Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/239

Rh education, flourishing schools of philosophy, poetry, and natural science. Five hundred years after the triumph of the Gothic conquerors we find their empires groaning under a concentration of all scourges. The day-star of civilization had set in utter night; the proud nations of the West had sunk in poverty, bigotry, general ignorance, cruel abasement of the lower classes, squalid misery of domestic life, systematic suppression of political, personal, and intellectual liberty.

How shall we explain that dreadful aphanasia, that thousand years' eclipse of reason and freedom that followed like an unnatural night upon the brightest sunrise in the history of the human race? A year after the death of the prophetess Sospitra, says the pagan historian Eunapius, her son was one day standing before the temple of Serapis, when the prophetic spirit of his mother fell upon him: "Woe be our children!" he exclaimed, when he awakened from his trance; "I see a cloud approaching: a great darkness will fall upon the human race."

And, verily, that cloud did not come from Olympus or Mount Sinai. The law revealed in the "conservation of forces" holds good in many phenomena of the moral world. Every apparent annihilation of energy is only a metamorphosis of its manifestations, and we can often discover the principle of that metamorphosis by ascertaining the active concomitants of its results. Just as mechanical force can be converted into heat, or heat into electricity, the energy diverted from rural pursuits may assert itself in political, industrial, or scientific activity. The pent-up vigor of the middle ages had no such outlets. War, now a curse, was then a welcome, but limited, alternative of stagnation; the lethargy of the dreary intervals was for millions a night without even the starlight of hope. Yet that strange torpor was accompanied by the feverish activity of a novel pursuit—a relentless war against the instincts of Nature. The children of freedom-loving ancestors were imprisoned in convents, where bigotry and superstition conspired for the suppression of every natural feeling. Hordes of self-torturing fanatics roamed the land, appalling the wretched peasants by their direful predictions of approaching calamities. Fourteen different orders of monastic devotees vied in the systematic mortification of their natural desires, the depletion of their physical and intellectual vigor, the enforcement of health-destroying penances, and reason-insulting dogmas and ceremonies. While science withered to its very roots in the famished love of knowledge, the mania of antiphysics rioted in the production of thousands upon thousands of voluminous manuscripts devoted to the propaganda of self-torture and self-abasement, and the glorification of Nature-insulting fanatics. Art worshiped at the same shrine. Painters exhausted their fancy in the representation of physical wrecks and ghastly tortures. Winckelmann estimates that hardly one in ten thousand of the plastic masterpieces of a Nature-loving antiquity escaped the fury of the monastic iconoclasts. The war