Page:History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic Vol. I.djvu/448

304 304 THE SPANISH ARABS. PART I. Their histor- loal merits. The Saracens gave an entirely new face to phar- macy and chemistry. They introduced a great variety of salutary medicaments into Europe. The Spanish Arabs, in particular, are commended by Sprengel above their brethren for their observations on the practice of medicine. ^^ But whatever real knowledge they possessed was corrupted by their inveterate propensity for mystical and occult sci- ence. They too often exhausted both health and fortune in fruitless researches after the elixir of life and the philosopher's stone. Their medical pre- scriptions were regulated by the aspect of the stars. Their physics were debased by magic, their chem- istry degenerated into alchemy, their astronomy into astrology. In the fruitful field of history, their success was even more equivocal. They seem to have been wholly destitute of the philosophical spirit, which gives life to this kind of composition. They were the disciples of fatalism and the subjects of a des- potic government. Man appeared to them only in the contrasted aspects of slave and master. What could they know of the finer moral relations, or of the higher energies of the soul, which are devel- oped only under free and beneficent institutions ? Even could they have formed conceptions of these, how would they have dared to express them ? least, by Honain and others in the alleged period. See art. Aver- ninth century, (see Casiri, Bibli- roes. otheca Escurialensis, torn. i. p. 41 Sprengel, Histoire de la M^d- 304,) and Bayle has shown that a ecine, traduite par Jourdan, (Paris, Latin version of the Stagiritc was 1815,) torn. ii. pp. 263 et seq. used by the Europeans before the