Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/44

32 doctrine of evolution. Or the literal Biblical point of view vs. that of modern science, exactly as at Upsala.

Aristotle, however, was no hard-shell Baptist, and Aristotelianism in the seventeenth century had little to do with him. Christian theologians had taken what suited them of Aristotle's ideas (badly translated from the Arabic) and had used them in their sacred edifice. This, according to them, was a world in which the earth, the home of sin and imperfection, was the center of the universe. Above it was Heaven, salvation, and perfection. Aristotle, so the theologians said, had studied nature all that was needful; for science it was only necessary to study him. But where he was at variance with the Bible they declared him wrong. Spiritual force, or, as the Christians said, God, governed matter, hence miracles were possible. Before Bishop Swedberg left Upsala he said to the students, "All that you need for time and eternity you can learn in the Bible, let that be your handbook."

But when he said this in 1703 the Fundamentalism of the Faculty of Theology at Upsala had already been beaten.

It had been beaten, chiefly, by René Descartes, 6 the frail Frenchman whom the Swedish winter had killed while he was on a visit to Stockholm in 1650. Although he believed he had "discovered the foundations of a marvelous science" in a series of dreams the night of November 10, 1619, he was essentially a "mechanistic materialist," and mainly responsible for freeing the study of nature from the limits set to it by medieval religion. For him material phenomena were not, as Aristotle had held, the result of indwelling spiritual forces or forms, translated by Christian theologians as God. The universe of matter, including the human body, Descartes maintained, was a vast mechanism ruled by the laws of physics. He did make provision for God and for the soul, but as outside of space and time and thus not interfering with the physical laws.

On this theory science was at last free to demonstrate the laws of nature from natural phenomena.

Not, however, if the Faculty of Theology of Upsala could prevent it. They complained about modern science in 1663, and the fight between the theologians and the Faculty of Medicine continued on and off until 1686 when the theologians succeeded in persuading the clerical part of the Diet to present Charles XI with