Chapter XI: New Englandism 433 (3)

We have known much more about Archimedes' inventions than about his mathematical works. The Archimedian screw, a spiral tube for pumping water, invented by him, is still used in Egypt. The old story with regard to his having succeeded in making burning mirrors by which he was enabled to set the Roman vessels on fire during the siege of Syracuse, used to be doubted very seriously and, indeed, by many considered a quite incredible feat, clearly an historical exaggeration, until Cuvier and others in the early part of the nineteenth century succeeded in making a mirror by which in an experiment in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris wood was set on fire at a distance of 140 feet. As the Roman vessels were very small, propelled only by oars or at least with very small sail capacity, and as their means of offence was most crude and they had to approach surely within 100 feet of the wall to be effective, the old story therefore is probably entirely true. The other phase of history according to which Archimedes succeeded in constructing instruments by which the Roman vessels were lifted bodily out of the water, is probably also true, and certainly comes with great credibility of the man of whom it is told that, after having studied the lever, he declared that if he only had {76} some place to rest his lever, he could move the world.

The well-known story of his discovery in hydrostatics, by which he was enabled to tell the King whether the royal goldsmiths had made his crown of solid gold or not, is very well authenticated. Archimedes realized the application of the principle of specific gravity in the solution of such problems while he was taking a bath. Quite forgetful of his state of nudity he ran through the streets, crying "Eureka! Eureka! I have found it! I have found it!" There are many other significant developments of hydrostatics and mechanics, besides specific gravity and the lever, the germs of which are at least attributed to Archimedes. He seems to have been one of the world's great eminent practical geniuses. That he should have been a product of Alexandria and should even have been a professor there would be a great surprise if we did not know Alexandria as a great scientific university. As it is, it is quite easy to understand how naturally he finds his place in the history of that university and how proud any modern university would be to have on the rolls of its students and professors a man who not only developed pure science but who made a series of practical applications that are of great value to mankind. Such men our modern universities appropriately claim the right to vaunt proudly as the products of their training.

When we analyze something of the work in {77} pure mathematics that was accomplished by Archimedes our estimation of him is greatly enhanced. His work "On the Quadrature," that is the finding of the area of a segment of the parabola, is probably his most significant contribution to mathematical knowledge. His proof of the principal theorem in this is obtained by the "method of exhaustion," which had been invented by Eudoxus but was greatly developed by Archimedes. This method contains in itself the germ of that most powerful instrument of mathematical analysis in the modern time, the calculus.

Another very important work was "The Sphere and the Cylinder." This was more appreciated in his own time, and as a consequence, after his death the figure of a sphere inscribed in a cylinder was cut on his tomb in commemoration of his favorite theorem, that the volume of the sphere is two-thirds that of the cylinder and its surface is four times that of the base of the cylinder. It was by searching for this symbol, famous in antiquity, that Cicero was enabled to find his tomb according to the story that I have already related.

Within the last few years the reputation of Archimedes in pure mathematics has been greatly enhanced by the discovery by Professor Heiberg of a lost work of the great Alexandrian professor in Constantinople. Archimedes himself stated in a dedication of the work to Eratosthenes the method employed in this. He says: "I have thought it well to analyze and lay down for you {78} in this same book a peculiar method by means of which it will be possible for you to derive instruction as to how certain mathematical questions may be investigated by means of mechanics. And I am convinced that this is equally profitable in demonstrating a proposition itself, for much that was made evident to me through the medium of mechanics was later proved by means of geometry, because the treatment by the former method had not yet been established by way of a demonstration. For of course it is easier to establish a proof, if one has in this way previously obtained a conception of the questions, than for him to seek it without such a preliminary notion. . . . Indeed, I assume that some one among the investigators of to-day or in the future, will discover by the method here set forth still other propositions which have not yet occurred to me." On this Professor Smith comments: "Perhaps in all the history of mathematics no such prophetic truth was ever put into words. It would almost seem as if Archimedes must have seen as in a vision the methods of Galileo, Cavalieri, Pascal, Newton, and many other great makers of the mathematics of the Renaissance and the present time."

Many other distinguished professors of mathematics have, since this declaration of Archimedes came under their notice, declared that he must have had almost a prophetic vision of certain developments of mathematics and especially applied {79} mathematics and mechanics and their relation to one another, that were only to come in much later and indeed comparatively modern times. Undoubtedly Archimedes' works proved the germ of magnificent development not only immediately after his own time but in the long-after time of the Renaissance, when their translation awakened minds to mathematical problems and their solutions that would not otherwise have come.

We know much less of the life of the third of the great trio of teachers and students of Alexandria, Apollonius of Perga. Perhaps it should be enough for us to know that his contemporaries spoke of him as "the great geometer," though they were familiar with Euclid's book and with Archimedes' mighty work. Apollonius was surely a student of Alexandria for many years and he was probably also a professor of mathematics there. He developed especially what we know now as conic sections. His book on the subject contains practically all of the theorems to be found in our text-books of analytical geometry or conic sections of the present time. It was developed with rigorous mathematical logic and Euclidean conclusiveness. These three men show us beyond all doubt how finely the mathematical side of the university developed.

After Archimedes the greatest mechanical genius of the University of Alexandria was Heron. To him we owe a series of inventions and discoveries in hydrostatics and the {80} construction of various mechanical toys that have been used in the laboratories since. There is even a little engine run by steam--the aeolipile--invented by him, which shows how close the old Greeks were to the underlying principles of discoveries that were destined to come only after the development of industries created a demand for them in the after time. Heron's engine is a globe of copper mounted on pivots, containing water, which on being heated produces steam that finds its way out through tubes bent so as to open in opposite directions on each side of the globe. The impact of the escaping steam on the air sets the globe revolving, and the principle of the turbine engine at work is clear. We have used steam for nearly 200 years always with a reciprocating type of movement, so that to apply energy in one direction the engine has had to move its parts backwards and forwards, but here was a direct-motion turbine engine in the long ago. Our great steamboats, the _Lusitania_ and the _Mauretania,_ now cross the ocean by the use of this principle and not by the reciprocating engine, and it is evident that it is along these lines the future developments of the application of steam are to take place.

Another extremely interesting invention made by Heron is the famous fountain called by his name, and which still is used to illustrate principles in pneumatics in our classrooms and laboratories. By means of condensed air water is made {81} to spring from a jet in a continuous stream and seems paradoxically to rise higher than its source. Probably his best work in the domain of physics is that on pneumatics in which are given not only a series of discussions, but of experiments and demonstrations on the elasticity of air and of steam. These experiments could only have been conducted in what we now call a physical laboratory. Indeed these inventions of his are still used in laboratories for demonstration purposes. While we may think, then, that the foundation of laboratories was reserved to our day, there is abundant evidence for their existence at the University of Alexandria. We shall return to this subject a little later, when the evidence from other departments has been presented, and then it will be clear, I think, that the laboratory methods were favorite modes of teaching at the University of Alexandria and were in use in nearly all departments of science both for research and for demonstration purposes.

The work of the other great teacher at Alexandria which was to influence mankind next to that of Euclid, was not destined to withstand the critical study of succeeding generations, though it served for some 1,500 years as the basis of their thinking in astronomy. This was the work of Ptolemy, the great professor of astronomy at Alexandria of the first century after Christ. It is easy for us now to see the absurdity of Ptolemy's system. It is even hard for us to {82} understand how men could have accepted it. It must not be forgotten, however, that it solved all the astronomical problems of fifteen centuries and that it even enabled men, by its application, to foretell events in the heavens, and scientific prophecy is sometimes claimed to be the highest test of the truth of a system of scientific thought. Even so late as 1620 Francis Bacon refused to accept Copernicanism, already before the world for more than a century, because it did not, as it seemed to him, solve all the difficulties, while Ptolemy's system did. As great an astronomer as Tycho Brahe living in the century after Copernicus still clung to Ptolemy's teaching. It must not be forgotten that when Galileo restated Copernicanism, the reason for the rejection of his teaching by all the astronomers of Europe almost without exception, was that his reasons were not conclusive. They preferred to hold on to the old which had been so satisfying than to accept the new which seemed dubious. Their wisdom in this will be best appreciated from the fact that none of Galileo's reasons maintained themselves.

Though his system has been rejected, still Ptolemy must be looked up to as one of the great teachers of mankind and his work the "Almagest" as one of the great contributions to human knowledge. The fact that he represented a climax of astronomical development at Alexandria some four centuries after the foundation of {83} that university, serves to show how much that first modern university occupied itself for all the centuries of its highest prestige, with physical science as well as with mathematics. Astronomy, physics, especially hydrostatics and mechanics, were all wonderfully developed. Generations of professors had given themselves to research and to the publication of important works quite as in the modern time, and Alexandria may well claim the right to be placed beside any university for what it accomplished in physical science, and rank high if not highest in the list of great research institutions adding new knowledge to old, leading men across the borderland of the unknown in science and furnishing that precious incentive to growing youth to occupy itself with the scientific problems of the world around it.

The most important part of the scientific work of the University of Alexandria to my mind remains to be spoken of, and that is the medical department. It is a well-known law in the history of medicine that, whenever medical schools are attached to universities in such a way that students who come to the medical department have been thoroughly trained by preliminary studies and have such standards of scholarship as obtain in genuine university work, then great progress in medicine and in medical education is accomplished. This was eminently the case at Alexandria. The departments of the arts, of linguistics and of philosophy were gathered {84} around the great building known in Greek as the Mouseion, a word that has come to us through the Latin under the guise of Museum. This temple of the Muses contained collections of various kinds and near it was situated the great library. Not far away was the Serapeum, or Temple of Serapis, the Goddess of Life, around which were centred the biological sciences, and close by was the medical school. As teachers for this medical school some of the greatest physicians of the time were secured by the first Ptolemy and a great period in medical history began.

The practical wisdom guiding the Ptolemys in the organization of this medical school will be best appreciated from the fact that they took the first step by inviting two distinguished physicians, the products of the two greatest medical schools of the time, to lay the foundations at Alexandria. They were probably the best investigators of their time and they had behind them fine traditions of research, thorough observation and conservative reasoning and theorizing on scientific subjects. Erasistratos was a disciple of Metrodoros, the son-in-law of Aristotle. He had studied for a time under another great teacher, Chrysippos of Cnidos. We are likely to know much more of Cos than of Cnidos because of the reputation in the after time of Hippocrates, whose name is so closely connected with Cos that the two are almost invariably associated, but Cnidos was one of the great university towns of the later Greek {85} civilization. Eudoxus the astronomer, Ctesias the writer on Persian history, and Sostratos the builder of the great lighthouse, one of the seven wonders of the world, the Pharos at Alexandria, were products of this university. Its medical school was famous when Cos had somewhat declined, and Chrysippos was one of the leading physicians of the world and one of the acknowledged great teachers of medicine when Erasistratos studied under him at Cnidos, and obtained that scientific training and incentive to original research which was to prove so valuable to Alexandria.

His colleague, Herophilos, was quite as distinguished as Erasistratos and owed his training to the rival school of Cos. Whether it was intentional or not to secure these two products of rival schools for the healthy spirit of competition that would come from it, and because they wanted to have at Alexandria the emulation that would naturally be aroused by such a condition, is not known, but there can be no doubt of the wisdom of the choice and of the foresight which dictated it. Herophilos had studied medicine under Praxagoras, one of the best-known successors of Hippocrates. While distinguished as a surgeon he had more influence on medicine than almost any man of his time, except possibly Erasistratos. He was, however, a great anatomist and, above all, a zoologist who, according to tradition, had obtained his knowledge of animals from the most {86} careful zootomy of literally thousands of specimens. His fair fame is blackened by the other tradition that he practised vivisection on human beings--criminals being turned over to him for that purpose by the Ptolemys, who were deeply interested in his researches. The traditions in this matter, however, serve to confirm the idea of his zeal as an investigator and his ardent labors in medical science. Tertullian declares that he dissected at least 600 living persons. We know that he did much dissection of human cadavers and there is question whether Tertullian's statement was not gross exaggeration due to confusion between dissection and vivisection.

Both of these men did some magnificent work upon the brain. This being the first period in the history of humanity when human beings could be dissected freely, it is not surprising that they should take up brain anatomy with ardent devotion, in the hope to solve some of the many human problems that seemed to centre in this complex organ. Before this anatomy had been learned mainly from animals, and as human beings differ most widely from animals by their brain, naturally, as soon as the opportunity presented itself, anatomists gave themselves to thorough work on this structure where so many discoveries were waiting to be made. After the brain and nervous system the heart was studied, and Erasistratos' description of its valves, of its general structure and even of its physiology, show how much he {87} knew. To know something of the work of these two anatomists is to see at once what is accomplished in a university medical school where medical science, and not the mere practice of medicine alone, is the object of teachers and students. I have told the story of this in my address before the graduates of the St. Louis Medical University Medical School, and here I shall simply refer you to that. [Footnote 7]

[Footnote 7: The details of what was accomplished in the Medical
Department at Alexandria were given to some extent at least in the
lecture in Brooklyn, but are omitted here in order to avoid
repetitions in the printed copy.]

Of course all these studies at the university could not be conducted without laboratory equipment. Of itself the dissecting room is a laboratory and until very recent years it was the only laboratory that most of the medical schools had. The numerous experiments in vivisection, if they really took place, required special arrangements and could only be conducted in what we now call a laboratory of physiology. This is not idle talk but represents the realities of the situation. Other laboratories there must have been. It would be quite impossible to conceive of a man like Archimedes carrying on his work, especially of the application of mathematical principles to mechanics, of the demonstration of mechanical principles themselves and of the invention of the many interesting machines which he made, without what we call laboratory facilities. The Ptolemys were {88} interested in his work, they supplied him with a place to do it, many of his advanced students at least must have been interested in this work so that, as I see it, there was what we would now call a physical laboratory in connection with his teaching at the University of Alexandria.

What we know about the development of zoology under Erasistratos and Herophilos would seem to indicate that there must have been such special facilities for the investigation of zoological problems as we would call a laboratory of physiology. A magnificent collection of plants was made for the university and these were studied and classified, and while we hear nothing of their dissection, there were at least botanical rooms for methodical study, if not botanical laboratories. Ptolemy's work represented the culmination of astronomical information which had been gathered for several centuries. This could only be brought together in what we would now call an observatory and this represents another laboratory of physical science. Our laboratory work, therefore, must have been anticipated to a great extent. We must not forget that our university laboratories are only a couple of generations old altogether and that they represent a very recent development of educational work. It is extremely interesting, therefore, to find them anticipated in germ at least, if not in actuality, at the first modern university of which we have sufficiently complete records to enable us to {89} appreciate just the sort of work that was being done and the ways and modes of its education.

I think that even this comparatively meagre description of the first university of which we have knowledge makes it very clear that Alexandria deserves the name of the First Modern University. It resembled our own in so many ways that I, for one, find it impossible to discover any essential difference between them. At Alexandria they anticipated every phase of modern university education. Their literature was studied from a scientific standpoint. They devoted themselves to an overwhelming extent to the study of the physical sciences and mathematics, their professors were inventors, developers of practical applications of science, experts to whom appeal was made when important scientific questions had to be settled, and their teaching was done with demonstrations and a laboratory system very like our own. Nothing that I know illustrates better the tendency of human achievement not to represent advance but to occur in cycles than the story of this first modern university. That is why I have tried to tell it to you as an exquisite illustration of How Old the New Is in Education.

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{91}

MEDIAEVAL SCIENTIFIC UNIVERSITIES

{92}

"Qui ad pauca respiciunt faciliter pronuntiant."
--AN OLD PHILOSOPHER.

[Those who know little readily pronounce judgment.]

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MEDIAEVAL SCIENTIFIC UNIVERSITIES [Footnote 8]

[Footnote 8: The material for this address was originally gathered
for a lecture in a course on the History of Education delivered to
the Sisters of Charity of Mount St. Vincent's, some 500 in number;
teachers in the Catholic public schools of New York City, and for
corresponding lectures to the Academy of the Sacred Heart, Kenwood.
The address was delivered substantially in its present form at the
Catholic Club of Cornell University, under the title "The Relations
of the Church to Science."]

Probably nothing is more surprising to any one who knows the history of science and of scientific education than the attitude of mind of the present generations, educated as they are mainly along scientific lines, toward the supposed lack of interest of preceding generations in science. Our scholars and professors seem to be almost universally of the opinion that the last few generations are the first who ever devoted themselves seriously to the study of science, or who, indeed, were free enough from superstitions and persuasions and beliefs of many kinds to give themselves up freely to scientific investigation. In the light of what we know or, perhaps I should say, what we are coming to know now with regard to the educational interests of the men of the various times, this would be an amusing, if it were not an amazing, presumption on our part. Over and over again in the world's history men have been {94} interested in science, both in pure science and in applied science, in the culture sciences and in the practical sciences.

Apparently men forget that philosophy is science and ethics is science and metaphysics is scientific and logic is science and there is a science of language. Of course the protest that will be heard at once is that what we now mean by science is physical science. Even taking the word science in this narrower sense, however, how can people forget that our mathematics comes to us from the old Greeks, that old Greek contributions to medicine and, above all, to the scientific side of it still remain valuable, that physical science, pure and applied, developed wonderfully at the University of Alexandria, that there was a beginning of chemistry and the great foundations of astronomy laid in the long ago, and that men evidently were quite as much interested in the problems of nature around them as they have been at any time: Archimedes insisting that if he only had some place to rest his lever he could move the world, inventing the screw pump, fashioning his great burning-mirrors, and a little later Heron inventing the first germ of the turbine engine, while all the time their colleagues and contemporaries were developing the mathematics in connection with them, are studying both pure and applied science. It is simply failure to state in terms of the present what was accomplished in the past, that has permitted people to retain {95} curious notions of the absence of science in antiquity.

Probably most people would be quite ready to concede, and especially after even a brief calling to their attention of some educational facts, that the old Greeks did enjoy a scientific educational development; it would probably even be admitted that the traditions of science of various kinds from Egypt, from Chaldea, from Babylonia point to previous eras of scientific development. They would probably still insist, however, that there had been a long interval of utter neglect of science lasting nearly 2,000 years and that our interest is properly a resurrection of science-study after a long burial. They do not even hesitate to blame the educational authorities of the interval for their failure to occupy themselves with scientific ideas and are prone to find reasons of various kinds to account for this failure. As the Church was dominant in education during the Middle Ages this makes a ready scapegoat, and so we have heard much of the repression of scientific study by the ecclesiastical authorities, and the determined effort made to keep men from inquiring about the problems of nature around them, because this would lead them to think for themselves and have doubts with regard to faith. Indeed this attitude of mind in the history of science is so usual that it is a commonplace, and men who are supposed to be scholars talk off-handedly of direct Church opposition to science.

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There is no doubt at all that the Church was the commanding influence in education during the Middle Ages. Whatever was studied was taken up because the Church authorities were interested in it. Whatever was not studied was absent from the curriculum because of their lack of interest. While study was magnificently encouraged there were many subjects, though not near so many as is often thought, that were repressed. The Church must certainly be held responsible in every way for the teaching of the Middle Ages, both as regards its extent and its limitations. The charters of the universities were granted by the Popes. The universities themselves usually were cathedral schools which had developed, and to which had become attached various graduate departments. The ecclesiastical authorities were in control of them. The rector of the university was usually the archdeacon of the cathedral or the chancellor of the diocese. The professors at the universities were practically all of them in clerical orders, and the great body of the students were clerics, in the sense that they had assumed at least minor orders and were supposed to be in preparation for a clerical life. This was, indeed, the one sure way to secure exemption from the military duties of the time and to prevent interference of various kinds by the civil power with the leisure necessary for study. No man had any essential rights in the Middle Ages except such as were conferred on him by some organization {97} to which he belonged, and the clerical order was particularly powerful.

Now the interesting phase of the education afforded by these universities under ecclesiastical control with clerical students and professors constituting the large majority of members, with the influence of the religious orders paramount for centuries, is that it was entirely scientific in character and largely occupied with the physical sciences, though the culture sciences formed the basis of it. Huxley, though he is surely the last man of recent times who would be suspected for a moment of exaggerating the scientific significance of mediaeval education, recognized this fact very well and stated it very emphatically. In his Inaugural Address on Universities Actual and Ideal, delivered as Rector of Aberdeen University after discussing the subject with evident careful preparation, he said:

"The scholars of the mediaeval universities seem to have studied
grammar, logic and rhetoric; arithmetic and geometry; astronomy,
theology and music. Thus, their work, however imperfect and faulty,
judged by modern lights, it may have been, brought them face to face
with all the leading aspects of the many-sided mind of man. For
these studies did really contain, at any rate in embryo, sometimes
it may be in caricature, what we now call philosophy, mathematical
and physical science and art. {98} _And I doubt if the curriculum of
any modern university shows so clear and generous a comprehension of
what is meant by culture, as this old Trivium and Quadrivium does."_
(Italics mine.)

Of course Huxley says, "sometimes it may be in caricature." We must not forget, however, that first even Huxley hesitates to say that it is caricature, for he knows how easy it is to be mistaken in our estimation of the true significance of an old-time mode of thought, and then, too, he knew comparatively how little we were sure of the real thoughts and conclusions of these men of the olden time because of defective sympathy and even defective knowledge of their work. Our knowledge in this matter has greatly increased since his time. As a matter of fact, the more we know about these old masters and the mediaeval universities the less are we likely to think of their work as lacking in seriousness in any sense. The quarter of a century that has elapsed since Huxley so cogently urged this at Aberdeen has brought many facts unknown to us before and has shown us what good work, even in the physical sciences, was accomplished in these old-time universities.

For instance, nothing is more common in the mouths of certain kinds of scholars than the expressions of wonder as to why men did not study nature more assiduously before our time. Here is a magnificent open book full of the most alluring lessons which any one may study for himself, and that somehow it is presumed men neglected {99} down to our time. We are the age of nature students, and preceding times are looked at askance for having neglected the opportunities that lay so invitingly open to them in this subject. It has always been a wonder to me how people dare to talk this way. Our old literatures are full of observations on nature. In my book on "The Popes and Science" I take Dante as a typical product of the universities of the thirteenth century, and show without any difficulty as it seems to me, that there is no poet of the modern time who can draw figures from nature which demand even a detailed knowledge of nature with so much confidence as Dante. He knows the most intimate details about the birds, about many animals, about the ways of flowers, about children, describes some experiments in science, has a wide knowledge of astronomy and in general is familiar with nature quite as much if not more than any modern writer not _ex professo_ a naturalist. He describes the metamorphosis of insects, how the ants communicate with one another, knows the secrets of the bees and exhibits wide knowledge of the secrets of bird life.

The presumption that people did not study nature in the olden time is quite unjustified. They did not write long books about trivial subjects of nature-study. They did not conclude that because they were seeing something for the first time, that that was the first time in the world's history it had ever been seen. They were gentle, {100} kindly scholars who assumed that others had eyes and saw too, and as fortunately there was no printing press there was not that hurried rushing into print, with superficial observations and still more superficial conclusions, which has characterized so much of our recent literature of nature-study and that has been so well dubbed "nature faking." Of course we have had faking of the same kind in nearly everything else: we have history faking in our supposed historical romances, science faking in our pseudo-science, science-history faking in our ready presumption that the men of the olden time could not have had our interests, and, above all--may I now say it?--in our cheap conclusion that there must have been some reason for their lack of interest in science, and then the assumption without anything further, that it must have been because of the Church.

Just as soon as there is question of there having been any serious scientific study during the Middle Ages, in the sense of observations in physical science, investigation of the physical phenomena of nature and the drawing of conclusions from them and the evolving of laws, there are a large number of people who consider themselves very well informed, who will at once object that this must be quite absurd, since at this time Lord Chancellor Bacon had not as yet laid down the great foundations of the physical sciences in his discussion of inductive reasoning. I have already {101} ventured to suggest, in the address on "The First Modern University," how utterly ridiculous any such notion is. I have quoted Lord Macaulay and Huxley as ridiculing those who entertained such an idea. Here I may be permitted to recur to the subject by quotations from the same authorities. I have often found that anything I myself said in this matter was at once considered as quite incredible, since my feelings were entirely too favorable toward the Middle Ages and then my religious affiliations are somehow supposed to unfit me for scientific thinking. Fortunately Macaulay and Huxley have expressed themselves in this matter even more vigorously than I would be likely to, and so I may simply quote them.

As Lord Macaulay wrote in his well-known essay:

"The vulgar notion about Bacon we take to be this, that he invented
a new method of arriving at truth, which method is called induction,
and that he detected some fallacy in the syllogistic reasoning which
had been in vogue before his time. This notion is as well founded as
that of the people who, in the Middle Ages, imagined that Virgil was
a great conjurer. Many who are far too well informed to talk such
extravagant nonsense entertain what we think incorrect notions as to
what Bacon really effected in this matter."

Still more apposite is what Professor Huxley has to say. Discoursing on the phenomena of {102} organic nature, after warning his auditors not to suppose that scientific investigation is "some kind of modern black art," he adds: "I say that you might 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 time of Queen Elizabeth.

"There are many men who, though knowing absolutely nothing of the
subject with which they may be dealing, wish nevertheless to damage
the author of some view with which they think fit to disagree. What
they do is not to go and learn something about the subject; . . .
but they abuse the originator of the view they question, in a
general manner, and wind up by saying that, '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
matter of course, and agrees that it must be so."

Lord Bacon himself so little understood true science that he condemned Copernicanism because it failed to solve the problems of the universe, and condemned Dr. Gilbert, the great founder in Magnetism, whose work was the best {103} exemplification of inductive science of that time. Of course Bacon did not invent science nor its methods. He was only a publicist popularizing them. They had existed in the minds of all logical thinkers from the beginning. His great namesake, Friar Bacon, much better deserves to be thought 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 limited post-graduate features, more or less distantly smacking 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 transformed during the last generation or two. It is to be utterly ignorant 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 inasmuch as Latin, the universal language, was studied in order that there might be a common ground of understanding. Latin 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 time paid no attention. Indeed it was because of this neglect 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 unsympathetic with their teaching and methods. We, however, have come once more into a time when style means little, indeed, entirely too little, and when the matter is supposed to be everything, and we should have more sympathy with our older forefathers in education who were in the same boat. We have inherited traditions of misunderstanding in this matter, but we should know the reasons for them and then they will disappear.

As a matter of fact, exactly the same thing happened in our modern change of university interests during the 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 educational movement termed the study of the humanities had been making some way in Italy during the preceding half-century before the fall of Constantinople, but now interest in it came with a rush. The clergymen, the nobility, even the women of the time became interested in the New Learning, 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 fashion, just as science became the fashion in the nineteenth century. Fashion 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 curriculum was quite good enough, and conservative enough 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 might be made for developmental purposes and true education that they were admitted into the universities.

Note the similarity with certain events in our own time in all this. Two generations ago the universities refused to admit science. They were training men in their undergraduate departments by means of classical literature. They argued exactly as did the old mediaeval universities with regard to the new learning, 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. Now we are in the midst of an educational period when the classics are losing in favor so rapidly that it seems as though it would not be long 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 much more closely than we might have imagined, or than is ordinarily thought, the preceding phase of education to the classical period which we have seen go out of fashion 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 mediaeval institutions of learning, but they were thoroughly 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 material world as would enable him to appreciate his rights and duties and to use his powers. Huxley declared that the trivium and quadrivium, the seven liberal arts studied in the mediaeval universities, probably demonstrate a clearer and more generous comprehension of what is meant by culture than the curriculum of any modern university. Language was learned through grammar, the science of language. Reasoning was learned through 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 German historian of mathematics, in hundreds of pages of a large volume, has told the story of the development of mathematics during the centuries before the Renaissance, that is from the thirteenth to the fifteenth, in a way that makes it very clear that the teaching at 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 make.

Then there was astronomy, metaphysics, theology, music and law and medicine. The science of law was developed and, above all, great {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 mediaeval centuries maintained a high standard of medical education and brought 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 achievement down to our own time, as during the period when it was studied so faithfully and developed so marvellously at the mediaeval universities. It was inasmuch as a knowledge 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 accumulation of such information with regard to nature as would enable them to draw conclusions, establish general principles and lay firm foundations for reasonings with regard to the creature and the Creator. It is, above all, this phase of mediaeval teaching work, of the schoolmen's ardent interest that is misunderstood, often ignored 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 omnino in nihilum redigetur_--nothing 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 him that were supposed to be destructive, the burnings, the vaporizations, the solutions, the putrefactions and all the rest, but he knew that these only brought changes in matter and not destruction of the underlying substance. 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 prime matter, one of these, matter or substance owed all its negative qualities, inertia and the like. To form, the dynamic element or principle, it owed all its individuating qualities. Prime matter was the same in all things. Form was the energy or bundle of energies, the dynamic principle, as we have said, which entering into prime matter, made the different kinds of matter that we speak of.

It is extremely interesting to compare this old scholastic teaching with the modern ideas of the composition of matter and especially the notions which have come to us from researches in physical chemistry in recent years. Our scientists no longer believe that we have some eighty different elements, essentially different kinds of matter, that cannot by any chance or process be changed one {110} into another. We have seen one form of elementary matter changing into another, helium emanations becoming 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 transmuting power. A prominent American professor of chemistry declared not long 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 examine it again, 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 from the copper, seemed very foolish a century ago, but no one would consider it so at the present moment.

We are prone to think that these old mediaeval philosophers accepting to 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 of mind. We are coming to the realization, however, that in many ways by pure reasoning, in {111} conjunction with such observation as they had at hand, they anticipated our most recent conclusions in very marvellous ways. We know now that radium, or at least radio-active substances, represent the philosopher's stone of the olden time. We are not surprised at the transmutation of metals and of substances, on the contrary, we are looking for it.

I remember once stating the old theory of matter and form to a distinguished professor in chemistry in this country, and he was struck by the similarity of it to what are the present accepted ideas of the composition of matter. He asked why this teaching was not more generally known. I had to tell him that in every Catholic school of philosophy, it was taught as a basic doctrine, and that far from being concealed it was the very touchstone of Catholic philosophic teaching, and had often been the subject of deprecation and contemptuous remarks on the part of those who thought that it represented somewhat foolish old-fashioned teaching 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 schoolmen reached similar conclusions, however, by strict reasoning 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 who was, however, at the same time a highly respected member of his order, holding important official positions in it and thoroughly honored and respected by his ecclesiastical superiors so that he was made a bishop, yet writing volumes of observation with regard 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 volumes are sufficient to show what sort of work he was doing. He has volumes on chemistry, botany, on physics, on cosmography, on animal locomotion, on respiration, on generation 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 must know nothing at all of Albertus Magnus' 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 submitted their discoveries to him. We {113} have Peregrinus' letter to him with regard to magnetism 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 sometime make a successful airship. He even thought 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 a machine could be constructed in which a man sitting in the centre might move wings by means of a crank and thus, quite after the fashion of birds, fly through the air. It was he who wrote that the time would come when carriages would move along the roads without men or horses to pull them. At the moment he was experimenting with gunpowder. He realized, therefore, that sometime men would harness explosives and use them for motor purposes. That is, of course, just what we are doing with gasolene.

He suggested that boats would run over the water without oars and without sails. He was anticipating our motor boat. He taught that light moves with a definite rate of velocity, though 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 experiment alone brought sure knowledge; _"Experimentum solum certificat in talibus."_ are his own words. Roger Bacon's devotion to mathematics shows how thoroughly 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 was without certainty. Some of his expressions in this matter are strikingly modern. It is no wonder that his writings and teachings were so great a surprise to his generation that the Pope ordered him to write out his knowledge in books. Without this order we would not have had Roger Bacon's great works, for his vow of poverty voluntarily taken forbade him to be possessed of sufficient money to enable him to purchase writing materials, which were then very expensive.