Chapter II: Part 2

It is part of my argument to-day to point out one evil of many which this prejudice has wrought for medicine. The progress of an applied science dependent as it is upon accessions of advantage from other arts, yet on the whole is from the simple to the complex; from facts of more direct observation to those of longer inference: and this path was the more necessary when the right method of inference--the so-called inductive method--had not been formulated, and indeed was barely in use. Now in medicine, from Homer to Lord Lister, direct observation and the simpler means of experiment have obtained their first-fruits on the surface of the body. In Homeric times surgery was the institution of medicine, and kings concerned themselves with the practice of it. From Erasistratus to Celsus physicians of all schools practised medicine and surgery as one art. Galen urges the unity of medicine, and Littré points out that this unity is maintained in the Hippocratic writings. In the Middle Ages the ascetic contempt for the body--partly Stoic, chiefly oriental,--the barren alliance of medicine with philosophy, and the low esteem of mechanical callings hid from the physician the very gates of the city into which he would enter. Francis Bacon says of the physicians of Harvey's day, that they saw things from afar off, as if from a high tower; and, again, that after the manner of spiders they spun webs of sophistical speculation from their own bowels. Surgery, by virtue of its imperative methods, was kept clear of philosophy on the one hand and of humanism on the other; and in Paris the establishment of the Collège de St Côme, afterwards the Academy of Surgery, protected the higher surgery against the rabble of barbers. Upon the raft of anatomy and surgery, with some clinical aid from Salerno, positive medicine crossed the gulf between Byzantine compilations, monkish leechcraft, Arab starcraft and alchemy, and the scientific era of Harvey[44]. But physicians were not only blind to the great services to the whole art of medicine of the surgical school of Lanfranc in the fourteenth century, of Guy de Chauliac in the fifteenth, and of Paré and Gale in the sixteenth century, advances even accelerated in the seventeenth, but they ignored also their very origin, and even withdrew from fellowship with the surgeon; to our grievous harm from those days unto our own[45]. Surgery was excluded from the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Paris; and from the Royal College of Physicians of England, which was, and is still, enabled by charter to teach surgery, and to grant licenses therein. Fabricius, the master of Harvey, was fortunately as great a surgeon as anatomist, and such was Fallopius. In this College Harvey lectured on anatomy and surgery, and he left his surgical instruments to us; for us Caldwal founded a lectureship in surgery which has been allowed virtually to lapse. From the progress of anatomy which, under the protection of the Italian nobles as formerly of the Alexandrian, went hand in hand with surgery, physicians drew then little advantage; and so in part perhaps it came about that although Vesalius, Fallopius, and Fabricius broke up the traditional anatomy of Mundinus, yet anatomy did more even for the fine arts than for physiology; and medicine at the end of the Middle Ages had not recovered the standard of Alexandria. Against this adversity also had to contend the founder of physiology whom to-day we celebrate.

Such were the chief adversities (vid. Appendix on Astrology) under which the naturalist suffered, but natural knowledge was never stifled; let us now turn our eyes to another point of view, from the oppression to the gradual enfranchisement of knowledge.

Necessary for the welding of western society in the Middle Ages as was authority in all spheres of thought and action, and, heavy as the price of its inertia has been since its work was done, yet in the celebration of the founders of natural science it would be untrue to assume that before them, even in the earlier scholastic period, the indomitable spirit of man had lain under tyranny in silence. "[Greek: Menei to theion doulia per en phreni]." The way had been prepared for them. By the Crusades of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries fury and devastation were diverted in part from Europe, and hurled upon Asia; which soon closes up again. The naïve serenity of the Faith was gone, but as its great minsters arose it forgot its dangers; and the social bonds of orthodoxy rudely shaken were renewed. The Schools grew as great as the churches: Naples, Pavia, Bologna and Padua; Paris, Orleans, Bourges, Toulouse, Montpellier, the Sorbonne; Oxford and Cambridge. Even the Friars Preachers and Minors were driven to fight with the new weapons; first rivalling the universities, then possessing themselves of their chairs. But philosophy, which had lent much to the Faith[46], gained nothing from it; and to philosophy rather than to the Church the sciences looked for their principles and methods. In physics the experimental method was creeping into life; and the substance as well as the form of old controversies was changing. Thus through all these generations was rising a leaven of free thought, and its reforms may roughly be put in a twofold division, into the reform of tradition, and the reform of method; the reform of texts being again divisible into two periods--the Arabian, or second scholastic, and the modern or Renascence period. The chief monuments of learning were stored in Byzantium[47] until Western Europe was fit to take care of them. In the peace of Theodoric, in the peace of Charlemagne, under Alfred at Winchester, the arts and sciences had scarcely found breathing-time, and no sure establishment[48]. Cassiodorus is said to have directed the Benedictines of the sixth century to read Cælius Aurelianus, a Roman adaptor of Soranus of Ephesus; but medical lore consisted of little beyond some relics of the Roman schools, handed on in prose or verse compilations which the teacher read to his class, and explained so far as he could. It seems that medicine was not taught formally until so ordered, in 805, by Charlemagne; probably by the advice of Alcuin, the founder of the learned tradition at Fulda, the founder, we may almost say, of the neo-latin period, and some time headmaster of my own school of St Peter at York. The influence of the School of Salerno, relatively excellent as it was in the domains of clinical medicine and of public health, never made its way into the general stream of Western culture. Religious wars and persecutions had driven Greek learning eastwards, as in the case of the Nestorians from Antioch to Persia; Hebrew and Syrian sages[49] translated some classical texts, and from these again the Arabs, in their brief and brilliant culture, made translations; for no Arab sage knew Greek. The palace of the Spanish Caliphs in the tenth century was a workshop of translators, and a huge storehouse of books. The learned and ubiquitous Jew carried texts and translations from Bagdad to Morocco, and from Morocco to Toledo, Paris, Oxford and Cologne; but translations made in Bagdad in the ninth century did not reach Paris till the eleventh or twelfth.

Among the earliest of these renderings in the West were works on medicine, mathematics, and astronomy, which in the Schools of Toledo and Cordova, by Constantinus Africanus at Monte Cassino (including certain treatises of Hippocrates and Galen), by Gerard of Cremona (a Salernitan scholar), by Michael the wizard[50], and by other hands, were converted into Latin; and, thus doubly disguised, and half buried in glosses which not only overlaid the text ("oscura glossa dov' é piana la lettera") but often supplanted it, were received with pathetic eagerness by the ardent scholars of the West. Aristotle, for instance, was now taught in the schools of the West from a Latin translation of a Hebrew translation of an Arab commentary upon an Arab translation of a Syriac translation of the Greek text[51]. Even in the sixteenth century medicine and anatomy were taught wholly from books; and teachers were forbidden to use other than prescribed books. Students began with the "Articella" of the Venetian physician Gregorio Volpi, a compendium of translations with woodcuts, published in 1491; they advanced to the Aphorisms, the Diet in Acute Diseases and the Prognostics of Hippocrates, overlaid with Syriac, Arabic and Spanish apparatus and glosses; to the Ars Parva of Galen; to the first and fifth Canons of Avicenna, with glosses; to the IXth Book of Rhazes, Honein, Aegidius Corboliensis, and perhaps some of the translations of Constantinus Africanus[52];--this was the lore that ruled the medical schools even to the birth of Harvey. Disputations among the students were incessant, both "inter se" and "sub cathedrâ"; but it is doubtful whether these did more than sharpen their dialectical wits. Botany, regarded by the galenists as the secret of the divine dispensary, was always more forward; every medical school had its physic garden, professors carried their students abroad to gather herbs, and Herbals, Dispensatoriums and Kräuterbücher were much in advance of the Bestiaries, mostly after Pliny's kind, the chief of which, largely an original work, was that of the well-known Conrad Gesner.

Some hundred years before the appearance of the Arabian Aristotle, which marked the second scholastic period, we have seen that the shadow of the Faith and the savagery of the peoples had not quelled such teachers as Roscellinus and Abélard, who fought for rationalism so sturdily as even then to threaten the ascendency of realism and the persuasion of supple and plausible demagogues like Anselm of Laon--that "sterile tree" as Abélard called him,--and actually to determine the first period of the Middle Ages. Happily the Arabian scholastic philosophy took its root in Alexandria when neo-platonism had veered towards Aristotle[53], and it was more uniformly peripatetic than the earliest Christian Scholasticism. It is one of the notes of the greatness of Aristotle that, even thus garbled and glossed, his power made itself felt by the mouths of the great Franciscans Alexander Hales, Roger Bacon, and William Ockham. The Organon had been expounded in Paris in 1180, and about the same time Alexander Neckam cited the Posterior Analytics, the Topics and the _De anima_; but Hales was in possession of the whole, or almost the whole, of a more or less corrupt Aristotle, which he turned upon theology.

Roger Bacon was the first of the natural philosophers of the West, and the only eminent forerunner of Harvey and the other pioneers of natural science in the seventeenth century. As erudite as Albert, Bacon was more inventive, freer of spirit, more disposed to scientific method, better aware of the hollowness of authority, better aware that truth can be found only in free reason guided by experiment. Unfortunately as an author he was as dull and ineffectual as Francis Bacon was rich, animated and impressive. That indeed this premature renascence, without scientific methods or sound tradition, should have failed[54], that its light was but the phantom of dawn[55], is no matter for surprise; yet from this time forward the methods of Cyprian and Athanasius lost their undisputed sway. This earlier renascence made the second period of the Middle Ages: the period distinguished by the Arabian version of Aristotle; by a check to the chimeras of realism; by some liberty of secular knowledge, for even bishops came out of the Mussulman school of Toledo and arrayed themselves in vestments of Arab work decorated with sentences from the Koran; and again by the coming of the friars, the Dominican and Franciscan especially, whose influence upon the thought of the Middle Ages was considerable, and soon rivalled even that of the universities, wherein later, as we have seen, they filled some of the chairs.

The issues of all schemes of thought led indeed as inevitably to natural science, as all ways to Rome. The logic and rhetoric of the learned Dominicans--the watch-dogs ("Domine cani") of the Lord against the wolves of heresy,--culminating in the systems of Albert and St Thomas, by their rationalism defined, and in defining restricted, the dominion of the Faith. Keen defenders of the Faith recognised this danger, and whimpered even against Albert that "philosophiam profanam in limen Sanctæ Theologiæ intromiserit; ... in ipsa sacraria Christi[56]." Men got used to reason, and great protestants, such as Robert of Lincoln, had put justice and honour before ecclesiastical politics[57]. Then the few Greek texts found their way into the West, and in the thirteenth century Albert and Aquinas possessed themselves of Greco-latin translations of some treatises of Aristotle[58]. And in the history of the comparatively unlearned Friars Minors we find, as elsewhere in the history of thought, that mysticism was less unfavourable to natural science than the passionate dogmatism of Clairvaux, or the dogmatism by ratiocination of St Thomas; the Victorians, as Gerson after them, despised reason rather than feared it; they would not accept the services of philosophy even with its wings clipped.

"Cujus laus est ex ore infantum,
Hæc est sapientia"!

Mysticism makes for individual religion, as with Glisson and Newton, rather than for a Church, as Albert was clear-sighted enough to foresee; if science undermines dogma, mysticism relaxes or neglects it: hence, as clerks only could teach, it may have been that independent thinkers like Hales, Roger Bacon, and Ockham entered the Franciscan order[59]. Indeed the science of Pietro di Abano (1250-1320), which laid the foundations of medicine at Padua, and inspired the frescoes of the Salla della Ragione, was occult and mystical.

In the thirteenth century then the conflict with the provisional synthesis of the Faith had become imminent and menacing. The faith, the chivalry and the learning of the Saracens led men to feel that without the Church all might not be utter darkness. Albert owed as much to Avicenna--"the Albert of the Orient"--as St Thomas to Averroes; pagan sages technically damnable yet "mighty spirits," worthy of reverence. Dante put in Hell, but on green meadows in an open place, lofty and luminous,--esteeming himself exalted by the sight of them,--not only Aristotle, Plato and Socrates, but also

"Euclide geometra, e Tolommeo,
Ippocrate, Avicenna, e Galieno,
Averrois, che il gran comento feo."

Inf. IV. 142.

Universities were founded in France, England, and Italy. Frederick the Second protected the Arabs, and even aped them; Ghibeline indeed almost signified freethinker. From the Roman de Renard, from the candid Joinville, from Boccaccio, we may infer that the very foundations of the Faith were sapped; and therewith, for good or ill, both moral and political bonds were loosened. But the natural Science which made the second renascence irresistible was absent in the first: the consolidation of the European peoples was not compact enough for a rehandling of the conceptions of religion and morals, too incomplete even for the latitude of opinion which, in nations as in individuals, is apt to slacken swift and consentient action. The toleration and scepticism of the first renascence had causes no deeper than a general enlargement of experience and thought.

To appreciate the influence, covert or overt, of scepticism in the Middle Ages we must clear the meaning of the word. Under the yoke of tribal custom scepticism can hardly arise, there is no place for the half-hearted, as all men feel alike so all think alike: scepticism arises when beliefs are put into formal propositions. Then, as experience and comparison enlarge, we detect scepticism in three forms or degrees: namely, doubt of a particular creed; doubt of all unverified propositions; and doubt of the validity of reason itself, whether in respect of the supernatural only or of all argument. It is remarkable that this last, the most devastating of the forms of scepticism, has come from the ranks of the faithful (Pascal, Hamilton, Mansel), who in resentment of the attacks of reason have turned blindly to rend reason herself. No civil society has been without scepticism; even in ages of most prevalent faith some current of doubt has flowed under the surface. In the Ionian philosophy the place of scepticism was only restricted in so far as many aspects of the subject-matter were not before those thinkers; for instance no Greek philosopher would have separated faith from reason. In the well-known words of Hippocrates, "[Greek: ouden heteron heterou theioteron oude anthrôpinôteron, alla panta theia]." "The Greek boldly set up his academy by the side of the temple." Even Protagoras never taught the futility of all reason, nor even the inconstancy of sensation which indeed is doctrine rather than scepticism. Neo-platonism had its scepticism in the first two forms, covering even the ground of the modern agnostic. Agnosticism does not deny the existence of the ladder, but asserts that the ladder begins and ends in the clouds; it is consistent therefore with ethical and practical activity. When Abélard said "Dubitando enim ad inquisitionem venimus, inquirendo veritatem percipimus," if a sceptic, he was no infidel. Even in the thirteenth century it was never doubted that truth is attainable, nor indeed that the Faith contained the truth. The scepticism of that age was rather cautious and controversial than faithless, and in practice divine discontent rather than indifference ([Greek: ataraxia]). Pyrrhonism on the other hand leads to slackness of ethics; either to the insouciance of Horace and Montaigne, or to the attitude of the seventeenth century in Padua (Pomponatius) and elsewhere, when the "economy," ironic or disingenuous, of allotting their several spheres to reason and dogma, if not first invented, became as fashionable as in the pulpits and in the drawing-rooms of Mayfair. "Comme savant j'ignore tout; comme citoyen je crois tout." The _Hypotyposes Pyrrhonioe_ of Sextus Empiricus, whose influence in the times of the Renascence was considerable, was not translated till the fourteenth century. The detachment of mind and shrewd wisdom of John of Salisbury foreshadowed Petrarch rather than Hume; and when John discusses what it is given to man to know, asking the frequent question, "Utrum contingat homini scire aliquid?", we must not fall into the error of importing into his question all it connotes for ourselves. Likewise when James of Douay (in MS. _De anima_, quoted by Hauréau) roundly says, "Id quod recipitur ab aliquo non recipitur secundum naturam rei receptæ sed secundum naturam recipientis ... sicut recipitur ita patitur.... Sensus judicando de sua passione non decipitur" and so on, he knew no more whither this would lead than John Duns knew that his system must lead to that of Spinoza. That guardians of morals and social cohesion, from Cato to the Westminster Assembly, and from Samuel Johnson to Cardinal Newman, should have distrusted scepticism even as reserve of judgment, or indeed repelled it with fierceness; that priest, presbyter, magistrate and moralist have tolerated irony, or even license, rather than vigilant and radical criticism of doctrine, is intelligible; and within limits springs from a justifiable apprehension. For the gay and indolent sceptic veers to conformity, especially if he mistrust the competence of reason; while the active sceptic endangers the theory of his society, and of the sanctions upon which all moral conduct temporarily depends. Hence the bitter condemnation of Galileo, "Perish all physical science rather than one article of the Faith be lost." Happily it is true that during times of transition piety and good conduct survive by virtue of "inertia," that is by tradition, social pressure, custom and sense of fitness; and it is true that in times of transition, as in our own times, halting thought is quickened for a while by plenitude of emotion, and wealth of æsthetic impressions makes amends for poverty of ideas; yet that morals are based on a theory of life is a truth still deeper and more abiding, and this deeper truth it was the function of the "Ages of Faith" to root in the conscience of mankind. "Abeunt studia in mores." As contrasted with Pyrrhonism, scepticism in its normal sense, while it declares that the conformity of notions with things in themselves cannot be postulated, for lack of an external standpoint of comparison, and while it declines to be confuted by the "regressus ad infinitum," for, having repudiated first principles it is prepared to be pushed backwards to remoter and remoter causes, is ready nevertheless to yield to assurance as facts are intercalated into inferences, and as inferences thus stiffened by verification are found to consist with each other and with the general context of experience.

If in the Middle Ages these various attitudes of mind were not fully distinguished, yet scepticism was moving variably towards the demand for verification on which all natural science is based; and the reaction was not long delayed. In the thirteenth century the culture of Omeyad and Abasid caliphs failed; by the end of the century philosophy was denounced and its books were burned; the generous and learned Frederick dashed himself in vain against the Papacy; Clement, the protector of Bacon, was dead, and during the two following centuries, in Spain at any rate, freedom of thought was crushed out by the Church. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the very name of Averroes--of "the mad dog who barked against the Christ," the "Averroem impium [Greek: kai tris kataraton]" of Erasmus--began to signify loose life as well as free thought. Of this resentment there had been no trace in Albert or St Thomas; but Imola had begun to wonder why Dante had treated so well Averroes who, if the Great Commentator, was yet the father of infidels. The Dominicans controlled the fine arts, and for them,--at Pisa, at Siena, in the Spanish Chapel,--Orcagna, Gaddi, Spinello Aretino, Simone Memmi abased the Empire, Averroes, and the new learning far more intolerantly than Dante had done; and exalted the Pope, with his handmaids Theology, Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric. In Santa Maria Novella, Memmi represents the triumph of the Dominicans in theology, Gaddi in philosophy; St Thomas and the Dominicans march triumphant over Arius, Sabellius, Averroes, and Savonarola. Thus in the Middle Ages Averroes appeared in two forms--first as the Great Commentator, later as the blasphemer and father of infidels of the Campo Santo and of Santa Maria Novella. In the fifteenth century the Council of Constance forbad the laity to teach, under a penalty of forty days' excommunication. In the sixteenth, in Granada, Ximenes burnt, it is said, 80,000 books of Arab philosophy, as Torquemada did for Hebrew in Seville; medical works, however, such as the Colliget[60] of Averroes, and his Commentary on Galen, were spared.

With the greater renascence the second period of Scholasticism, and indeed the Middle Ages themselves are closed. With the fall of Constantinople the stream of learning, driven eastwards in the first period of the Middle Ages, set westward again. Exiled grammarians now found their shelter under the protection of the "literate tyrants" of Italy, and with their spoil of manuscripts enriched the libraries of Rome and Venice. The Universities of Bologna and Padua from their foundation became notable for independence of thought; and, on the revival of learning, for their peripatetic teaching as opposed to the platonism of Florence, where, however, a spirit of accurate learning was nurtured in the deciphering and verification of texts. The political and commercial ambition of Venice, the Holland of Italy, of which State Padua was the learned quarter, and the inflow of liberal thinkers from other nations, kept her aloof from the fury of the Catholic reaction of the sixteenth century, which ruined Paris; thus in North-east Italy the spirit of modern science awoke sooner than in England or in France, and inquisitive students, both home and foreign, were attracted rather to Padua and to Bologna than, as in earlier times, to Paris.

In so far as Scholasticism may be described as a temporary reconciliation of Aristotle--that is, of natural and secular methods--with the Faith, this end had been attained, if at all, by St Thomas; in St Thomas Scholasticism culminated. But no such artificial truce could abide; and the issue of the chief scholastic controversy was to be determined by one greater than St Thomas. The pilgrim to Ockham, sitting in its church beneath the seven lancets of its twelfth century window, may be solitary also in his memory of one of the greatest of Englishmen, who saw that light six long centuries ago; yet a child rather of our age than of his own. As Abélard had closed the gates upon the neo-platonist tradition of Alexandria, so Ockham closed them against realism in all its forms; and the Church cursed them both. In his own person the occupation of professorial chairs by Franciscans came to an end; Paris and the Thomists could not consistently oppose nominalism; Duns the Northumbrian had inflated realism into a monstrous phantasm, and speculative reason had to submit to the yoke of verification. Yet what could nominalism do for theology, or for clerical schools? The Franciscans for the most part had turned to mysticism, and thenceforth the man of science and the devotee were to work apart. Furthermore, by Ockham philosophy gained a new meaning, or lost all meaning. Before Locke, Voltaire, and Kant, Ockham demonstrated that faculties were not substances; and differentiated logic, psychology, and natural science[61].

But if, as I have said, the way for Harvey and the other pioneers of natural knowledge was thus prepared for them, it was still, even in the seventeenth century, dark, rough and perilous. As in all times of transition, still the weight of defunct systems rolled inertly along; and while the new forces seemed to slumber stresses were accumulating. In Oxford and Cambridge the influence of Linacre, and even of Caius[62], seems to have been rather humanist than scientific[63]; in Oxford the text rather than the inspiration of Aristotle prevailed, while in Cambridge the platonist school, of which the charming Henry More was the leader, full of inspiration as it was, soon evaporated into mysticism, or obscurantism. Bacon and Harvey seem to have left Cambridge--for Paris and Padua respectively--as Locke left Oxford[64], under some discouragement. Of Paris the great days were over; it was in Padua that medicine, long degraded or disguised, was now to prove her lineage as the mother of natural science, and the truth of the saying of Hippocrates that to know the nature of man one must know the nature of all things. But on Harvey's arrival, Padua, which had become the first school of Medicine in Europe, as was Bologna of Imperial Law[65], was settling down upon the lees of the once noble school of Averroes: a discipline which, by its original strength, by its freedom of thought, and by the ascendency of its professors, had withstood in the thirteenth century the direct condemnation of the brilliant fourth Lateran Council; and in the sixteenth the thunders of Trent. Padua adopted Averroism, in the fourteenth century, because of its medical contents; in the two following centuries this system was emptied of heart and life, but pattered and mumbled by pretentious pedants in North-east Italy it prevailed till the seventeenth, when after a reign of three centuries it was succeeded by the Cartesian. Of its phases in the sixteenth century Patrizzi said, "Ingens ab his philosophorum numerus ac successio manavit quæ in Aven Rois hypothesibus habitavit.... Inde dubitationum ac quæstionum sexcentorum milium numerus manavit" (Disc. Peripat. Vol. I. Venet. 1571; quoted by Renan, Averroès). The name of Averroes, "perfectus et gloriosissimus physicus, veritatis amicus et defensor intrepidus," became the shibboleth of philosophers who held the different nature of the heavenly bodies against the "moderns" who alleged the identity of matter in sky and earth, and the doctrine of the universal against the individual soul.

Yet, in spite of Petrarch's gibes, Averroism in its spring had nursed Padua with the milk of natural science. Even in its decay--for all teaching of philosophy, as a separate study, must decay--the triumph of the Faith was premature; like Jansenism, the School of Averroes, effete as it became, held the ground for a more dangerous invasion, for Leonardo, Telesio, Bruno, Gilbert, Sarpi, Campanella, Galileo, and Harvey; for the pioneers of truth, not as consistency with tradition, not as an alchemical search for real essences, nor indeed as wisdom only; but as the verification of premises. This fuse Paracelsus fixed to the shell which burst upon the Faith, upon Scholasticism, upon Galenism, and even upon humanism, "So Christus spricht 'Perscrutamini scripturas'; warum soll ich nicht sagen 'Perscrutamini naturas rerum'?" The _Credo ut intelligam_ of Augustine and Anselm of Canterbury; the _Intelligo ut credam_ of Aquinas belonged to the past; and men began to cry "c'est Dieu qui nous veut hérétiques." A criticism based upon a larger sense of the relativity of knowledge, and, in the sixteenth century, a new scepticism[66], which pierced even into the Vatican, as to the very possibility of knowledge of the nature of being, were preparing the way for new conceptions: but in ethics meanwhile men were falling either into the carelessness of the scoffer or into the anti-nomianism of the mystic. The brilliant futilities of the medieval dialectic had led to weariness of spirit. After vain and vexatious jugglings with the dry tissues of unchastened ratiocination, simplicity and even ignorance brought their solace.

As from Florence humanism invaded English letters, so the Averroistic physician of Padua became known, even in Chaucer's day, as a man of secular rather than of Scriptural learning. In Padua, while Galileo was teaching Euclid for a pittance, chairs of Averroistic philosophy were filled by highly paid professors, whose "rotuli" or portfolios, many of which now rest in the dust of the libraries of North Italy, were handed down from one to another in deadly routine. Virtually, however, the Averroistic tradition ended with a contemporary Paduan professor, Cremonini, lifted into fame by Harvey's refutation in the _De motu cordis_, and by his own repudiation of the satellites of Jupiter, bodies for which Aristotle had made no provision. The coarseness and pedantry of the Averroistic freethinkers, whose scepticism lacked the elegance and sprightliness of the French, and their bastard language--mongrel of Greek and Arabic--revolted the humanists also: "Nihil indoctius, nihil insulsius, frigidius." "Unum te obsecro," Petrarch had said two hundred years before (in his invectives against doctors, whom he classed with astrologers, as afterwards indeed did Harvey more or less), "ut ab omni consilio mearum rerum tui isti Arabes arceantur atque exsulent." "De medicis non modo nil sperandum sed valde etiam metuendum[67]." The doctors in their turn did not hide their disdain for poets. Whether justly or unjustly, the Doctors of Medicine were classed with astrologers and alchemists; the latter of whom Harvey repudiated frankly, not altogether avoiding a contempt for chemistry itself. Clad in fine raiment, with rings on their fingers and golden spurs on their heels, they rode tall horses, and gave themselves pompous airs. The humanist would rather pose as a believer than as an underbred infidel; the Averroist protected the license of his doctrines and manners by subterfuge and ironic evasion: and humanist and Averroist alike stood by at the burning of Bruno[68].

It must not be supposed, however, that these pompous pedants had it all their own way, and that Medicine was not better justified of her children. It is full of interest for our present purpose to read in the preface by Thomas Junta to the Edition of Averroes (1552), "Plerique omnes juniores medici jam intolerabile in Arabum Mauritaniorumque dogmata odium conceperunt, ut ne nominandi citandive locus relinquatur; principes etiam Hippocratem atque Galenum habere nos prædicant." This enlightenment seems to have come about in some part through the teaching of Thomæus Nicolaus Leonicus[69], who began to lecture, for the first time, from the Greek text of Aristotle (there were chairs thenceforth for both the Arabian and the Greek Aristotle) in 1497.

It was with Galileo however that scientific research began in Padua, at any rate for professors; and Galileo may be venerated as the first modern naturalist to set the experimental method conceptually, coherently, and thoroughly before himself, including the deductive side of it. In the Harveian Oration of 1892, Dr Bridges reminded us that Galileo conceived of motion and energy as calculable quantities, and drew our attention to those most interesting experiments wherein Galileo applied the pendulum to measure the rate and rhythm of the pulse. Roger Bacon had dwelt upon experiment, but scarcely upon methodical verification thereby. The chemistry of Albert of Cologne was but a return of the curiosity of Geber of Cordova (in the ninth century). Even Francis Bacon saw the method less clearly than Galileo had done; and, as the last of the schoolmen and encyclopedists, he made a place for it rather in literature and philosophy: he ignored, as the scientific Descartes welcomed, the cardinal discoveries of Copernicus and of Harvey[70]. But if Galileo discovered the experimental method as a method, before Galileo the method was in use. Leonardo had laid down the rule of investigation of nature by experiment, and the aphorism that nature never deceives us; unfortunately his manuscripts were not published. In the first half of the fifteenth century Nicholas of Cusa weighed plants at definite stages of their growth in known weights of earth; and he weighed the moisture of the air. His contemporary Leon Battista Alberti of Genoa had done likewise. But above all the scientific forerunners of Galileo and Harvey stands William Gilbert, Fellow of St John's College, Doctor of Medicine of Cambridge, Censor and President of this College, Physician to Queen Elizabeth, and Founder of the science of Magnetism.

The century dating from the birth of Galileo to the death of Harvey was perhaps the most brilliant in the history of modern knowledge. The discovery of Greek texts had destroyed the conventional Aristotle, the conventional Hippocrates and Galen; since the latter part of the sixteenth century Greek had been taught in the High Schools, philosophy was born again, and men found themselves no longer the slaves but the kin of the great ancients. Telesius, Bruno, Campanella vindicated natural science and liberty of thought. Galileo taught in Padua for twenty years, including the time when Harvey graduated there; Torricelli was a pupil of the great Florentine; in 1582, on the theory of Copernicus, Gregory reformed the Calendar, and thus laid the axe to the root of astrology; by Newton terrestrial physics were established in the celestial spheres[71]. Malpighi, who was to fulfil Harvey's discovery and foresight, was born in N.-E. Italy in the very year (1628) in which the _De motu cordis_ was published. In 1626 Boyle was creating chemistry. Anatomy, which had slept since its days in Alexandria, was fully awake. The Society of the Lincei was virtually founded in 1603; the Royal Society[72] in 1645; the Academy of France in 1656. Clinical teaching, initiated in Salerno and advanced by the _Consilia_ _medica_[73], was formally established in Padua[74], to be pursued in Heidelberg, Leyden, and Vienna. Thus was the study "De rerum natura juxta propria principia" unfolded, and the "Civitas Dei" gave place to the "Regnum Hominis."

The "Regnum Hominis"! Yet when I look, from a respectful distance, upon the folios of the schoolmen, monuments, I am told, as empty as the Pyramids of Egypt, my mind turns back to the fiery and turbulent tribes which in the "deep but dazzling darkness" of the Middle Ages raged upon a barren land before the nations began; and I wonder if the ideas which awed them, swayed them, and welded them into stable societies were fancies as wild and sterile; and if the men who wrought them were mere traffickers in words. And then I wonder if we are glad that the riddle of the origin and issues of being, which tormented their eager hearts, is not solved, but proved insoluble: if we are glad that "sub specie hominis" the earth, no longer the nursery of eternal souls, is but a meteor in the sky; men and women but the gleam upon it; the sons of Heaven but companies of whirling stones, and the Father of Heaven an inaccessible idea.

The scholastic philosophies became inhuman only in their decrepitude. In the equal eye of history, the Middle Ages teach us that the slow and painful travail of natural science is not to be regarded as the belated labour of light in the womb of darkness, nor as a mere stifling of the growth of the human mind by tyranny and oppression, nor indeed as the arming of moral forces against brute forces, but as the condition of time in the making of societies on a necessarily provisional theory of life. They teach us that conduct in state and morals depends upon a theory of life; that although habits and even standards of ethics may abide for a time after the theory on which they were built is sapped, it is but for a time; that if the social discipline and fruition are to be renewed and enlarged it must be upon a new synthesis, as laborious and ardent as the former, and more true. Meanwhile the business of a nation, whether in war or peace, is first to be quick and strong in action, to be rational afterwards; and swiftness and strength come of union of wills and singleness of heart rather than of wisdom. Even within its borders freedom of opinion must awaken slowly; the nation strong enough to suffer irresolutions in its outward policy has yet to appear. Hence it is that we find in ruling classes, and in social circles which put on aristocratical fashions, that ideas, and especially scientific ideas, are held in sincere aversion and in simulated contempt.

The Greek was no heathen, suckled by nature and endowed only with her instincts; he sought in his mind to improve nature: but in the Renascence instincts were set as free as thought. In this passionate and adventurous time to preach the destruction of the animal instincts, or to crush them for the higher life, was a noble idea, but an impossible hope; the animal impulses are to be trained, not suppressed, and for this the help of science was to come. Yet science was to be not the hated rival but a necessary ally of religion. It is not within the province of science to answer the medieval searchings on the nature of being, nevertheless this threshold problem--"_der Drudenfuss auf der Schwelle_"--faces us still; and the world, so far as we have seen of it, has always demanded a provisional answer. To-day Professor James Ward offers it again in "Supreme Intelligence"; and Principal Caird ("Fundamental Christianity") yearns for the knowledge of infinite being almost in the words of Plato himself:--"If," he cries, "underneath all the phenomena of the world in which we live we can discern no principle of reason and order, no absolute intelligence and love, then indeed" this world is a "meaningless waste."

Gilbert Galileo and Harvey, Maxwell Hertz and Darwin have taught men not that the speculations of the schoolmen were over-bold, for they busied themselves with no speculations bolder or more transcendental than are our modern theories on matter, on inertia, on the ether, or on the origin of life, but that metaphysics by "intercalation of facts" shall become physics, that, in the words of Descartes, concepts, if "[Greek: meta ta physika]," "talia sint tantum ut omnibus naturae phænomenis accurate respondeant," and that notions great and small shall be subjected to strict verification, so far as such tests can be carried; not that men shall deny themselves the rapture of touching that various instrument they find within themselves, but that they shall endure the drudgery of learning to play it in harmony with the orchestra of nature; not that they shall desist from imagining, but that before proclaiming hypotheses they shall be compelled to the humble task of making an infinite number of little piles of facts. The art of experiment can grow only with the growth of science itself; instruments of precision are not provided till men feel the need of them. The experimental verification of concepts is no mere alternative path, no mere renunciation, but a new birth; a birth into a dull and vexatious discipline for the impatient Hegelian, whether of the thirteenth or of the twentieth century, who believes that, as mind is the product of evolution, and so the sum and store of nature, "in dem Gedanken selbst das Wahre ist zu suchen[75]."

"Long fed on boundless hopes, O race of man,
How angrily thou spurn'st all simpler fare."

The genius and courage concerned in a particular discovery or reform it were impossible to estimate; there is no method of determining the specific gravity of such adventures: moreover we are now so well used to the lights, bells, and soundings of the routes of scientific enquiry that it is hard for us to realise the pain and peril of fogs and contrary winds in voyages where were no such guides. Indeed no exposition of defects of methods can explain false habits of thought without a careful estimate of historical causes also, in what we may call the embryology of thought; for at no time were right methods of thought wholly wanting, or even wholly disregarded. But, as we approach Harvey's own time, if on the one hand I have shown that Europe until he came was not ready for him, on the other hand I trust I have made it more easy to conceive the weight of the social systems, opinions, and prejudices against which his gigantic effort was made. For, brilliant as was the promise of the Renascence, yet in the time of Harvey, and in the generation immediately before him, the decay of the scholastic methods and the worldliness of the Church, which in the first half of the sixteenth century had favoured the advance of secular culture, had led to a reaction, not against Luther only but also against all liberal learning and science. In the Vatican, in the Sorbonne, in the Consistory, and even in the courts of justice it was proclaimed that as these studies make government more difficult, it were ill to encourage them! We have seen that the Faith, though undermined and no longer catholic, was aroused, and was terrible still; orthodoxy was crushing free thought in Italy; Alva was in Flanders, and had been visited by Catherine de Medici at Bayonne; in France the ruthless religious wars ended in the triumph of Rome; Europe was overrun by Dominicans and Franciscans; Trent was long pregnant with anathema. Contrary sects alike defied liberal culture; and four years before Harvey's birth the wolf, hidden under another cloak, had torn Servetus--Servetus who shared with Colombo the honour of preparing the way for the founder of modern physiology. Even the genial conformist of the world, after his manner when he is scared, had turned brutal; he felt that the old conceptions upon which society was built for him, were suspected, and therewith society itself beginning to crack and split, yet he did not see that now by science only could society be recreated.

In Italy the Cinque Cento had taken its birth and nourishment chiefly from Latin sources and tradition. It regarded symmetry of form and rhetorical modes of passion; elegance was preferred to matter, and style to knowledge. Such a culture had not the seeds of life in it; in the middle of the sixteenth century its enthusiasms waned, its philosophy fell into routine, its style into mannerism; but science, not philosophy, not the Faith, was the heir of the Middle Ages. Science is not of Latin but of Greek inheritance, its sources are Greek; and with the westward swarm of the Greeks their older boons of eloquence and beauty were rivalled by their newer gifts of scholarship and natural knowledge. In France the leaders of this school were the Huguenots, the flower of the nation; in the Catholic reaction of the sixteenth century France scorched her own bloom, and Spain was blasted for ever. The humanists, who at best were false friends of science and medicine, were no longer powerful friends; their noble rage was suppressed by chill penury, and many of the most learned and zealous of them were vagabonds in Europe. Rhetoric, fine art, and even philosophy may flourish in slavery, learning and science can breathe no air but that of freedom; and freedom of learning was quenched in the blood of the Massacre of St Bartholomew. In 1540 had been founded the Society of Jesus, which then as now used science and learning, not as sources of truth or tests of conduct, but as tactics; putting on indeed the habit of the scholar, but only the more effectually to control research. Two years later the Spanish Inquisition was set up in Rome; and its shadow fell even over Venice, which abased itself to the imprisonment of Bruno. The great Venetian printers, some time reduced to the publications of decadent Averroism (p. 97), to avert bankruptcy had to print breviaries. Henry of Navarre, deserting Du Plessis Mornay, D'Aubigné, and De Thou, turned not only Roman Catholic but also ultramontane; and, if with his accession the Terror had ceased, social and political ostracisms, tests, and disabilities stifled all generous culture.

The great University of Paris, which throughout the Middle Ages had been the heart of Christendom, the centre of its life and heat, which in the fourteenth century was at its splendid culmination, and which had meddled with no feeble hand even in the State, was waning even in the fifteenth century, when France was devastated by war and rapine and her schools were emptied. This University, which had savagely condemned Joan of Arc, and sent Nicholas Midi to preach a solemn sermon at the stake, "pro Joannæ salutari admonitione et populi ædificatione," in the sixteenth century came out of the religious wars stripped of its endowments, and deserted by its students; its curriculum was crassly conservative, its philosophy buckram, its theology a petrifaction; its forty colleges were closed, grass grew in its courts, and its public disputations were abased to the decorous apostasy of the freethinker. Montpellier was dominated by realism (vitalism). Francis Bacon had done better to have gone with Harvey to Padua; almost in the year of the publication of the _De motu cordis_, the Parliament of Paris issued an edict that no teacher should promulgate anything contrary to the accepted doctrines of the ancients.

Such was the check which, after the death of Leo the Tenth, had befallen liberal studies: no Bembo now secretly protected freethinkers; in Central Europe the generous Maximilian the Second, who died in 1576 while counselling tolerance in religion to Henry the Third, was followed by reactionary emperors. In England no doubt the sky was clearer; in the Salamis of modern civilization the malign pretensions of Philip were shattered, and the "spacious times of Elizabeth" were glorious in their outburst of freedom, adventure, and culture, Medicine, however, sinking in the sixteenth century, fell, in the seventeenth, into that reproach which has become a byword. All superstition was not within the Faith. When Harvey's discovery, like an earthquake, had broken up galenism and other outworn sophistries, his masterly work stood forth not only against long-winded dialectics on ars sphygmica, critical days, coctions, derivatives, revulsives, and like abstractions bequeathed by realism and uncritical subservience to texts, but also against a more lurid background of folk superstitions--of vampires, witch-burning, magic, cabbalism, astrology, alchemy, chiromancy, and water-casting. For medicine, says Bacon, is associated with charlatanry as Aesculapius with Circe. In physics, terrestrial and celestial, Galileo, persecuted as he was, had some current with him and before him; Copernicus had preceded him, Kepler was beside him: but in physiology the waters had closed upon the path of Galen as upon the wake of a great ship; the anatomists, themselves galenists, had given Harvey little help; and the share of Servetus[76], Colombo, and Fabricius was but small in the discovery of the central fact of the science, and of the method which opened the way to Pecquet and Aselli, to Glisson, to Steno, to Wharton and Willis, to Haller and Bernard. Harvey's discovery was the first step to a transfiguration of medicine; and though after Harvey there arose much false physiology and therewith again great floods of medical sophistry, yet from his time medicine has had to reckon with physiology, the only source of scientific nosology and therapeutics.

We celebrate the memory of great men in the certain hope that in their children they will be born again.

APPENDIX.

ASTROLOGY.

Besides those greater preventions which lay in the very structure and organised conceptions of society in the Middle Ages, the student of natural science was thwarted also by many lesser, which could not find place in this oration. Among the chief of these was judicial astrology, which supplanted and degraded the art of medicine.

It is difficult to carry the imagination into a time when the heavens were conceived as an animate and divine being[77], the heavenly bodies as active and intelligent parts of it, and the whole set not in illimitable space but around man and his home, and waiting upon him (vid. p. 47); yet without such an effort we cannot realise the ancient place and dominion of astrology. Such a possession when in its strength must have enthralled the human mind; and it abode tenaciously with the first scientific conceptions of celestial phenomena, even in the thoughts of the enlightened. Tycho Brahe, for many years of his life, was an adept; and even Kepler saw portents in the skies. When we read the doctrines of Aristotle on the celestial beings, it is indeed somewhat strange that upon him, upon Plato, and upon the Ionians, the "judicia astrorum" had even less hold than the mythology: so truly poised, even in the infancy of science, were the cosmic speculations of this wonderful race. The Romans by their Etruscan tradition held to astrology, chiefly derived from Chaldea and Egypt, and by them it was mixed with grosser folk magic; yet even in Rome there were many to repudiate it, not only such Grecian spirits as Cicero but also such Romans as Juvenal; as in Harvey's time it was assailed by the irony of Pascal and of La Fontaine. Even in the twelfth century John of Salisbury had not failed to turn his light artillery upon astrology.

This art of forecast naturally attached itself closely to that of medicine; and in its decrepitude still it clung to medicine like a parasite. And as parasites in the field of pathology, so astrology brought with it other noxious superstitions and follies even worse than itself. In England it survived till the witty attack of Swift killed Partridge and astrology together; yet to this day many of its notions are embedded in our common speech.