Chapter XXXII: Appendix: IX

THE DANGER OF A LITTLE KNOWLEDGE.

_Professor Draper's "The History of the Conflict between Religion and Science."_

What I have tried to emphasize in this volume is that the arguments advanced to show the opposition of the Catholic Church to science are founded on actual ignorance of the history of science or misunderstandings of particular incidents of that history. Not only was there no policy of opposition to science, but on the contrary encouragement of interest in scientific subjects, patronage of scientific workers and even definite endowment of scientific research by the ecclesiastical authorities. The tradition of Church opposition to science is founded especially on lack of knowledge of what was done for science in the medieval period and a misunderstanding of the medieval universities. This tradition owed its origin partly to the Renaissance, which, having rediscovered Greek, despised whatever Western Europe had accomplished during the preceding centuries and spoke of all that was done as Gothic, as if only worthy of barbarous Gothic ancestors.

Another large factor, however, in the creation of this tradition and one which meant more for us here in America than the Renaissance, was the religious revolt of the sixteenth century in Germany which has been called the Reformation. The reformers made it a point to minimize, if not actually to misrepresent, what had been accomplished under the old Church regime, and this Protestant tradition lived on here in America with much more vitality even than in Europe.

The consequence was the bringing up of a series of generations, who, if not actually believing as so many absurdly did, that the Pope of Rome was the Scarlet Woman and the Church the Babylon of the Apocalypse, were quite sure at least that no good could possibly have come out of the Nazareth of pre-Reformation times. It is only in recent years that we have come to recognize that all the talk about the Dark Ages is, as John Fiske said, simply due to ignorance of the time and its accomplishment. The later medieval period might well be called the "Bright Ages" for its art and architecture, its magnificent literature, its interest in education and {501} in scholarship, its development of democracy and its formulation of the great laws and constitutions by which the rights of men were guaranteed in practically every country in Europe. Just as soon as this true state of affairs with regard to the medieval period is recognized, then all question of any policy of Church opposition to education and science disappears.

I have illustrated the lack of knowledge of the true history of science as the basis of the arguments for the thesis of Church opposition to science in the present volume by impugning what President White advances as facts. It can be illustrated still better, however, from another book written twenty years before President White's, even a little consideration of which shows how the whole status of the arguments with regard to the relations of Church and science has changed during a single generation. Our growing knowledge of history has literally taken away all the ground on which the older controversialists used to stand. This is the "History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science" by Professor John W. Draper, which was issued in 1874, just forty years ago, and already in 1875 had entered its third edition, so that the book sold almost as a popular novel at that time and evidently attracted wide attention. The volume was accorded the privilege of publication in the International Scientific Series, and as this set is among the recognized serious books of the time, some of them classics in science and most of them representing important contributions to knowledge, no wonder most readers never thought of doubting its authority or above all questioning its "facts."

Some of Dr. Draper's work made him deservedly one of the best-known biological scientists of the United States in his time. He had had a very striking career. As a medical student at the University of Pennsylvania he reported in his thesis for the doctorate in medicine, which had become at this time usually such a commonplace statement of conventional science that it was shortly after given up as a requirement, a series of observations on absorption through membranes, using bubbles for his experimental work, that attracted the special commendation of the faculty and the attention of the scientific world. He was not yet thirty years of age when he made the first photograph of a human being--that of his sister--ever made and in 1840 successfully secured the first photographs of the moon. During the next ten years he made a series of observations on the spectrum which attracted deserved attention and anticipated not a little of Kirchoff's work. Melloni, himself a distinguished Italian physicist, reported these observations {502} to the academy of Naples. Draper's text-book of physiology was without doubt the best medical text-book issued in America up to that time and deservedly held its place for many years in our medical schools.

It was no wonder then that Draper received many distinctions in the shape of membership in foreign scientific societies, honorable mentions, and prizes. His works were translated into many of the European languages. Late in life he gave up his experimental and scientific work to devote himself to the writing of history. His history of the Civil War was widely read both in Europe and America. His "History of the Intellectual Development of Europe," which only a little reading now in the light of recent knowledge of the Middle Ages shows us to be a caricature of the philosophy of history, was translated into several foreign languages and was probably more widely read than any serious work by an American author up to that time. What was very rare for an American book at that period it was read by a great many European teachers and students. All this gave added distinction to his writing on the subject of the relations of science and religion, and so it is easy to understand that he was considered by many to have made an almost final summary of this important controversy.

Professor Draper's book then became a sort of bible, that is a book of books, for a great many American teachers of science and, above all, for the younger generation of university lecturers who were to have the shaping of opinions among the students of scientific departments of our colleges and universities during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. It does not seem too much to assume that most of the maturer scientists who are now teaching in the university scientific departments of this country, read Professor Draper's book and were led by it to an almost unshakeable conviction that religion and, above all, the Catholic Church, fearful lest science should take men away from her influence, had been constantly opposed to all true scientific progress, and what was more unpardonable, that religion as represented by the Church had been for the same reason a bitter enemy of any and every social progress that might lead to the real development of mankind. For them under Draper's inspiration it seemed that the deliberate Church policy was that if men were not happy here they would look with all the more eagerness to happiness hereafter and take all the means offered by the Church to secure it. That such a conclusion impugned the motives of millions of men whom their own generation had thoroughly respected and yielded to the most {503} dangerous of human ideas, suspicion, made no difference. No good could come out of the Nazareth of the Catholic Church.

It is quite certain that a great many of the younger teachers of science of that time who are still alive, even when not entirely conscious of the source of their opinions as to the relations of science and religion and the Church and education, have at the back of their minds certain prejudices, founded on the influence produced on them during their plastic, formative state of mind by the reading of Professor Draper's book. Indeed, so firm is the feeling in many of these men, that this whole subject is settled for them beyond the possibility of any modification, that they have insulated their minds from any further currents of information.

Controversy is distasteful at best; to find out that one has been cherishing a mistaken notion for years, is always disturbing as one grows older, and so it is not surprising that many of these men frequently use expressions with regard to the supposed relations of Church and science that are quite incompatible with what is now very generally known of the history of science. Their minds are made up, and they simply refuse to bring for a second time any of these subjects before the bar of judgment. Besides, though they would resent any such imputation as to their own state of mind, they have the feeling that people with religious convictions are prone to see only one side, and, therefore, anything that may be said on the other side is only a bit of special pleading for a conviction that no reasoning and no argument would change. They argue, as a consequence, that it would be quite useless for them to read the other side with any reasonable hope of getting at the real facts. This attitude of scientists is very different from the open-mindedness that is supposed to be characteristic of the devotees of science; but it is very human.

Now the interesting fact with regard to Professor Draper's books is that Professor Draper, a scientist, did not know the history of science at all. He was entirely ignorant of the great advances that were even then being made, with regard to our knowledge of the growth of science during the medieval period. He thought that there was very little, indeed practically no science, during that period. Looking about for a reason, he made the Church a scapegoat. The publication during the past generation of many German volumes on the history of the different sciences--and these German students went straight to the original documents--has shown us that there were magnificent developments of science during the medieval and early Renaissance periods, when the Church was in control of the educational institutions and of every phase of {504} academic work. The story of the opposition between religion and science falls to the ground at once when these facts are known. Some of them were already in process of publication even in Draper's time, but he knew nothing of them. He was so sure that there was nothing to know in this matter, that he probably did not bother his head very much about trying to get the latest results of scholarship in the matter.

Professor Draper's summary of the relations of the Church to science or learning, and his declaration of her absolute refusal to recognize anything as scholarship, except what was deduced from the Scriptures, shows how far a man can go in his assumption of knowledge when he knows literally nothing about a subject. For him the Dark Ages knew nothing because he knows nothing about them. If they knew anything, he would know it, but he does not. Of one or two men he knows something, but they are exceptions to the general rule of absolute negation of intellectual interests and developments. Draper said: [Footnote 64]

[Footnote 64: Page 250.]

"In the annals of Christianity, the most ill-omened day is that in
which she separated herself from science. She compelled Origen, at
that time (A.D. 231) its chief representative and supporter in the
Church, to abandon his charge in Alexandria, and retire to Caesarea.
In vain through many subsequent centuries did her leading men spend
themselves in--as the phrase then went--drawing forth the internal
juice and marrow of the Scriptures for the explaining of things.
Universal history from the third to the sixteenth century shows with
what result. The Dark Ages owe their darkness to this fatal policy.
Here and there, it is true, there were great men, such as Frederick
II and Alphonso X, who, standing at a very elevated and general
point of view, had detected the value of learning to civilization,
and, in the midst of the dreary prospect that ecclesiasticism had
created around them, had recognized that science alone can improve
the social condition of man."

Of course the man who wrote that either knew nothing at all about a whole series of triumphs of human intelligence, or else he deliberately put them out of his mind. One wonders if he had ever even heard of Dante, of whom more has been written than of any man who ever lived. Those triumphs of art, architecture, the arts and crafts, engineering, construction work of the highest genius, the Gothic cathedrals and the great public buildings, town halls, hospitals, university buildings, would surely have appeared to him as representing magnificent intellectual--and social--accomplishments, had he appreciated anything of their real significance or allowed himself for a moment to get out of the narrow circle of {505} interests in which he was unfortunately placed. Our architecture in his time was cheap; our art absent; our crafts lacked development; our civic and university architecture of the quarter century before he wrote was literally a disgrace, and of course Professor Draper could not be expected to appreciate the achievements of the Middle Ages in those departments in which his own generation lacked so much.

It is especially striking to take a paragraph of Professor Draper's, in which he sums up a whole movement, and place beside it a paragraph of a serious and informed student of the same subject. Professor Draper inherited the old traditions of lazy monks, living in idleness, a drain on the country, of absolutely no benefit to themselves or to others. Professor Draper wrote: [Footnote 65]

[Footnote 65: Page 267.]

"While thus the higher clergy secured every political appointment
worth having, and abbots vied with counts, in the herds of slaves
they possessed--some, it is said, owned not fewer than twenty
thousand--begging friars pervaded society in all directions, picking
up a share of what still remained to the poor. There was a vast body
of non-producers, living in idleness and owning a foreign
allegiance, who were subsisting on the fruits of the toil of the
laborers. It could not be otherwise than that small farms should be
unceasingly merged into the larger estates; that the poor should
steadily become poorer; that society far from improving, should
exhibit a continually increasing demoralization."

As a commentary on this, read the following paragraph from Mr. Ralph Adams Cram's book on "The Ruined Abbeys of Great Britain," in which he describes what the monasteries actually did for the people. Mr. Cram has made a special study of the subject in connection with the magnificent architecture which these medieval monks developed, and which he would like to have our people appreciate and emulate. Professor Draper is much more positive, but Mr. Cram is much more convincing. [Footnote 66]

[Footnote 66: _The Ruined Abbeys of Great Britain_. New York: The Churchman Co., 1905, p. 458.]

"At the height of monastic glory the religious houses were actually
the chief centres of industry and civilization, and around them grew
up the eager villages, many of which now exist, even though their
impulse and original inspiration have long since departed. Of
course, the possessions of the abbey reached far away from the walls
in every direction, including many farms even at a great distance,
for the abbeys were then the great landowners, and beneficent
landlords they were as well; even in their last days, for we have
many records of the cruelty and hardships that came to {506} the
tenants the moment the stolen lands came into the hands of laymen."

Or, almost better still, read the following paragraph from an address at the summer meeting of the State Board of Agriculture of Massachusetts, delivered by Dr. Henry Goodell, the President of the Massachusetts Agricultural College, on the general subject of the influence of the monks in agriculture:

"Agriculture was sunk to a low ebb at the decadence of the Roman
Empire. Marshes covered once fertile fields, and the men who should
have tilled the land spurned the plow as degrading. The monks left
their cells and their prayers to dig ditches and plow fields. The
effort was magical. Men once more turned back to a noble but
despised industry, and peace and plenty supplanted war and poverty.
So well recognized were the blessings they brought, that an old
German proverb among the peasants runs, 'It is good to live under
the crozier.' They ennobled manual labor, which, in a degenerate
Roman world, had been performed exclusively by slaves, and among the
barbarians by women. For the monks it is no exaggeration to say that
the cultivation of the soil was like an immense alms spread over a
whole country. The abbots and superiors set the example, and
stripping off their sacerdotal robes, toiled as common laborers.
Like the good parson whom Chaucer portrays in the prologue to the
"Canterbury Tales":

"'This noble ensample unto his scheep he gaf
That first he wroughte and after that he taughte.'

"When a Papal messenger came in haste to consult the Abbot Equutius
on important matters of the Church, he was not to be found anywhere,
but was finally discovered in the valley cutting hay. Under such
guidance and such example the monks upheld and taught everywhere the
dignity of labor, first, by consecrating to agriculture the energy
and intelligent activity of freemen often of high birth, and clothed
with the double authority of the priesthood and of hereditary
nobility, and, second, by associating under the Benedictine habit
sons of kings, princes, and nobles with the rudest labors of
peasants and serfs."

President Goodell has told the story of how the monks cleared and reclaimed the land, transformed fens into forests, marshes into gardens, and swamps into beautiful domains. As he says:

"A swamp was of no value. It was a source of pestilence. But it was
just the place for a monastery because it made life especially hard,
and so the monks carried in earth and stone and made a foundation,
and built their convent, and then set to work to dyke and drain and
fill up the swamp, till they had turned it into fertile plow land
and the pestilence had ceased."

{507}

President Goodell did not hesitate to proclaim that the monasteries were the early representatives of our agricultural colleges. They taught the peasantry of the surrounding country how best to grow their crops and what to grow. Because of their wide affiliations they were enabled to secure seeds of various kinds, and stock for breeding purposes, and so were able to teach the people what was best for particular neighborhoods, and not only show them how to raise it, but actually supply them with the necessary initial materials. It became a proverb that the monks and their people were the best farmers. When we ourselves were ignorant of scientific farming, we did not appreciate what the monks had done for agriculture. Now that our soil is becoming exhausted by unscientific and wasteful farming, the foundation of agricultural colleges leads the men who have studied the subject to appreciate what the monks really accomplished. Professor Draper not only cannot find anything good to say of the monks, but he can scarcely find anything bitter enough to say of them. On the other hand President Goodell, who has studied the situation from his point of view very carefully, can scarcely find words strong enough to praise them. He concluded his address as follows:

"My friends, I have outlined to you in briefest manner to-day the
work of these grand old monks during the period of 1500 years. They
saved agriculture when no one else would save it, they practised it
under a new life and new conditions when no one else dared undertake
it. They advanced it along every line of theory and practice, and
when they perished they left a void which generations have not
filled."

In the light of these few quotations even it is easy to see that Professor Draper's book is really quite an amazing work to have come from the hand of a man widely read, acknowledged as an authority in certain subjects by his contemporaries and, above all, because the author seems to have thought that he had quite exhausted his subject. Here, for instance, is a portion of the paragraph in which he summarizes the beginnings of science in modern Europe (page 298).

"The science of the Arabians followed the invading track of their
literature, which had come into Christendom by two routes--the south
of France and Sicily. Favored by the exile of the Popes to Avignon,
and by the Great Schism, it made good its foothold in upper Italy.
The Aristotelian or Inductive philosophy, clad in the Saracenic
costume that Averroes had given it, made many secret and not a few
open friends. It found many minds eager to receive {508} and able to
appreciate it. Among these were Leonardo da Vinci, who proclaimed
the fundamental principle that experiment and observation are the
only reliable foundations of reasoning in science, that experiment
is the only trustworthy interpreter of Nature, and is essential to
the ascertainment of laws. He showed that the action of two
perpendicular forces upon a point is the same as that denoted by the
diagonal of a rectangle, of which they represent the sides, etc."

We must suppose that the scientific readers of this book, for they were mainly scientists, and it had a place in the International Scientific Series, agreed with this marvellous exhibition of ignorance. Here is a man summarizing modern European science and leaving out all mention of Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, the great medical school of Salerno in the twelfth century, and the great medical schools of Italy farther north during the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries. This lack of knowledge of the history of medicine deserves, above all, to be emphasized because Draper as a professor in a medical school would naturally be supposed to know something about his own branch of science.

He attributes all the initiative of modern science to the impulse derived from the Arabs. This used to be a favorite way of looking at the history of culture for those who wanted to minimize just as far as possible all Christian influence. The facts of history are in constant contradiction with this. Modern European science began at the University of Salerno. It has often been stated that Arabian influence must have largely impelled Salerno's work, situated as it was in the southern part of Italy, but the use of any such expression means that the writer must forget that this southern part of Italy had been a Greek colony, was indeed called Magna Graecia and that Greek influence persisted there, and when the revival came after the Barbarians who had invaded Italy had gradually been brought by religious influence into a state where culture and science and civilization were to mean something for them, the influence of the old Greek authors was first felt here. Gurlt, in his History of Surgery, emphasizes the fact, for instance, that the first important modern (or medieval) writers on surgery, the Four Masters of Salerno, were not influenced by the Arabs. Their books contain no Arabisms but many Graecisms. They obtained their inspiration from the old Greeks and carried on the torch of learning in their own department magnificently as recent studies of the School of Salerno have shown. They corrected the polypharmacy of the Arabs and restored natural modes of cure to their proper place.

{509}

For Professor Draper, until after the Reformation there was practically no development of medicine. "It had always been the policy of the Church to discourage the physician and his arts; he interfered too much with the gifts and profits of the shrines." Professor Draper either knew nothing of the great series of Papal physicians and surgeons or else he ignored what they had done deliberately. It seems reasonably certain that he knew nothing about them, for if he had done so he would surely have mentioned them in order to minimize the significance of their work--for that is his way. He is emphatic in his declaration of the medieval neglect of sanitation and care for the ailing, and sets it down to the deliberate purpose to secure more money for prayers. "From cities wreaking with putrefying filth it was thought that the plague might be staid by the prayers of the priests." He knows nothing apparently of the well-directed attempts to organize sanitary control, of the appointment of archiaters or medical directors in Italian cities, of the recognition of the contagiousness of tuberculosis, and the effort to control it, and seems even to have missed the significance of the successful obliteration of leprosy by segregation methods, for that was one of the greatest triumphs of preventive medicine ever attained. Leprosy was probably as common in the thirteenth century in Europe as consumption is now with us or very nearly so, and yet in two centuries it had been practically eradicated. Well for us if we shall accomplish as much for our folk scourge of disease--the White Plague.

Above all, Professor Draper seems to know nothing of the magnificent hospitals of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries, beautiful architecturally, well planned for ventilation and the disposal of waste material, with abundant water supply, with large open wards, windows high in the wall, tiled floors that could be thoroughly cleansed and which, alas! were to be replaced hundreds of years later by the awful hospitals of the first half of the nineteenth century, which with their small windows, narrow corridors, cell-like apartments and little doors, were to be more like jails than refuges. Some of the worst hospitals ever built in modern history had been erected in Professor Draper's own lifetime. Some of the most beautiful hospitals in the world had been erected in Italy and other countries during the later medieval and Renaissance period, before the Reformation, under religious influence,--but Professor Draper knows nothing of them. The history of hospitals here in America is as largely religious as it was in other countries and times.

{510}

Professor Draper seems to have known nothing of the fine hospitals and foundling institutions and the great surgery of the later Middle Ages, but he thinks he knows enough to be quite sure that any such developments were impossible. Certain incidents that he accepts as historical showed him what fools the Popes and all near them were in matters of science, and, therefore, it would be quite impossible that they could have any sympathy for scientific progress and quite easy to understand their opposition. It is from conclusions and assumptions in history that we need to be saved. A hundred years ago it used to be said with pride that if you gave a zoologist a single bone he could reconstruct the entire animal for you. We know that such reconstruction worked much harm to science. Many of the animals possess structures that even important portions of their anatomy in other parts of the body would give no hint of. History that is built up from single incidents is likely to be even more false because human conduct is much more complex than any animal body. What could be expected of the zoologist's reconstruction, however, if the original bone handed to him was factitious, what a curious result might be expected from his deduced skeleton.

This is what happened with Professor Draper's reconstruction of history from certain incidents that he accepted. The story of the Papal Bull against Halley's comet seemed enough to him to make it quite clear that for centuries the Popes must have been buried in the profoundest ignorance of science,--but then the story of the Papal Bull against Halley's comet is all a modern invention. Draper said: "But when Halley's comet came in 1456 so tremendous was its apparition that it was necessary for the Pope himself to interfere. He exorcised and expelled it from the skies. It slunk away into the abysses of space terror-stricken by the maledictions of Calixtus III, and did not venture back again for seventy-five years!" Of course this bit of supposed information is all nonsense; Calixtus did no such thing, and just at that time the Popes were encouraging Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa in his great mathematical work and astronomical speculations, were inviting Regiomontanus, "the Father of modern astronomy," down to Rome to do his work there and help in the correction of the calendar, while Cardinal Bessarion, one of the most intimate friends of the Pope at this time, was encouraging Purbach at Vienna and Regiomontanus to translate Ptolemy and providing them with manuscripts and putting them in touch with Greek science in every way.

{511}

Halley's comet is a favorite reference with Professor Draper. How well his readers must have remembered all about it! He says, for instance, on page 320:

"The step that European intellect had made between 1456 and 1759 was
illustrated by Halley's comet. When it appeared in the former year,
it was considered as the harbinger of the vengeance of God, the
dispenser of the most dreadful of his retributions, war, pestilence,
famine. By order of the Pope, all the church-bells in Europe were
rung to scare it away, the faithful were commanded to add each day
another prayer; and, as their prayers had often in so marked a
manner been answered in eclipses and droughts and rains, so on this
occasion it was declared that a victory over the comet had been
vouchsafed to the Pope. But, in the meantime, Halley, guided by
revelations of Kepler and Newton, had discovered that its motions,
so far from being controlled by the supplications of Christendom,
were guided in an elliptic orbit by destiny. Knowing that Nature had
denied to him an opportunity of witnessing the fulfilment of his
daring prophecy, he besought the astronomers of the succeeding
generation to watch for its return in 1759, and in that year it
came."

All this is of course mere persiflage once it is known that the story of the Papal Bull against the comet has no foundation in history. It is the sort of nonsense that a great many serious men permit themselves to indulge in when they think they are convicting some past century of sublime foolishness. Not infrequently they make themselves out just as absurd as they would like to present the men of former generations, because they show how credulous a modern scholar can be when his prejudices influence him. Unfortunately such passages have a particularly lamentable effect upon young minds. For them ridicule means much more than argument. For a young man to be ridiculous seems the worst thing that can possibly happen and when anything is made ridiculous for him he loses his respect for it. Ridicule is, as is well known, an extremely dangerous argument, however. Professor Draper and, indeed, many another teacher of history and, above all, lecturer and writer on the history of science, have made themselves supremely ridiculous by their ready acceptance of a legend for which there is not the slightest authority. It was made up to serve the purpose of exhibiting Papal ignorance and superstition, but it so happens that in serious history the Popes of the time when this is supposed to have occurred are among the most intelligent and scholarly men of history.

It seems worth while to go over the list of Popes who came during the twenty years just before and after the date given for the issuance of this supposed bull. Eugene IV, elected Pope in 1431, {512} whatever may have been his faults of lack of tact, was scholarly and unselfish. At an early age he distributed what was really an immense fortune in his time to the poor, and entered the monastery. When political troubles drove him from Rome he resided at Florence and the presence of the Papal Court there did much to foster the humanistic movement which was just then beginning. It was he who consecrated the beautiful church just finished by Brunelleschi. His successor in 1447 was Pope Nicholas V, a man of wide education and deep interest in the revival of classical literature and Christian antiquities. He was the founder of the Vatican Library and brought Fra Angelico to Rome for the great decorative work at the Vatican. Pope Calixtus III, who succeeded Nicholas in 1455, was a man of cultivated mind, scholarly tastes and shared with his predecessor the honor of having founded the Vatican Library. He encouraged the Greek scholars in Italy and added greatly to the collections of precious manuscripts. His desire to prevent the further destruction of Greek culture by the Turks who had just captured Constantinople, led him to devote himself mainly to the fulfilment of a vow that he had made to wrest Constantinople from the Moslem. To his influence is largely due the victory gained by the Christians at Belgrade at this time which prevented the further spread of Mohammedan power. Pope Calixtus had the Angelus Bell rung every day at noon to implore the aid of the heavenly powers against the Turks. There is absolutely no question of any reference in this matter to the comet, but here is where the story comes in.

Pope Calixtus' successor was the famous Renaissance scholar AEneas Sylvius Piccolomini. He was just beginning some of the reforms, the need of which had been pointed out by his friend, the scholarly Nicholas of Cusa, when his death occurred as a consequence of his fatigue in journeys undertaken to rouse the Christians of the West against the Turks so as to preserve Christian civilization. His successor was Pope Paul II. He found it necessary to suppress some of the academies of Rome whose privileges were being abused by fostering a pagan attitude toward philosophy and religion, and in revenge Platina wrote a bitter biography of him, but no one has ever doubted of his scholarliness. He built the Palace of St. Marco in Rome, now known as the Venezia, and organized relief work among the poor while encouraging printing, protecting universities, and showing himself a judicious collector of works of ancient art.

Professor Draper's summaries of periods of history are amusing {513} caricatures of the reality. I know no easier way to make a comic history of progress in Europe, so-called, than to take a series of excerpts from Draper's book and string them together. He ignores completely the wonderful work done for scholarship, he knows nothing apparently of the great series of books printed for us during the Renaissance, usually in magnificent editions, which preserve scholarly works of the Middle Ages, he utterly neglects the painting, the architecture, the sculpture, even the great engineering feats in the making of bridges and constructive work of all kinds, and then in order to explain why there was nothing done by mankind puts all the blame on the Church. As I have said before, in a period in which even well-read men knew nothing about the Middle Ages, self-complacency tempted them to conclude that such a gap in their knowledge could only be because there was nothing to know about them. They looked for some reason for the absence of accomplishment that made this blank in human history. With their feelings, the Church was just the one that must be responsible. Progress would surely have been made only that some factor was keeping it back.

Professor Draper makes an especially strong appeal to American readers by contrasting all the accomplishments of our material civilization here in the United States, with the results in Mexico and in South America. Our progress has been all beneficent, while the influence of the Spaniard was everywhere absolutely maleficent. He seems to forget all about our treatment of the Indian, with its awful injustice. He proclaims our increase in wealth as the surest sign of our intellectual superiority. He says: [Footnote 67]

[Footnote 67: Page 289.]

"Let us contrast with this the results of the invasion of Mexico and
Peru by the Spaniards, who in those countries overthrew a wonderful
civilization, in many respects superior to their own, a civilization
that had been accomplished without iron and gunpowder--a
civilization resting on an agriculture that had neither horse, nor
ox, nor plow. The Spaniards had a clear base to start from, and no
obstruction whatever in their advance. They ruined all that the
aboriginal children of America had accomplished. Millions of those
unfortunates were destroyed by their cruelty. Nations that for many
centuries had been living in contentment and prosperity, under
institutions shown by their history to be suitable to them, were
plunged into anarchy; the people fell into a baneful superstition,
and a greater part of their land and other property found its way
into the possession of the Roman Church."

Place beside that a paragraph from the late lamented Professor Bourne of Yale, who having made special studies in {514} Spanish-American culture and education, as well as in its intellectual life, contrasts it quite unfavorably with what was accomplished in the English colonies. Professor Bourne was, like Draper, a professor at an American university, but he had made special studies in the subject, and knew something about it. Professor Draper talked out of the depths of his assumption of knowledge; Professor Bourne out of an intimate acquaintance that had been obtained by years of serious research work. Professor Bourne said:

"Both the Crown and the Church were solicitous for education in the
Spanish colonies, and provisions were made for its promotion on a
far greater scale than was possible or even attempted in the English
colonies. The early Franciscan missionaries built a school beside
each church, and in their teaching abundant use was made of signs,
drawings, and paintings. The native languages were reduced to
writing, and in a few years Indians were learning to read and write.
Pedro de Gante, a Flemish lay brother, and a relative of Charles V,
founded and conducted in the Indian quarter in Mexico a great
school, attended by over a thousand Indian boys, which combined
instruction in elementary and higher branches, the mechanical and
fine arts. In its workshops the boys were taught to be tailors,
carpenters, blacksmiths, shoemakers, and painters."

Sir Sidney Lee, the editor of the "National Dictionary of Biography of England," and the author of a series of works on Shakespeare, which has gained for him recognition as probably the best living authority on the history of the Elizabethan times, without deliberate intent, answered Draper almost directly, in the following paragraphs from his work, "The Call of The West," which appeared originally in _Scribner's Magazine_, but has since been published in book form. Since Mr. Lee cannot be suspected of national or creed affinities with the Spaniards, and his knowledge of the subject is unquestionable, his direct contradictions of Draper are all the more weighty:

"Especially has theological bias justified neglect or facilitated
misconception of Spain's role in the sixteenth century drama of
American history. Spain's initial adventures in the New World are
often consciously or unconsciously overlooked or underrated, in
order that she may figure on the stage of history as the benighted
champion of a false and obsolete faith, which was vanquished under a
divine protecting Providence by English defenders of the true
religion. Many are the hostile critics who have painted sixteenth
century Spain as the avaricious accumulator of American gold and
silver, to which she had no right, as the monopolist of American
trade, of which she robbed others, and as the oppressor and
exterminator of the weak and innocent aborigines of the new
continent, who deplored her presence among {515} them. Cruelty in
all its hideous forms is, indeed, commonly set forth as Spain's only
instrument of rule in her sixteenth century empire. On the other
hand, the English adventurer has been credited by the same pens with
a touching humanity, with the purest religious aspirations, with a
romantic courage which was always at the disposal of the oppressed
native.

"No such picture is recognized when we apply the touchstone of the
oral traditions, printed books, maps, and manuscripts concerning
America which circulated in Shakespeare's England. There a
predilection for romantic adventure is found to sway the Spaniards
in even greater degree than it swayed the Elizabethan Englishman.
Religious zeal is seen to inspirit the Spaniards more constantly and
conspicuously than it stimulated his English contemporary. The
motives of each nation are barely distinguishable one from another.
Neither deserves to be credited with any monopoly of virtue or vice.
Above all, the study of contemporary authorities brings into a
dazzling light, which illumes every corner of the picture, the
commanding facts of the Spaniard's priority as explorer, as
scientific navigator, as conqueror, as settler."

When an Englishman will admit this much in a comparison of his own countrymen with the Spaniards, it is easy to understand how great must be the actual historical contrast between the settlers of Spanish and English America.

Professor Draper's philosophy of history is, indeed, something to make one pause. He says on page 291, "The result of the Crusades had shaken the faith of all Christendom." As a matter of easily ascertainable history, the faith of Christendom was never so strong as during the century immediately following the Crusades. This was the thirteenth century, with the glorious Gothic cathedrals; the great Latin hymns; the magnificent musical development; the wondrous tribute of painting to religion, from Cimabue and Duccio to Giotto and Orcagna, and of sculpture from the Pisani to the great designers of some of the doors of the baptistry of Florence, of the finest arts and crafts in gold and silver, in woodwork, in needle-work, in illuminated books--all precious tributes to religious belief. In the hundred years after the Crusades, the Popes secured a position of influence in Europe greater than they had ever had before or have ever enjoyed since, which they used to secure the foundation of hospitals everywhere throughout Europe, the establishment of universities, the organization of religious orders for teaching and nursing purposes, and the finest development of social life and social happiness that the world had ever known.

According to Professor Draper, the removal of the Papal Court to Avignon in France gave opportunity for "the memorable intellectual movement that soon manifested itself in the great commercial {516} cities of Upper Italy." For him the earlier Renaissance begins with the fourteenth century, the thirteenth is entirely neglected, and a period that is really one of decadence is proclaimed a triumphant era of progress, because forsooth the removal from Rome of the Papacy and the abandonment by some of Christianity itself, gives him an opportunity to explain, thus from his prejudiced point of view, how the first stirrings of the Renaissance began. Verily indeed Professor Draper has written a joke book of history. Everything is along the same line. It is very rare, indeed, that by some chance he states a genuine historical truth, and when he does he usually disfigures it in some way or other. For him the Moors are the source of chivalry, of respect for women(!), and of the noble sentiment of personal honor. Everything else that is of any value in Christendom, must be referred to some source not Christian, lest by any chance religion should seem to have done any good in the world. _And let us not forget that this book was taken seriously, and not by the ignorant, but by university men, college graduates, professors, and teachers in many parts of the country._

Above all Professor Draper can scarcely be too bitter in his denunciation of the way that the poor were imposed upon, their ignorance encouraged, their rights refused, and all opportunities denied them. All this was due, according to Professor Draper, to the tyranny of the Church. President Woodrow Wilson, after making a special study of that subject, suggested in a passage in his book, which may be found in "The New Freedom," exactly the opposite of this. He knew something of the subject. Professor Draper was quite sure that he knew all about it, and that no good could have possibly come out of the Church. President Wilson's expressions are interesting to those who do not know them:

"The only reason why government did not suffer dry rot in the Middle
Ages under the aristocratic systems which then prevailed, was that
the men who were efficient instruments of government were drawn from
the Church--from that great Church, that body we now distinguish
from other Church bodies as the Roman Catholic Church. The Roman
Catholic Church then, as now, was a great democracy. There was no
peasant so humble that he might not become a priest, and no priest
so obscure that he might not become a Pope of Christendom, and every
chancellory in Europe was ruled by those learned, trained and
accomplished men--the priesthood of that great and then dominant
Church; and so, what kept government alive in the Middle Ages was
this constant rise of the sap from the bottom, from the rank and
file of the great body of the people through the open channels of
the Roman Catholic priesthood."

{517}

The greatest surprise is to be found in Professor Draper's ignorance of the history of his own profession. He says, "It had always been the policy of the Church to discourage the physician and his art; he interfered too much with the gifts and profits of the shrines." Professor Draper apparently knew nothing of the magnificent medical schools attached to the universities in the medieval period, whose professors wrote great medical and surgical text-books, which have come down to us, and whose faculties required a far higher standard of medical education than was demanded in America in Professor Draper's own day. For about 1871 anyone who wished might enter an American medical school practically anywhere in the country, without any preliminary education, and having taken two terms of ungraded lectures, that is, having listened to the same set of lectures two years in succession, might receive his degree of doctor of medicine. In the Middle Ages he could enter the medical school only after having completed three years of preliminary work in the undergraduate department, and then he was required to give four years to the study of medicine, and spend a year as assistant with another physician before he was allowed to practise for himself. This is the standard to which our university medical schools gradually climbed back at the beginning of the twentieth century--a full generation after Draper's time.

We know now that in those earlier centuries they had thorough clinical teaching in the hospitals, that is, physicians learned to practise medicine at the bedside of the patient, and not merely out of books and by theoretic lectures. Clinical teaching had not developed in Professor Draper's day to any extent. The medieval hospitals had trained nurses and magnificent quarters, while the trained nurse was only introduced into America in 1871, and our hospitals at that time were almost without exception a disgrace to civilization, according to our present standards of hospital construction. Our surgery was most discouraging, because there were so many deaths in the unclean hospital conditions. The medieval hospital surgeons operating under anesthesia, boasted of getting union by first intention, and were in many ways doing better work than their colleagues of 1870, Professor Draper's own time, before Lister's great discovery. Of all this Professor Draper had no inkling.

Draper's position is very like that of the specialist at all times. Dean West of Princeton once said, I believe, that a specialist is a man who knows so much more about one thing than he knows about anything else that he is inclined to think that he knows more about that than anyone else does. To which I once ventured {518} to add that the specialist is also a man who thinks because of his recognized attainments in one line, that if, for any reason, he should pay any serious attention to any other subject he would know more about that than anyone else does. Draper's views on universal history correspond exactly to such a definition. He jumped to conclusions in a way that he would surely have resented most bitterly and quite properly in anyone who attempted after slight acquaintance with his own department of science to express ultimate conclusions with regard to it, but he himself with the most scanty information gleaned only for the purpose of confirming some preconceived ideas, gathered entirely from secondary authorities without even an attempt to confirm his views by consultation of original documents, proceeded to tell the world just what it ought to think about questions of all kinds that have sometimes occupied historians for centuries and are by no means clear even yet.

Above all, he failed to realize the relations of whatever knowledge he had to the other facts of history. Deeply interested in science himself to the exclusion of nearly everything else, he could not understand how any generation and scarcely how any individual could live a deeply intellectual life without an absorbing interest in physical science. He seems to have had no conception of the fact that physical science is only a passing phase of man's interest, and that interests in philosophy, in art, in poetry, in literature are not only quite equal to science as a mental discipline, but must probably be considered to surpass it. Nothing can be so narrow as physical science pursued alone,--as Draper himself furnishes the best possible proof, but of this he seems to have had no hint. Fortunately humanity has drawn away from that exaggerated idea of the value of physical science as ultimate truth and we are able to judge a little more dispassionately.

Professor Draper's prestige, and the fact that his book was published in the International Scientific Series, led a great many people to read it, and it found its way into many of the public libraries of the country, on whose shelves it may still be found. Many of its readers thought it could never be effectively answered. Scientists were affected by it, or at least those interested in science, and it represented one phase of that pronounced opposition to religion which characterized what has been so well called the "silly seventies."

And if the seriously educated were willing to accept the ignorant and prejudiced views of Professor Draper, what was to be expected of the general reader? What has helped the position of the Church {519} in this country during the past generations is knowledge, and ever more knowledge. When those who are not of the fold know even a little of the history of the Church, know a reasonable amount of the other side of controversial problems, and, above all, when they have been brought into personal touch with the Church itself, her pastors and the hierarchy and religious men and women, prejudice disappears and understanding grows. We still have the monks and nuns of the olden time with us, but no one who knows them personally ever thinks for a moment of lazy monks and idle nuns. After a man has met scholarly Catholic clergymen, he has quite a different view of the relations of the Church to education. That is all that the Church has ever needed--to be known in order to be appreciated. Nothing emphasizes this so much as the change that has come over the opinions of those outside the Church as a result of growth in knowledge of the Church and her institutions during the generation that separates us from the writing of Professor Draper's book.

{520}

{521}

INDEX

A

A.A.A.S. 311

_Abditis de causis morborum_ 84

Accident of fevers 213

Achievement, human 306

Achillini 76, 86, 92, 105, 244

Achillinus (see above)

Addison 85

After-care of insane 371

Agenius, Otto 47

Agnostic 262

Agnus Dei 199

Albert (see Albertus)

Albertus Magnus 102, 134, 287, 295, 305, 324;
botany 318;
physical geography 318;
science 299;
scientific treatises 319;
scientific works 319

Albigenses 257

Albucasis 99

Alchemy 134, 135

Alderotti, Thaddeus 206

Alexander VI. 215, 231

Allbutt 83, 173, 185, 194, 196, 214, 506

Allston, Washington 391

Alma Mater Studiorum 94

Alphanus 228

America, discovery of 316

Amerigo Vespucci 283

Amalgam 135

Ampere 281

Anatomical preparations 46;
work at Rome 117

Anatomy,
history of 114, 62;
Father of 111;
Golden Age 30;
myths 61;
Renaissance of 112;
supposed prohibition 28

Anaxagoras 351

Aneurysms 243

Angelico 92

Angelo 90, 112

Angel butterfly 358

Angleworms dried 184

Annals of Anatomy and Surgery 116, 233

Annihilation 313

Anomalies 185

Antimony, Triumphal Chariot of 136

Antipodes 316

Ants 358

Applied science 329

Aquinas 135, 305, 323, 325

Arabisms 170

Arabs, surgical knowledge of 170, 192

Aranzi 245

Archives, Hospitalieres 253

Ardern, John 188

Argelata 76

Aristotle 218, 292;
a man 298;
errors of 298

Arnold of Villanova 135, 186, 210

Arts and architecture 329;
seven devilish 145

Arts and Sciences, Congress of 173

Astrology 158, 212

Astronomy 140

Auenbrugger 243, 403

Augsburg 251

Augustine, St. 112, 296, 327

Authors, second-rate 315

Autopsy
on a living person 117;
on Cardinals 58

Autopsy, legal 72

Avicenna 99, 183

Avignon 79, 164, 182, 211;
development of 139

Azarias, Brother 344

B

B. A. A. S. 311

Bacon, Francis 283, 332, 360

Bacon, Roger 134, 305, 321, 323, 327, 332

Baillie 85

Balliol College 95

Bartholomaeus Anglicus 338

Bartholomew the Englishman 336

Bartolo 270

Basel 105

Basil, Valentine 136

Bauhin 209

Baunette 308

Baverius de Baveriis 213

Bede 315

Bedlam 255, 372;
visitors' fees 373

Bedlamites 374

Bedlams 374

Bees 358

Belgium, Catholic 102

Bellinis 90

Benedict XIV. 218, 223

Benedictines and medicine 224;
of St. Maur 53, 54

Benivieni 83, 85, 99, 105

Berengar of Carpi 82, 86, 105, 115, 245, 399

Berengarius 77

Bertapaglia 77

Berthelot 132

Bertrand, M. 394

Bertrucci 92, 186

Besancon 254

Bethlehem Hospital 369, 372

Black Death 272

Blepharitis 208

Blood, shedding of 168, 191

{522}

Bodleian 95

Body-snatching 37, 75

Boerhaave 244

Bologna 19, 119, 152, 158, 174, 192, 222;
a Papal City 82

Bolognese Medical School 244

Boniface VIII. 56, 112

Boniface's, Pope,
Bull 29;
Bull, meaning of 59;
misinterpretation 35;
reason for 32;
text 31;
where found 31

Books, medical, dedicated to Popes 235

Borelli 217

Botany 140, 158;
medieval 318

Brethren of the Common Life 97

Bridewell 255

Bright 85

Broeck 178

Brother Potamian 288

Brothers 254

Butterfly 358