Page:Decline of the West (Volume 2).djvu/317

Rh based treatise on magnetism that appeared before Gilbert (1600). And Roger Bacon, the disciple of both, developed a natural-scientific theory of knowledge to serve as basis for his technical investigations. But boldness in the discovery of dynamic interlinkages went further still. The Copernican system was hinted at in a manuscript of 1322 and a few decades later was mathematically developed by the Paris Occamists, Buridan, Albert of Saxony, and Oresme. Let us not deceive ourselves as to the fundamental motive-power of these explorations. Pure contemplative philosophy could have dispensed with experiment for ever, but not so the Faustian symbol of the machine, which urged us to mechanical constructions even in the twelfth century and made "Perpetuum mobile" the Prometheus-idea of the Western intellect. For us the first thing is ever the working hypothesis — the very kind of thought-product that is meaningless to other Cultures. It is an astounding fact (to which, however, we must accustom ourselves) that the idea of immediately exploiting in practice any knowledge of natural relations that may be acquired is alien to every sort of mankind except the Faustian (and those who, like Japanese, Jews, and Russians, have to-day come under the intellectual spell of its Civilization). The very notion of the working hypothesis implicitly contains a dynamic lay-out of the universe. Theoria, contemplative vision of actuality, was for those subtly inquiring monks only secondary, and, being itself the outcome of the technical passion, it presently led them, quite imperceptibly, to the typically Faustian conception of God as the Grand Master of the machine, who could accomplish everything that they themselves in their impotence only dared to wish. Insensibly the world of God became, century by century, more and more like the Perpetuum mobile. And, imperceptibly also, as the scanning of nature became sharper and sharper in the school of experiment and technique, and the Gothic myth became more and more shadowy, the concepts of monkish working hypotheses developed, from Galileo onwards, into the critically illuminated numina of modern science, the collisions and the fields, gravitation, the velocity of light, and the "electricity" which in our electrodynamic world-picture has absorbed into itself the other forms of energy and thereby attained to a sort of physical monotheism. They are the concepts that are set up behind the formulæ, to endow them with a mythic visibility for the inner eye. The numbers themselves are technical elements, levers and screws, overhearings of the world's secrets. The Classical Nature-thought — and that of others also — required no numbers, for it strove for no powers. The pure mathematic of Pythagoras and Plato had no relation whatever to the nature-views of Democritus and Aristotle.