Page:Science and medieval thought. The Harveian oration delivered before the Royal College of Physicians, October 18, 1900 (IA sciencemedievalt00allbrich).pdf/32

 world; that the cosmical scheme of the Timæus, apparelled in the Latin of Chalcidius,-for there were theu no Greek texts in the libraries of the West, should for some 500 years have occupied that theoretical activity which Aristotle regarded as the highest good of man'. Again, those works of Aristotle which might have made for natural knowledge fell out of men's hands, while in them, as Abélard tells us of himself, lay the Categories, the Interpretation, and the Intro- duction of Porphyry to the Categories, all in the Latin of Boetius³; treatises which made for

¹ I see in recent reports of Egyptian exploration that at Oxyrhynchus Plato was represented with curious persistence by the Phaedo and the Lachos; and those treatisos appear in the early Fayyum papyri. "A few axioms, collected from the physical and meta- physical treatises (perhaps by Cassiodorus from Boetius), were current from an early date. The translations of Boetius must for a time have lain in some neglect? 3 Alcuin had but a translated abridgment or summary of the Categories, attributed to Augustine; and in a MS. of the tenth century we find no more than this. Bootius' full trans- lation of the Categories was not current till the end of this century, when all the logic of Aristotle was in the hands of the doctors. In the earlier Middle Ages, as in the writings of John of Salisbury and of William of Conches, we hear even more of Boetius than of the master himself. Virgil, Seneca and Cicero also were the sources of much of the culturo of this period. Alcuin was a grammarian; he taught