Page:Science and medieval thought. The Harveian oration delivered before the Royal College of Physicians, October 18, 1900 (IA sciencemedievalt00allbrich).pdf/34

 as stationary; when reasons were not tested but counted and balanced; when even the later Aver- roists found final answers either in Aristotle or in Galen'. Thus in the irony of things it came to (pass that Harvey was withstood by the dogma of Galen who, in his own day, had passionately appealed from dogma to nature.

Porphyry of Tyre, who lived in the 3rd century, may be called the founder of both Arabian and Christian scholastics. He was an Alexandrian, but of peripatetic rather than platonic opinions. In the Isagoge, or Introduction to the Categories, already mentioned as translated by Boetius about 500 A.D., he set forth plainly a problem which during the Middle Ages rent Western Europe asunder; a problem which, says John of Salisbury",

1 Yet Roger Bacon seems to have apprehended both pro- gress and the relativity of truth. Before Newman, he declared that God makes no full revelation but gives it in instalments; and in another passage he speaks of the judgments of Aristotle, and of other great teachers, "secundum possibili- tatem sui temporis......aliud tempus fuit tunc, et aliud nuve est"-a remarkable saying. Of the Saints he says "they had their time, we have our own." Vid. also note, p. 80. 2 Modern French historians do us the honour of annexing our heroes; in respect of the scholars of the Middle Ages M. Charles Jourdain has set, or followed, this example. John of Salisbury, that charming child of renascence, born out