Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 64.djvu/23

Rh to agree with the nine heavens moved by angels or intelligences, the supreme sphere resting in God himself.

About the end of the fifteenth century a revolt against the Aristotle of the Arab commentators took form in Italy. On April 4, 1497, the first lecture from the original Greek text was given at the University of Padua. The 'vain glosses' of the Arabs were decried by the most distinguished among the teachers of the sixteenth century. Hippocrates and Galen were infallible only in Greek. In 1552 the preface to an edition of Averroes declared: "Our ancestors could find nothing ingenious in philosophy or medicine unless it came from the Moors. Our own age, on the other hand, trampling Arab science under foot, admires and accepts only what comes directly from the treasury of Greece; it adores the Greeks only; it will have only Greeks for masters; he who knows not Greek, knows nothing." The Arab Aristotle became 'a poisoner; an obscurantist; the executioner of the human race, who has destroyed the world with his pen as did Alexander with his sword.' The new school conquered in the end, but not without a long struggle.

In Petrarch 's time the doctrines of Aristotle had taken on an aridity from the Arab commentators that cried for a living spirit to replace it.

"Petrarch deserves the name of 'the first modern man' in that he first introduced to the Latins the fine feeling of antique culture, the source of all our civilization. * * * It was he who first rediscovered the secret of that noble, generous and liberal comprehension of life which disappeared when the barbarians triumphed over the ancient world."

When Arab philosophy was finally overthrown in the early part of the seventeenth century (we may fix the date at the death of Cremonini in 1631) the liberty of opinion that then prevailed in the northeast of Italy vanished completely. The day of conflict was over. The reign of orthodoxy began anew. The final defeat of the Arabs was, on the one hand, a sign of the victory of experimental science; and on the other, it cleared the way for a rigid orthodoxy.

During the period when the struggle between the Arab and the Greek Aristotle was in full progress it was inevitable that liberty of