Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 42.djvu/163

Rh blessing of Heaven rested upon his labors; and among the legends embodying this claim is that given by the Bollandists and immortalized by a renowned painter. The great philosopher and saint is represented in the habit of his order, with book and pen in hand, kneeling before the image of Christ crucified, and as he kneels the image thus addresses him: "Thomas, thou hast written well concerning me; what price wilt thou receive for thy labor?" The myth-making faculty of the people at large was also brought into play. According to a wide-spread and circumstantial legend, Albert, by magical means, created an android—an artificial man, living, speaking, and answering all questions with such subtlety that St. Thomas, unable to answer its reasoning, broke it to pieces with his staff.

To this day historians of the Roman Church like Rohrbacher, and historians of science like Pouchet, find it convenient to propitiate the Church by dilating upon the glories of St. Thomas Aquinas in thus making an alliance between religious and scientific thought, and laying the foundations for a "sanctified science"; but the unprejudiced historian can not indulge in this enthusiastic view: the results both for the Church and for science have been most unfortunate. It was a wretched delay in the evolution of fruitful thought; for the first result of this great man's great compromise was to close for ages that path in science which above all others leads to discoveries of value—the experimental method—and to reopen that old path of mixed theology and science which, as Hallam declares, "after three or four hundred years had not untied a single knot or added one unequivocal truth to the domain of philosophy"—the path which, as all modern history proves, has ever since led only to delusion and evil.