Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 87.djvu/278

274 city life of antiquity, but with these modern differences, that religion was separate from the state, and that the institution of human slavery found no place in the medieval town. There the freeman was not ashamed to toil, and the runaway serf could acquire liberty. Slavery has been reckoned by one historian of science as one of the five great obstacles to the advance of science in antiquity; if so, the middle ages were better off in this respect.

Early in the twelfth century there was a great outburst of enthusiasm for learning and of intellectual curiosity. Students swarmed from all parts of western Europe seeking teachers; the result was that foundation of the European universities whose intellectual life has been continuous from then until now. Roman law was revived and studied scientifically. The fruits of Greek philosophy, preserved by the Arabs in Spain or the Orient in translations and commentaries, were translated again,—this time into Latin, which in the Christian West was now the universal language of scholarship. Humanism, classical scholarship in the strict and narrow sense, and the great paintings and sculptures of the Italians in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, were but later phases of the same movement. Petrarch, the first great humanist, who adored Cicero, wrote letters like Pliny the Younger, collected and copied ancient manuscripts, and came to scorn all contemporary interests except his own fame, has often been called the first modern man, but in many ways seems a reactionary looking backward. Abelard, the first great schoolman, who over two centuries before Petrarch's time wandered forth from his native Brittany, first seeking teachers, then triumphing over them, then attracting students to himself; Abelard, who dared to show that even the church fathers held conflicting opinions, and who advocated sceptical and systematic criticism as the best road to knowledge; Abelard, more than Petrarch, deserves the title of the first modern man.

Turning now from medieval civilization as a whole to this medieval learning in particular, let us correct some erroneous notions concerning it. For one thing, we have been taught to call medieval learning scholasticism, and to think of it as concerned almost exclusively with logic, metaphysics and theology; while we have been taught to associate the beginnings of modern science with the Italian Renaissance. But the fact is that the narrow humanist of the Renaissance took no more interest in natural science than did the narrow schoolman of the middle ages. The sciences which they cultivated were philology and theology. The fact is that natural science has had a more or less continuous development of its own, largely independent of the middle ages and Renaissance. Books on nature written in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were still satisfactory to readers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as is shown by numerous editions of them which were printed then.

The reliance of the middle ages upon the authority of the Greek