Science and Medieval Thought Part 1

Science and Medieval Thought.

by Sir Thomas Clifford Allb.u.t.t.

PREFACE.

In the Middle Ages the old world had pa.s.sed, and the vision of a new world came near to the eager and pa.s.sionate hearts of many peoples.

Lincoln and Wells, Amiens and Chartres, Florence and a.s.sisi 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 l.u.s.tier 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 centuries; as manyminded 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 dryness and pedantry of its latter days prevent our vision of the earlier time when the pa.s.sion 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 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 controversy, are they not deaf to the voices of the spirit which he would interpret to us? A distinguished 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 conceptions of evolution, which have entered the mind of churchman and layman alike, that not a few 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:

Haureau, La Philosophie Scolastique, Ed. 1872;

Jowett, Dialogues of Plato (vol. III. p. 523);

Jourdain (Amable), Recherches critiques, Paris 1848;

Jourdain (Charles), Excursions historiques, Paris 1888 (and the Philosophie de St Thomas of the same author);

Ampere, Histoire litt. de la France avant le XIIme siecle;

Brucker's Historia Critica Philosophiae (English Ed., 1791);

Renan, Averroes, Paris 1866; the Philosophie perip. apud Syros; and the Peuples Semitiques dans l'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 Mystiques du XIVme siecle;

Benn, A. W., The Greek Philosophers, London 1882 (and many helpful essays in periodical literature);

Zeller, Die Philosophie 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 Traumuller, Gesch. d. physik.

Experimentierkunst, Leipzig 1899;

Rashdall's History of Universities;

Haeser, Geschichte der Medicin, Jena 1875-82;

Baas, J. H., Gesch. d. Medicin, Stuttgart 1876;

_Idem_, Die geschichtliche Entwicklung des arztlichen Standes, Berlin 1896;

Charles Daremberg (all his works);

Rousselot, etudes sur la philosophie 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, Elem. Physiol., 1757, I. 3;

Tiedemann, Physiologie de l'homme, Paris 1831, I. 41;

Delle Chiaja, Inst.i.tuzione di Anatom. e Fis. Comp., 1832, 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.)

INTRODUCTION[1].

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 perspective 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 constellation-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 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 questions 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 th.o.r.n.y 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 fas.h.i.+on 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.

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 survive 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 a.s.sume that from their chairs there issued naught but rhetoric, casuistries and fallacies, and that their mult.i.tudinous disciples were silly moths.

Each period of human achievement has its phases 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 posterior 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 limits of the knowable we must have sought to transgress 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 errors came not of indolence, for they were pa.s.sionate; 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. 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 scientifically 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 sanct.i.ty, 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 apparition of truth can no longer command united allegiance, and criterions begin to encroach upon sanctions. Broader and more stable foundations have, it is true, 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 verification 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 illumination, 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 modern sayings was that of Freeman-that the end of modern material progress 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.

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 ignorance 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.