Page:Science and medieval thought. The Harveian oration delivered before the Royal College of Physicians, October 18, 1900 (IA sciencemedievalt00allbrich).pdf/31

 objects and methods of enquiry were determined for thirty generations. From Aristotle Europe adopted logic first, and then metaphysics, yet both in method and in purpose Origen and Augustine were platonists; rationalised dogma lived upon dialectic, and conflicted with mysticism; but logic, dogma and mysticism alike disdained experience.

Thus, no mere external sanction, stood the Faith; threefold: from the past it brought its pompous ritual, it appealed by its subtle dogmatic scheme to the intellects, and by its devotion to the hearts of men. Through the mirage of it, when its substance had waned, Copernicus, Galileo, and Harvey had to steer by the compass of the experimental method. This was their chief ad- versity, and of other adversities I have to speak.

The visitor to the Dominican Church of St Catherine at Pisa will see on its walls St Thomas of Aquino with the Holy Scriptures in his hand; prostrate beneath him is Averroes with his Great Commentary, but beside him Plato bearing the Timæus. It was the fortune of the Faith that, of all the treatises of Plato, the Timæus, the most fantastic and the least scientific, should have been set apart to instruct the medieval