Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 55.djvu/307

Rh that period Christianity dominated the best thought of Europe, and the tremendous practical problems that confronted the Church for a long time threw everything else into the shade; for a long time, I said, during the early part of this period in especial, when the Church in general seemed to realize its responsibility to win the whole world to its Master, and every individual coming into the Church was made to feel that the Church's work was above everything else in the world. The importance of an exhaustive knowledge of the facts of Nature seemed trifling when compared with questions of character and future life, and making the world feel the power of Christ. Eusebius only expressed the thought of much of his age when he said, speaking of those who pursued the study of physical science, "It is not through ignorance of the things admired by them, but through contempt of their useless labor, that we think little of these matters, turning our souls to the exercise of better things." And with that deliberate turning away from such subjects there "would come of necessity that indistinctness of ideas about natural things which is fatal to all scientific investigation. Witness these words of Lactantius: "To search for the causes of natural things; to inquire whether the sun be as large as he seems; whether the moon is convex or concave; whether the stars are fixed in the sky or float freely in the air; of what size and of what material are the heavens, whether they be at rest or in motion; what is the magnitude of the earth, on what foundations it is suspended and balanced—to dispute and conjecture on such matters is just as if we chose to discuss what we think of a city in a remote country, of which we never heard but the name." As Whewell, from whom these last two quotations are taken, says, "It is impossible to express more forcibly that absence of any definite notions on physical subjects which led to this tone of thought."

2. Contributing, without doubt, largely to that indistinctness of ideas, and to the low value put upon physical science, was the mysticism common to the early and the mediæval Church, and to the world at large for many hundred years—the mysticism, that is to say, the habit of assigning supernatural agencies to the various phenomena of Nature, and of regarding them as subject to the vicissitudes of arbitrary will rather than as following out the workings of a consistent orderly plan. There is no need of any attempt to show how fatal such a spirit is to science, nor how that spirit seemed for a long while to dominate the world." It changed physical science to magic; astronomy to astrology; the study of the composition of bodies to alchemy; and even mathematics was changed till it became the contemplation of the "spiritual relations of number and figure." That the Church was not, as has been often charged,