Kitabı oku: «Science and Medieval Thought», sayfa 4

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 “μετὰ τὰ φυσικά,” “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 suchen⁷⁵.”

“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 Servetus⁷⁶, 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 being⁷⁷, 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.

Ptolemy among his good services did one ill to mankind by his Tetrabiblon or “Quadripertit,” an astrological treatise which was current with the Almagest in the Western Schools. This authoritative treatise, together with the Aristotelian conception of the heavens, gave to astrology the aspect of a regular science with its own principles and methods; a science admired and even courted by princes. As Frederick the Second and Charles the Fifth would learn of the stars the moment to take the field against their foes, so the medieval physician sought their countenance in the letting of blood or in the exhibition of a clyster or emetic. The Church, abhorring all concurrent dominion, and justly abhorring this bondage of the judgment of God and of the will of man, almost alone withstood the astrologer. If the doctors of theology did not know how to deny the power of the stars in the material cosmos, they vehemently denied it in the world of the spirit. “Et ideo pro certo tenendum est,” says Aquinas, “grave peccatum esse circa ea quæ a voluntate hominis dependent judiciis astrorum uti.” Of the priestly assailants of astrology, the most attractive to us for his wit, sagacity and sound knowledge, was Nicholas Oresme, sometime Bishop of Lisieux (died 1382), translator of the Ethics and other Aristotelian treatises, as he is portrayed for us by Hauréau (Dict. des Sciences philosophiques, art. Oresme) and M. Charles Jourdain. The fun of the thing is that the outspoken Oresme was the counsellor, the friend, and even the tutor of that notable astrologer Charles the Fifth; a story as honourable to the prince as to the subject. As Charles issued from the chambers of his astrologers the discourses of Oresme must have made him a little uncomfortable, especially when Oresme records the misfortunes of astrologising captains, such as Alphonso king of Castille, of whom, says he, I have heard nothing notable except that he cast horoscopes, was unfortunate in war, and neglected his kingdom; or such again as James the king of Majorca, a passionate astrologer, who on the dictation of the stars made a sortie against Peter of Aragon, and never came back again. It is all very well, says Oresme, for kings to know somewhat of the noble science of astronomy, but they must be content to hear of it in talk with sages, and not to spend upon the stars time and care which they should devote to the interests of their people. “Mesmement tele chose” (astrology, necromancy, geomancy and “quelconques tels ars”) est plus périlleuse à personnes d’estat, comme sont princes et seigneurs ausquelz appartient le gouvernement publique. Et pour ce ay je composé ce livret en françois afin que gens lais le puissent entendre, desquels, si comme j’ay entendu, plusieurs sont trop enclins à telles fatuités. Et autres fois ay je escript en latin de ceste matière” etc. In spite of the Bishop of Lisieux, astrology at the end of the fourteenth century reached the summit of its influence and popularity. In the course of his argument Oresme gives an admirable account of the nature of hallucination and the parts it may play in perverting knowledge; not only so but he explains also the fallibility of the normal senses in respect of organic defects, of media, of false inference, of association, of imposition of the imagination, and so forth. Under such circumstances, he says, a mystic might conceive himself to have been visited by an angel!