Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 64.djvu/12

8 discouraged by the traditions of Mohammed. Architecture was the only outlet for their artistic impulse. They could not dissect the human body. Original investigation was closed on nearly every side. What they were permitted to do, they did well. In astronomy they preserved the classic books and they made many precise observations. It is almost an accident that so little use was made of their work by Europeans. If there had been an active commerce between the east and all the countries of the west the history of Europe in the middle ages would have been changed and brightened.

The scientific history of the middle ages is sharply divided into two periods. In the first, no part of Arabic learning had penetrated the west. All knowledge came from the Greeks through the Romans. In the second, the treasures of the Greeks were made known together with the results of three centuries of acute commentary by the subtle-minded philosophers of the east. . The astronomy of the first period was represented by Manilius, Hyginus and Bede. The works of Ptolemy were unknown. These were indeed dark ages for science. In the second, all the wealth of Alexandria was opened, and it was increased by the observations of Albategnius and Ibn Yunos and the commentaries of Albumasar and his successors.

A satisfactory history of science in the middle ages is still a desideratum. Such a book could not possibly have been written before 1860, for the doctrine of special creations would then have assumed the place of the doctrine of a slow, steady and continuous evolution. Episodes of decadence are as much a part of evolution as examples of advancement. The book might well be written as a series of biographies of great men, if this were done without forgetting that, in the strictest sense, every man, even the greatest, is the product of his time.

With the advent of the christian religion theology had become the supreme science of the west. In theory, at least, the whole of philosophy could be deduced from revelation, and at all events theology was the standard to which all philosophizing was obliged to conform. Just as philosophy could be got, by deductive reasoning, from theology, so the whole of science could be deduced from a few fundamental facts, precisely as the whole of geometry of the ancients was derived from a few axioms. Under pre-suppositions of this sort, there could be no natural science, since our very conception of science implies theory compared with, and controlled by, observation and experiment. The method of medieval science was logical deduction. The method of modern science is a very different thing.

'Thus,' as Whewell formulates it:

A universal science was established with the authority of a religious creed. Its universality rested on erroneous views of the relations of words and truths; its pretensions as a science were admitted by the servile temper of men's