Science and Medieval Thought. Allbutt Thomas Clifford

never became a nation; her city states were too wilful to combine. The Macedonian power broadened the foundation of polity eastward and westward; and this work was carried as far perhaps as sword and fasces could carry it by the power of Rome. But even the Roman peace, bought as it was at the cost of learning and the arts, was but a mechanical peace; in the wilder, more turbulent and more heterogeneous peoples of the later Empire the bodies but not the wills of men were in subjugation. The great system of Roman Law, which Numa, the Moses of Rome, had invested with supernatural awe, had become but an external rule; even in Rome herself, poorer in people, poorer in commerce, poorer than ever in ideas, the sanction of patriotism was failing, and her citizens were held together for the most part by their baser and more dangerous passions3. For Eastern Europe the University of Constantinople established a compact and uniform system of thought, subtle prolix and acquisitive rather than original or profound; but in the West, under the Frank and later Northern devastations, the very traditions of learning and obedience were broken up; schools were closed, and even the art of writing was almost lost. Then it was that the cohesion and development of Western Europe were saved by a new and a wonderful thing. From the East, the home of religions, had spread, like an exhalation, Christianity, that religion which proves by its survival that it is the fittest sanction for the will of man. This religion, entering as a new spirit into the ancient fabric of Roman Empire, was to hold men’s service in heart and soul as well as in body; yet to this end no mere mystic or personal religion could suffice: clothing itself with the political and ritual pride and even with the mythology of the pagan Empire it inspired a new adoration; but it imposed also upon Europe a catholic and elaborated creed. To preserve the authority of the common faith not only must every knee be bowed, not only must every heart be touched, but to build and to repair its fabric every mind must also bring its service. How the scheme of the Faith was built up, how oriental ecstasy and hellenistic subtlety, possessing themselves of the machinery of Roman pomp, were wrought to this end, we may briefly consider.

      As, politically, under Diocletian and Constantine the ancient world gave place to the new, so in the third century philosophy was born again in neo-platonism4, the offspring of the coition of East and West in Alexandria, where all religions and all philosophies met together. The world and the flesh were crucified that by the spirit, man might enter into God5. Pure in its ethical mood, neo-platonism, says Harnack, led surely to intellectual bankruptcy; the irruption of the barbarians was not altogether the cause of the eclipse of natural knowledge: to transcendental intuition the wisdom of the world had become foolishness. Yet even then, as again and again, came the genius of Aristotle to save the human mind. The death of Hypatia was the death of the School of Alexandria, but in Athens neo-platonism survived and grew. Proclus, ascetic as he was, was versed also in Aristotle; and he compelled the Eastern mysteries into categories: so that on the closure of the School of Athens by Justinian (a. d. 529) a formal philosophy was bequeathed to the Faith; the first scholastic period was fashioned, and the objects and methods of enquiry were determined for thirty generations. From Aristotle Europe adopted logic first, and then metaphysics, yet both in method and in purpose Origen and Augustine were platonists; rationalised dogma lived upon dialectic, and conflicted with mysticism; but logic, dogma and mysticism alike disdained experience.

      Thus, no mere external sanction, stood the Faith; threefold: from the past it brought its pompous ritual, it appealed by its subtle dogmatic scheme to the intellects, and by its devotion to the hearts of men. Through the mirage of it, when its substance had waned, Copernicus, Galileo, and Harvey had to steer by the compass of the experimental method. This was their chief adversity, and of other adversities I have to speak.

      The visitor to the Dominican Church of St Catherine at Pisa will see on its walls St Thomas of Aquino with the Holy Scriptures in his hand; prostrate beneath him is Averroes with his Great Commentary, but beside him Plato bearing the Timæus. It was the fortune of the Faith that, of all the treatises of Plato, the Timæus, the most fantastic and the least scientific, should have been set apart to instruct the medieval world; that the cosmical scheme of the Timæus, apparelled in the Latin of Chalcidius, – for there were then no Greek texts in the libraries of the West, – should for some 500 years have occupied that theoretical activity which Aristotle regarded as the highest good of man6. Again, those works of. Aristotle which might have made for natural knowledge fell out of men’s hands7, while in them, as Abélard tells us of himself, lay the Categories, the Interpretation, and the Introduction of Porphyry to the Categories, all in the Latin of Boetius8; treatises which made for peripatetic nominalism, but whereby men were versed rather in logic and rhetoric than in natural science. Thus Plato’s chimera of the human microcosm, a reflection of his theory of the macrocosm, stood beside the Faith as the second great adversary of physiology.

      The influence of authority, by which Europe was to be welded together, governed all human ideas. As in theology was the authority of the Faith, so in the science and medicine of the first period of the Middle Ages was that of the neo-platonic doctrines, and, in the second period, of the Arabian versions of Galen and of Aristotle; furthermore in this rigid discipline metallic doctrine almost necessarily overbore life and freedom. It is not easy for us to realise a time when intellectual progress – which involves the successive abandonment of provisional syntheses – was unconceived; when truths were regarded as stationary; when reasons were not tested but counted and balanced; when even the later Averroists found final answers either in Aristotle or in Galen9. Thus in the irony of things it came to pass that Harvey was withstood by the dogma of Galen who, in his own day, had passionately appealed from dogma to nature.

      Porphyry of Tyre, who lived in the 3rd century, may be called the founder of both Arabian and Christian scholastics. He was an Alexandrian, but of peripatetic rather than platonic opinions. In the Isagoge, or Introduction to the Categories, already mentioned as translated by Boetius about 500 a. d., he set forth plainly a problem which during the Middle Ages rent Western Europe asunder; a problem which, says John of Salisbury10, engaged more of the time and passions of men than for the house of Cæsar to conquer and govern the world; one indeed which even in our day and country is not wholly resolved.

      The controversy lay between the Realists11 and the Nominalists; and the issues of it, in the eleventh century, – at which time the “Dark Ages” passed into the earlier of the two periods of the Middle Ages, – were formulated on the realist side by William of Champeaux, while the Breton Rousselin, or Roscellinus, had the perilous honour of defining them on behalf of the nominalists12. To see the depth of the difference we must step back a little, to a time when metaphysics and psychology were not distinguished from other spheres of science13, and all research had for its object the nature of being. Plato himself held ideas not as mere abstractions but in some degree as creative powers; and we shall see how potent this function became in the thought of the Middle Ages when, in the ardour of research into the nature of being, the modes of individuating principles were distinguished or contrasted with an ingenuity incomprehensible to Plato or Aristotle, or at any rate undesired by these greater thinkers. Aristotle avoided the question whether form or matter individuate; he held that there is no form and no matter extrinsic to the individual. But by the medieval realist every particular, every thing, was regarded as after some fashion the product of universal matter and individual form. Now “form” might be regarded, and severally was regarded, as a shaping, determinative force or principle, pattern type or mould, having real existence apart from stuff, or, on the other hand, as an abstract principle or pattern having no existence but as a conception of the mind of the observer. The realists roundly asserted that form is as actual as matter, and that things arise by their participation – without whiteness no white thing, without humanity no man; and not individuals only: for the realist, out-platonising Plato, genera and species also had their forms, either pre-existent (“universalia ante rem”), or continuously evolved in the several acts of creation (“universalia in re”). Indeed