknowledged as an authority in certain subjects by his contemporaries and, above all, because the author seems to have thought that he had quite exhausted his subject.

Here, for instance, is a portion of the paragraph in which he summarizes the beginnings of science in modern Europe (page 298).

"The science of the Arabians followed the invading track of their literature, which had come into Christendom by two routes--the south of France and Sicily. Favored by the exile of the Popes to Avignon, and by the Great Schism, it made good its foothold in upper Italy.

The Aristotelian or Inductive philosophy, clad in the Saracenic costume that Averroes had given it, made many secret and not a few open friends. It found many minds eager to receive {508} and able to appreciate it. Among these were Leonardo da Vinci, who proclaimed the fundamental principle that experiment and observation are the only reliable foundations of reasoning in science, that experiment is the only trustworthy interpreter of Nature, and is essential to the ascertainment of laws. He showed that the action of two perpendicular forces upon a point is the same as that denoted by the diagonal of a rectangle, of which they represent the sides, etc."

We must suppose that the scientific readers of this book, for they were mainly scientists, and it had a place in the International Scientific Series, agreed with this marvellous exhibition of ignorance. Here is a man summarizing modern European science and leaving out all mention of Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, the great medical school of Salerno in the twelfth century, and the great medical schools of Italy farther north during the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries. This lack of knowledge of the history of medicine deserves, above all, to be emphasized because Draper as a professor in a medical school would naturally be supposed to know something about his own branch of science.

He attributes all the initiative of modern science to the impulse derived from the Arabs. This used to be a favorite way of looking at the history of culture for those who wanted to minimize just as far as possible all Christian influence. The facts of history are in constant contradiction with this. Modern European science began at the University of Salerno. It has often been stated that Arabian influence must have largely impelled Salerno's work, situated as it was in the southern part of Italy, but the use of any such expression means that the writer must forget that this southern part of Italy had been a Greek colony, was indeed called Magna Graecia and that Greek influence persisted there, and when the revival came after the Barbarians who had invaded Italy had gradually been brought by religious influence into a state where culture and science and civilization were to mean something for them, the influence of the old Greek authors was first felt here. Gurlt, in his History of Surgery, emphasizes the fact, for instance, that the first important modern (or medieval) writers on surgery, the Four Masters of Salerno, were not influenced by the Arabs. Their books contain no Arabisms but many Graecisms. They obtained their inspiration from the old Greeks and carried on the torch of learning in their own department magnificently as recent studies of the School of Salerno have shown. They corrected the polypharmacy of the Arabs and restored natural modes of cure to their proper place.

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For Professor Draper, until after the Reformation there was practically no development of medicine. "It had always been the policy of the Church to discourage the physician and his arts; he interfered too much with the gifts and profits of the shrines." Professor Draper either knew nothing of the great series of Papal physicians and surgeons or else he ignored what they had done deliberately. It seems reasonably certain that he knew nothing about them, for if he had done so he would surely have mentioned them in order to minimize the significance of their work--for that is his way. He is emphatic in his declaration of the medieval neglect of sanitation and care for the ailing, and sets it down to the deliberate purpose to secure more money for prayers. "From cities wreaking with putrefying filth it was thought that the plague might be staid by the prayers of the priests."

He knows nothing apparently of the well-directed attempts to organize sanitary control, of the appointment of archiaters or medical directors in Italian cities, of the recognition of the contagiousness of tuberculosis, and the effort to control it, and seems even to have missed the significance of the successful obliteration of leprosy by segregation methods, for that was one of the greatest triumphs of preventive medicine ever attained. Leprosy was probably as common in the thirteenth century in Europe as consumption is now with us or very nearly so, and yet in two centuries it had been practically eradicated. Well for us if we shall accomplish as much for our folk scourge of disease--the White Plague.

Above all, Professor Draper seems to know nothing of the magnificent hospitals of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries, beautiful architecturally, well planned for ventilation and the disposal of waste material, with abundant water supply, with large open wards, windows high in the wall, tiled floors that could be thoroughly cleansed and which, alas! were to be replaced hundreds of years later by the awful hospitals of the first half of the nineteenth century, which with their small windows, narrow corridors, cell-like apartments and little doors, were to be more like jails than refuges.

Some of the worst hospitals ever built in modern history had been erected in Professor Draper's own lifetime. Some of the most beautiful hospitals in the world had been erected in Italy and other countries during the later medieval and Renaissance period, before the Reformation, under religious influence,--but Professor Draper knows nothing of them. The history of hospitals here in America is as largely religious as it was in other countries and times.

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