Page:Science and medieval thought. The Harveian oration delivered before the Royal College of Physicians, October 18, 1900 (IA sciencemedievalt00allbrich).pdf/22

 limits of the knowable we must have sought to trans- gress them. We can build our bridge over the chasm of ignorance with stored material in which the thirteentli century was poor indeed, we can fix our bearings where then was no foundation; yet man may be well engaged when he knows not the ends of his work; and the schoolmen in digging for treasure cultivated the field of knowledge, even for Galileo and Harvey, for Newton and Darwin. Their many errors came not of indolence, for they were passionate; not of hatred of light, for they were eager for the light; not of fickleness, for they wrought with unparalleled devotion; nor indeed of ignorance of particular things, for they knew many things they erred because they did not know, and they could not know, the conditions of the problems which, as they emerged from the cauldron of war and from the wreck of letters and science, they were nevertheless bound to attack, if civil societies worthy of the name were to be constructed. How slow in gestation is the mother of truth we may see by comparing the schoolmen of the second medieval period with those of the first; in the enlargement of their view, the better furniture of their minds, and the deeper meaning of their distinctions and when we compare with these later schoolmen the naturalists of the seventeenth century, we find not new acquirements only but also a new direction of the pursuit of truth.

It seems hardly comprehensible that great and stable societies have been built up on transcendental schemes of thought, upon conceptions poised as it were in the air.