Part 4 (1/2)
”The vulgar notion about Bacon we take to be this, that he invented a newat truth, which method is called induction, and that he detected soue before his time This notion is as well founded as that of the people who, in the Middle Ages, ireat conjurer Many who are far too well inforant nonsense entertain e think incorrect notions as to what Bacon really effected in this matter”
Stillon the pheno his auditors not to suppose that scientific investigation is ”soht easily gather this impression from the manner in which many persons speak of scientific inquiry, or talk about inductive and deductive philosophy, or the principles of the 'Baconian philosophy' To hear people talk about the great Chancellor--and a very great man he certainly was--you would think that it was he who had invented science, and that there was no such thing as sound reasoning before the tih knowing absolutely nothing of the subject hich they e the author of soree What they do is not to go and learn soinator of the view they question, in a generalthat, 'After all, you know, the principles and method of this author are totally opposed to the canons of the Baconian philosophy' Then everybody applauds, as a rees that it must be so”
Lord Bacon himself so little understood true science that he condemned Copernicanism because it failed to solve the problereat founder in Magnetism, whose as the best {103} exemplification of inductive science of that time
Of course Bacon did not invent science nor itstheical thinkers froreat naht a pioneer in modern physical science than the chancellor,--and he was a mediaeval university man
We are prone to think of the old-time universities as classical or literary schools with certain li of science The reason for this is easy to understand It is because out of such classical and literary colleges our present universities, with their devotion to science, were developed or transfornorant of mediaeval education, however, to think that the classical and literary schools are types of university work in the Middle Ages The original universities of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries paid no attention to language at all except inase, was studied in order that thereLatin was not studied at all, however, from its literary side; to style as such the professors in the old mediaeval universities and the writers of the books of the tilect of style in literature and of the niceties of classical Latin that the university men of recent centuries before our own, {104} so bitterly condemned the old, mediaeval teachers and were so utterly unsy and methods We, however, have come once more into a time when style means little, indeed, entirely too little, and when the , and we should have more sympathy with our older forefathers in education ere in the sa in this matter, but we should know the reasons for them and then they will disappear
As ahappened in ourthe latter half of the nineteenth century as happened in the latter half of the fifteenth century in Italy, and in the next century throughout Europe With the fall of Constantinople the Greeks were sent packing by the Turks and they carried with them into Italy manuscripts of the old Greek authors, examples of old Greek art and the classic spirit of devotion to literature as such A new educationalso half-century before the fall of Constantinople, but now interest in it caymen, the nobility, even the wo, as it was called Private schools of various kinds were opened for the study of it, and everybody considered that it was the one thing that people who {105} wanted to keep up to date, smart people, for they have always been with us, should not fail to be familiar with The humanities became the fashi+on, just as science became the fashi+on in the nineteenth century Fashi+on has a wonderfully pervasive power and it runs in cycles in intellectual matters as well as in clothes
The devotees of the New Learning demanded a place for it in the universities University faculties perfectly confident, as university faculties always are, that what they had in the curriculuh to think that what had been good enough for their forefathers was surely good enough also for this generation, refused to admit the new studies For a considerable period, therefore, the humanities had to be pursued in institutions apart from the universities Indeed it was not until the Jesuits showed how valuable classical studies ht be made for developmental purposes and true education that they were admitted into the universities
Note the similarity with certain events in our own tio the universities refused to adraduate departued exactly as did the old , that they had no place for science Science had to be learned, then, in separate institutions for a time The scientific {106} educational movement made its way, however, until finally it was admitted into the university curricula
Noe are in thein favor so rapidly that it see before they would be entirely replaced by the sciences, except, in so far as those are concerned who are looking for education in literature and the classic languages for special purposes
It will be interesting, then, to trace the story of the old mediaeval universities as far as the science in their curriculum was concerned, because it represents ined, or than is ordinarily thought, the preceding phase of education to the classical period which we have seen go out of fashi+on to so great an extent in the last two generations We shall readily find that at least as much time was devoted in the mediaeval universities to the physical sciences as in our own, and that the culture sciences filled up the rest of the curriculum Philosophy, which occupied so prominent a place in older university life, was not only a culture science, but physical science as well, as indeed the name natural philosophy, which remained almost down to our day, attests
Physical science was not the sole object of these hly scientific The main object of the universities in the olden time was to secure such {107} discussion of the problems of man's relation to the universe, to his Creator, to his fellow-creatures and to the hts and duties and to use his powers Huxley declared that the trivium and quadrivium, the seven liberal arts studied in the mediaeval universities, probably deenerous comprehension of what is meant by culture than the curriculurah logic, the science of reasoning; the art of expression through rhetoric, a combination of art and science with applications to practical life Mathematics was studied with a zeal and a success that only those who know the history of mediaeval mathematics can at all appreciate Cantor, the Gere volume, has told the story of the develop the centuries before the Renaissance, that is from the thirteenth to the fifteenth, in a way thatat the universities in this subject was not dry and sterile, but eminently productive, successful in research, and with constant additions to knowledge such as live universities ought to y, music and law and reat {108} collections of laws made for purposes of scientific study Of astronomy every one was expected to know much, of medicine we shall have considerable to say hereafter, but in the meantime it is well to recall that these h standard of ht some wonderful developments in the sciences allied to medicine and above all in their applications to therapeutics Surgery never reached so high a plane of achieve the period when it was studied so faithfully and developed so marvellously at the e of physics was needed for the development of metaphysics that the mediaeval schoolmen devoted themselves to the study of nature They turned with as much ardor and devotion as did Herbert Spencer in the nineteenth century, to the accuard to nature as would enable theeneral principles and lay firard to the creature and the Creator It is, above all, this phase ofwork, of the schoolnored and only too frequently misrepresented in the modern time
For instance, in the discussion of the status of matter in the universe the scholastics and notably Thomas Aquinas had come to the conclusion that matter was absolutely indestructible He {109} even went so far as to say that man could not destroy it, and God would not annihilate it _Nihil o at all will ever be reduced to nothingness, was his dictum as the conclusion of a course of lectures on this subject He saw the changes in matter all round his, the vaporizations, the solutions, the putrefactions and all the rest, but he knew that these only brought changes insubstance For him, as for all the scholastic philosophers, matter was composed of two principles, as they were called One of these was prime matter and the other form To priative qualities, inertia and the like To form, the dyna qualities Priy or bundle of energies, the dyna into prime matter, made the different kinds ofto co with the modern ideas of the composition of matter and especially the notions which have come to us from researches in physical cheer believe that we have sohty different elements, essentially different kinds of ed one {110} into another We have seen one for into another, heliu radium, have heard of Professor Ramsay's transmutation of various elements, and have about come to the conclusion that in the radio-active substances we have a wonderful trans power A pro since that he would like to treat a large quantity of lead ore in order to extract from it all the silver which so constantly occurs in connection with it in the natural state, and then having put the lead ore aside for a score of years, would like to exaain, confident that he would find traces of silver in it once more, which had developed as a consequence of the radio-activity present in the substance and which is constantly changing lead into silver in small quantities Newton's declaration, when he saw crystals of gold in connection with copper, that gold had been developed froo, but no one would consider it so at the present moment
We are prone to think that these oldto some extent at least the philosopher's stone with its supposed capacity for changing baser metals into precious, and with their acceptance of the transmutation of substances, cannot have had any real scientific bent ofto the realization, however, that in , in {111} conjunction with such observation as they had at hand, they anticipated our most recent conclusions in very marvellous ways We kno that radium, or at least radio-active substances, represent the philosopher's stone of the olden time We are not surprised at the transmutation offor it
I re the old theory of uished professor in chemistry in this country, and he was struck by the similarity of it to what are the present accepted ideas of the coenerally known I had to tell hiht as a basic doctrine, and that far fro concealed it was the very touchstone of Catholic philosophic teaching, and had often been the subject of deprecation and conteht that it represented so handed down to us from the backwardness and abysm of time
We have demonstrated the indestructibility of matter in modern times by experimental methods The mediaeval school from the premises of observation that they had in the olden times We may be apt to think that they knew very little about nature and the details of physical science, but that will be only because we do not {112} know their great books Albertus Magnus is a typical example of a renowned teacher of the thirteenth century as, however, at the sa ihly honored and respected by his ecclesiastical superiors so that he was ard to nearly every phase of physical science A list of his books reads like a section of a catalogue of a library of physical science I have told the story of his career in the second series of ”Catholic Churchmen in Science,” but the names of his volu He has voluraphy, on anieneration and corruption, on age and death and life, on phases of psychology, the soul, sense and sensation, memory, sleep, the intellect and many another subject
Those who think that there was no attention paid to science in the Middle Ages nus' work
Above all, those who talk thus are entirely ignorant of all that Roger Bacon did Roger Bacon himself was a student of the University of Paris He was a professor there He corresponded with the scientists of Europe quite as frequently or at least as significantly as professors of the modern time do with each other Students subrinus' letter to hinetism and electricity and know of others We have his own books, in which he treats not only the scientific problems, but inventions and applied science of all kinds At the present time his interest in aeronautics has a special appeal to us He was sure that men would soht that he could make one himself, but his experiments proved unsuccessful His theory of it was very interesting In his work ”De Secretis Artis et Naturae Operibus” he writes that ain the centre s by means of a crank and thus, quite after the fashi+on of birds, fly through the air It was he rote that the ti the roads withoutwith gunpowder He realized, therefore, that sometime men would harness explosives and use them for motor purposes
That is, of course, just e are doing with gasolene
He suggested that boats would run over the water without oars and without sails He was anticipating our ht h that fact was not demonstrated for several centuries after his time He worked out most of the theory of lenses as we have it at the present time He was sure that experiment and {114} observation constituted the only way by which knowledge of nature could be obtained In this he was but following his great teacher Albertus Magnus, who insisted that in natural philosophy experie; _”Experier Bacon's devotion to hly scientific was the trend of his mind Without mathematics he was sure that one could not reach scientific knowledge, or that what one did get ithout certainty Soly s were so great a surprise to his generation that the Pope ordered hie in books Without this order ould not have had Roger Bacon's great works, for his vow of poverty voluntarily taken forbade him to be possessed of sufficientmaterials, which were then very expensive
Indeed the mathematics of the mediaeval universities is the best proof of the seriousness of their devotion to science and, may it also be said, of their success Cantor, in his ”History of Mathereat authority in the es of his second volume to the mathematicians of the thirteenth century alone, two of whom, Leonard of Pisa and Jordanus Nemorarius, did so eometry, {115} as to work a revolution in reat disciples like John of Holywood (probably a town near Dublin), Johannes Campanus and others No wonder that at the end of the century Roger Bacon said, ”For withoutin philosophy can be obtained,” and again, ”for he who knows not mathematics cannot know any other science; what is norance or find its proper remedy” The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries saw even more important work done Cantor has half a dozen men in the fifteenth century to whoes each
How the place of this incan have escaped the notice of those who insist so es, is hard to understand This alone would convict the about
The educational genius of the great university century, the thirteenth, the enerations more than any other, was Thooodness, gave the title of saint If any further proof that these centuries were interested in science were needed, or that the universities in which he was the leading light as scholar and professor in the thirteenth century, and as the greatscientific studies, it would be found in {116} his works Philosophy is developed scientifically in his ”Contra Gentes” and theology, scientifically in his great ”Summa” It is the very austerity of the scientific qualities of these books that havefor many modern readers, who, therefore, have failed to understand the scientific spirit of the tiested at the beginning of this, deeply interested in every forard tocall physical science He evidently drank in with avidity all that had been observed with regard to living creatures and, e come to analyze his works with care and read his books with the devotion of his own students, we find many anticipations of what is most modern in our science
The indestructibility of matter, matter and form, that is the doctrine of the unity of the basis of y in the sense that the fore but do not disappear, all these were co I have recently had occasion to point out how close he cay which is probably considered to be one of our most modern contributions to the theory of evolution It is expressed by the foreny”
According to this the co repeats in the course of its develop phases of foetal develople cell in which it originates up to the perfect being as it is born into the world, retrace the history by which froradually developed The whole theory of evolution is supposed by many people to be modern, but of course it is not This particular phase of it, however, is thought surely to be modern It is soeny In recent years serious doubts have been thrown on it, but with that we have nothing to do here