Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 5.djvu/677

Rh During the centuries between the first of these three philosophers and the last, the human intellect was active in other fields than theirs. The Sophists had run through their career. At Athens had appeared the three men, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, whose yoke remains to some extent unbroken to the present hour. Within this period, also, the School of Alexandria was founded, Euclid wrote his "Elements," and he and others made some advance in optics. Archimedes had propounded the theory of the lever and the principles of hydrostatics. Pythagoras had made his experiments on the harmonic intervals, while astronomy was immensely enriched by the discoveries of Hipparchus, who was followed by the historically more celebrated Ptolemy. Anatomy had been made the basis of scientific medicine; and it is said by Draper that vivisection then began. In fact, the science of ancient Greece had already cleared the world of the fantastic images of divinities operating capriciously through natural phenomena. It had shaken itself free from that fruitless scrutiny "by the internal light of the mind alone," which had vainly sought to transcend experience and reach a knowledge of ultimate causes. Instead of accidental observation, it had introduced observation with a purpose; instruments were employed to aid the senses; and scientific method was rendered in a great measure complete by the union of induction and experiment.

What, then, stopped its victorious advance? Why was the scientific intellect compelled, like an exhausted soil, to lie fallow for nearly two millenniums before it could regather the elements necessary to its fertility and strength? Bacon has already let us know one cause; Whewell ascribes this stationary period to four causes—obscurity of thought, servility, intolerance of disposition, enthusiasm of temper; and he gives striking examples of each. But these characteristics must have had their causes, which lay in the circumstances of the time. Rome and the other cities of the empire had fallen into moral putrefaction. Christianity had appeared, offering the Gospel to the poor, and, by moderation if not asceticism of life, practically protesting against the profligacy of the age. The sufferings of the early Christians and the extraordinary exaltation of mind which enabled them to triumph over the diabolical tortures to which they were subjected, must have left traces not easily effaced. They scorned the earth, in view of that "building of God, that house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens." The Scriptures which ministered to their spiritual needs were also the measure of their science. When, for example, the celebrated question of antipodes came to be discussed, the Bible was with many the ultimate court of appeal. Augustine, who flourished a. d. 400, would not deny the rotundity of the earth,