Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 5.djvu/678

658 but he would deny the possible existence of inhabitants at the other side, "because no such race is recorded in Scripture among the descendants of Adam." Archbishop Boniface was shocked at the assumption of a "world of human beings out of the reach of the means of salvation." Thus reined in, science was not likely to make much progress. Later on, the political and theological strife between the Church and civil governments, so powerfully depicted by Draper, must have done much to stifle investigation.

Whewell makes many wise and brave remarks regarding the spirit of the middle ages. It was a menial spirit. The seekers after natural knowledge had forsaken that fountain of living waters, the direct appeal to Nature by observation and experiment, and had given themselves up to the remanipulation of the notions of their predecessors. It was a time when thought had become abject, and when the acceptance of mere authority led, as it always does in science, to intellectual death. Natural events, instead of being traced to physical, were referred to moral causes, while an exercise of the fantasy, almost as degrading as the spiritualism of the present day, took the place of scientific speculation. Then came the mysticism of the middle ages, magic, alchemy, the Neo-platonic philosophy, with its visionary though sublime attractions, which caused men to look with shame upon their own bodies as hindrances to the absorption of the creature in the blessedness of the Creator. Finally came the scholastic philosophy, a fusion, according to Lange, of the least mature notions of Aristotle with the Christianity of the West. Intellectual immobility was the result. As a traveler without a compass in a fog may wander long, imagining he is making way, and find himself, after hours of toil, at his starting-point, so the schoolmen, having tied and untied the same knots, and formed and dissipated the same clouds, found themselves at the end of centuries in their old position.

With regard to the influence wielded by Aristotle in the middle ages, and which, though to a less extent, he still wields, I would ask permission to make one remark. When the human mind has achieved greatness and given evidence of extraordinary power in any domain, there is a tendency to credit it with similar power in all other domains. Thus theologians have found comfort and assurance in the thought that Newton dealt with the question of revelation, forgetful of the fact that the very devotion of his powers, through all the best years of his life, to a totally different class of ideas, not to speak of any natural disqualification, tended to render him less instead of more competent to deal with theological and historic questions. Goethe, starting from his established greatness as a poet, and indeed from his positive discoveries in natural history, produced a profound impression among the painters of Germany when he published his "Farbenlehre," in which he endeavored to overthrow Newton's theory of colors. This theory he deemed so obviously absurd, that he considered