Part 38 (1/2)

At Alexandria the most notable Greek scientific work had been done Euclid (323-283 BC) in geometry; Aristarchus (third century BC), who explained the motion of the earth; Eratosthenes (270-196 BC), who measured the size of the earth; Archimedes (270?-212 BC), a pupil of Euclid's, who applied science in many ways and laid the foundations of dynamics; Hipparchus (160-125 BC), the father of astronoued the stars, were aht there in the days when Alexandria had succeeded Athens as the intellectual capital of the Greek world Some remarkable advances also were made in the study of human anatomy and medicine by two Greeks, Herophilus (335-280 BC) and Erasistratus (d 280 BC), who apparently did

But even at Alexandria the promise of Greek science was unfulfilled

Despite many notable speculations and scientific advances, the hopeful beginnings did not coreat contributionscientific lines than along the lines of literature and philosophy Their great strength lay in the direction of philosophic speculation, and this tendency to speculate, rather than to observe and test and measure and record, was the fundamental weakness of all Greek science The Greeks never advanced in scientific work to the invention and perfection of instruments for the standardization of their observations As a result they passed on to the mediaeval world an extensive ”book science” and not a little keen observation, of which the works of Aristotle and the Alexandrian mathematicians and astronomers form the e of which the modern world has been able to make much use The ”book science” of the Greeks, and especially that of Aristotle, was highly prized for centuries, but in time, due to the many inaccuracies, had to be discarded and done anew by modern scholars

The Romans, as we have seen (chapter III), were essentially a practical people, good at getting the work of the world done, but not iven to theoretical discussion or scientific speculation They were organizers, governors, engineers, executives, and literary workers rather than scientists They executed s of a practical character, such as the building of roads, bridges, aqueducts, and public buildings; organized governe scale; and have left us a literature and a legal system of importance, but they contributed little to the realreat narapher (63 BC-24 AD); Pliny the Elder (23-79 AD), who did notable work as an observer in natural history; and Galen (a Roman-Greek), in medicine They, like the Greeks, were pervaded by the saht prove useful, whereas they cultivated it largely as a mental exercise (R 203)

THE CHRISTIAN REACTION AGAINST INQUIRY The Christian attitude toward inquiry was froly intolerant The tendency of the Western Church, it will be remembered (p

94), was fro, and to depend upon emotional faith and the enforcement of a moral life By the close of the third century the hostility to pagan schools and hellenic learning had become so pronounced that the _Apostolic Constitutions_ (R 41) ordered Christians to abstain fro of value and only served ”to subvert the faith of the unstable” In 401 AD the Council of Carthage forbade the clergy to read any heathen author, and Greek learning now rapidly died out in the West For a time it was almost entirely lost In consequence Greek science, then best represented by Alexandrian learning, and which containedwith other pagan learning The, very es in the great mediaeval textbooks (p 162), as we have seen in the study of the Seven Liberal Arts (chapter VII), caes of Scripture or in illustrating the ways of God toward y, to which all other learning tended (see Figure 44, p 154)

The history of Christianity throughout all the Dark Ages is a history of the distrust of inquiry and reason, and the eood and evil spirits, and the interpretation of natural phenomena as e ereat developion into a crude polytheises the miraculous flourished The ic and prayers were employed to heal the sick, restore the crippled, foretell the future, and punish the wicked Sacred pools, the royal touch, wonder-working ih prayer stood in the way of the development of medicine (R 204) Disease was attributed to satanic influence, and a regular schedule of prayers for cures was in use

Sanitation was unknown Plagues and pestilences were manifestations of Divine wrath, and hysteria and insanity were possession by the devil to be cast out by whipping and torture One's future was determined by the position of the heavenly bodies at the time of birth Eclipses, meteors, and coht things there be a Coe; Wind, Fas, War, Earthquakes, Floods, and Direful Change [4]

The literature on s were recorded and believed Trial by ordeal, following careful religious forh prohibited shortly afterward by papal decrees (1215, 1222) The insistence of the Church on ”the willful, devilish character of heresy,” and the extension of heresy to cover almost any form of honest doubt or independent inquiry, caused an intellectual stagnation along lines of scientific investigation which was not relieved for more than a thousand years The many notable advances in physics, chemistry, astronomy, and medicine made by Moslem scholars (chapter VIII) were lost on Christian Europe, and had to be worked out again centuries later by the scholars of the western world Out of the astronoy; out of their cheot only alchemy Both in ti and discovery

GROWING TOLERANCE CHANGED BY THE PROTESTANT REVOLTS After the rise of the universities, the expansion of the minds of men which followed the Crusades and the revival of trade and industry, the awakening which caraphical discovery, the church authorities assumed a broader and a more tolerant attitude toward inquiry and reason than had been the case for hundreds of years It would have been surprising, with the large nu the service of the Church, had this not been the case By the h the Renaissance spirit ht extend into many new directions, and by 1500 the world seeress in almost every line of endeavor As was pointed out earlier (p 259), the Church was more tolerant than it had been for centuries, and about the year 1500 was thetime in the history of our civilization since the days of Alexandria and ancient Rome

In 1517 Luther nailed his theses to the church door in Wittenberg The Church took alarreatest contest since the conflict between paganism and Christianity was on

Within half a century all northern lands had been lost to the ancient Church (see e of its authority during its long history

The effect of these religious revolts on the attitude of the Church toward intellectual liberty was natural and marked The tolerance of inquiry recently extended ithdrawn, and an era of steadily increasing intolerance set in which was not broken for more than a century In an effort to stop the further spread of the heresy, the Church Council of Trent (1545-63) adopted stringent regulations against heretical teachings (p 303), while the sword and torch and imprisonment were resorted to to sta lands A century of endered by the long and bitter struggle over religious differences put both Catholic and Protestant Europe in no tolerant frame of mind toward inquiry or new ideas The Inquisition, a sort of universal rand jury for the detection and punishment of heretics, was revived, and the Jesuits, founded in 1534-40, were vigorous in defense of the Church and bitter in their opposition to all forms of independent inquiry and Protestant heresy

It was into this post-Reformation atmosphere of suspicion and distrust and hatred that the new critical, inquiring, questioning spirit of science, as applied to the forces of the universe, was born A century earlier the first scientists ht have been permitted to press their claims; after the Protestant Revolts had torn Christian Europe asunder this could hardly be As a result the early scientists found themselves in no enviable position Their theories were bitterly assailed as savoring of heresy; their e of an old long-accepted idea was likely to bring a punishment that ift and sure From the middle of the sixteenth to the middle of the seventeenth century was not a time when new ideas were at a premium anywhere in western Europe It was essentially a period of reaction, and periods of reaction are not favorable to intellectual progress It was into this century of reaction that , itself another form of expression of the intellectual attitudes awakened by the work of the humanistic scholars of the Italian Renaissance,

THE BEGINNINGS OF MODERN SCIENTIFIC METHOD One of the great proble men in all lands is the nature and constitution of the es of civilization have worked out for thereat speculations of the Greeks, and it was at Alexandria, in the period of its decadence, that the Egyptian geographer Ptolemy (138 AD) had offered an explanation which was accepted by Christian Europe and which does He had concluded that the earth was located at the center of the visible universe, immovable, and that the heavenly bodies moved around the earth, in circular motion, fixed in crystalline spheres [5]

This explanation accorded perfectly with Christian ideas as to creation, as well as with Christian conceptions as to the position and place of man and his relation to the heavens above and to a hell beneath This theory was obviously simple and satisfactory, and became sanctified with time As we see it now the wonder is that such an explanation could have been accepted for so long Only a an uninquisitive people could so imperfect a theory have endured for over fourteen centuries

[Illustration: FIG 113 NICHOLAS KOPERNIK (Copernicus), (1473-1543)]

In 1543 a Bohemian church canon and physician by the name of Nicholas Copernicus published his _De Revolutionibusobum Celestium_, in which he set forth the explanation of the universe whichHe piously dedicated the work to Pope Paul III, and wisely refrained fro so co the Christian conception as to the place and position of man in the universe could hardly be expected to be accepted, particularly at the ti and bitter opposition

In the dedicatory letter (R 205), Copernicus explains how, after feeling that the Ptole, he came to arrive at the conclusions he did The steps he set forth for now common, but then almost unknown They were:

1 Dissatisfaction with the old Ptolemaic explanation

2 A study of all known literature, to see if any better explanation had been offered

3 Careful thought on the subject, until his thinking took for out, to see if the observed facts would support his theory

5 The theory held to be correct, because it reduced all known facts to a systematic order and har as was L Valla's exposure of the forgery of the so-called ”Donation of Constantine,” an exa Both used a new method--the method of modern scholarshi+p In both cases the results were revolutionary As Petrarch stands forth in history as the first modern classical scholar, so Copernicus stands forth as the first s of all ation date from 1543 Of his work a recent writer (E C J Morton) has said:

Copernicus cannot be said to have flooded with light the dark places of nature--in the way that one stupendous h the long vista of the history of science, the diure of the old monk seems to rear itself out of the dull flats around it, pierces with its head the lea sun,

Like solow of the rushi+ng morn