I.

In all the earliest developments of human thought we find a

strong tendency to ascribe mysterious powers over Nature to men

and women especially gifted or skilled.  Survivals of this view

are found to this day among savages and barbarians left behind in

the evolution of civilization, and especially is this the case

among the tribes of Australia, Africa, and the Pacific coast of

America.  Even in the most enlightened nations still appear

popular beliefs, observances, or sayings, drawn from this earlier

phase of thought.



Between the prehistoric savage developing this theory, and

therefore endeavouring to deal with the powers of Nature by

magic, and the modern man who has outgrown it, appears a long

line of nations struggling upward through it.  As the

hieroglyphs, cuneiform inscriptions, and various other records of

antiquity are read, the development of this belief can be studied

in Egypt, India, Babylonia, Assyria, Persia, and Phoenicia.  From

these civilizations it came into the early thought of Greece and

Rome, but especially into the Jewish and Christian sacred books.

Both in the Old Testament and in the New we find magic,

witchcraft, and soothsaying constantly referred to as

realities.[266]





[266] For magic in prehistoric times and survivals of it since,

with abundant citation of authorities, see Tylor, Primitive

Culture, chap. iv; also The Early History of Mankind, by the same

author, third edition, pp. 115 et seq., also p. 380.; also Andrew

Lang, Myth, Ritual, and Religion, vol. i, chap iv.  For magic in

Egypt, see Lenormant, Chaldean Magic, chaps. vi-viii; also

Maspero, Histoire Ancienne des Peuples de l'Orient; also Maspero

and Sayce, The Dawn of Civilization, p. 282, and for the threat

of magicians to wreck heaven, see ibid, p. 17, note, and

especially the citations from Chabas, Le Papyrus Magique Harris,

in chap. vii; also Maury, La Magie et l'Astrologie dans

l'Antiquite et au Moyen Age.  For magic in Chaldea, see Lenormant

as above; also Maspero and Sayce, pp. 780 et seq.  For examples

of magical powers in India, see Max Muller's Sacred Books of the

East, vol. xvi, pp. 121 et seq.  For a legendary view of magic in

Media, see the Zend Avesta, part i, p. 14, translated by

Darmsteter; and for a more highly developed view, see the Zend

Avesta, part iii, p. 239, translated by Mill.  For magic in

Greece and Rome, and especially in the Neoplatonic school, as

well as in the Middle Ages, see especially Maury, La Magie et

l'Astrologie, chaps. iii-v.  For various sorts of magic

recognised and condemned in our sacred books, see Deuteronomy

xviii, 10, 11; and for the burning of magical books at Ephesus

under the influence of St. Paul, see Acts xix, 14.  See also

Ewald, History of Israel, Martineau's translation, fourth

edition, vol. iii, pp. 45-51.  For a very elaborate summing up of

the passages in our sacred books recognizing magic as a fact, see

De Haen, De Magia, Leipsic, 1775, chaps. i, ii, and iii, of the

first part.  For the general subject of magic, see Ennemoser,

History of Magic, translated by Howitt, which, however,

constantly mixes sorcery with magic proper.





The first distinct impulse toward a higher view of research into

natural laws was given by the philosophers of Greece.  It is true

that philosophical opposition to physical research was at times

strong, and that even a great thinker like Socrates considered

certain physical investigations as an impious intrusion into the

work of the gods.  It is also true that Plato and Aristotle,

while bringing their thoughts to bear upon the world with great

beauty and force, did much to draw mankind away from those

methods which in modern times have produced the best results.



Plato developed a world in which the physical sciences had little

if any real reason for existing; Aristotle, a world in which the

same sciences were developed largely indeed by observation of

what is, but still more by speculation on what ought to be.  From

the former of these two great men came into Christian theology

many germs of medieval magic, and from the latter sundry modes of

reasoning which aided in the evolution of these; yet the impulse

to human thought given by these great masters was of inestimable

value to our race, and one legacy from them was especially

precious--the idea that a science of Nature is possible, and that

the highest occupation of man is the discovery of its laws.

Still another gift from them was greatest of all, for they gave

scientific freedom.  They laid no interdict upon new paths; they

interposed no barriers to the extension of knowledge; they

threatened no doom in this life or in the next against

investigators on new lines; they left the world free to seek any

new methods and to follow any new paths which thinking men could

find.



This legacy of belief in science, of respect for scientific

pursuits, and of freedom in scientific research, was especially

received by the school of Alexandria, and above all by

Archimedes, who began, just before the Christian era, to open new

paths through the great field of the inductive sciences by

observation, comparison, and experiment.[267]



[267] As to the beginnings of physical science in Greece, and of

the theological opposition to physical science, also Socrates's

view regarding certain branches as interdicted to human study,

see Grote's History of Greece, vol. i, pp. 495 and 504, 505; also

Jowett's introduction to his translation of the Timaeus, and

Whewell's History of the Inductive Sciences.  For examples

showing the incompatibility of Plato's methods in physical

science with that pursued in modern times, see Zeller, Plato and

the Older Academy, English translation by Alleyne and Goodwin,

pp. 375 et. seq.  The supposed opposition to freedom of opinion

in the Laws of Plato, toward the end of his life, can hardly make

against the whole spirit of Greek thought.





The establishment of Christianity, beginning a new evolution of

theology, arrested the normal development of the physical

sciences for over fifteen hundred years.  The cause of this

arrest was twofold:  First, there was created an atmosphere in

which the germs of physical science could hardly grow--an

atmosphere in which all seeking in Nature for truth as truth was

regarded as futile.  The general belief derived from the New

Testament Scriptures was, that the end of the world was at hand;

that the last judgment was approaching; that all existing

physical nature was soon to be destroyed:  hence, the greatest

thinkers in the Church generally poured contempt upon all

investigators into a science of Nature, and insisted that

everything except the saving of souls was folly.



This belief appears frequently through the entire period of the

Middle Ages; but during the first thousand years it is clearly

dominant.  From Lactantius and Eusebius, in the third century,

pouring contempt, as we have seen, over studies in astronomy, to

Peter Damian, the noted chancellor of Pope Gregory VII, in the

eleventh century, declaring all worldly sciences to be

"absurdities" and "fooleries," it becomes a very important

element in the atmosphere of thought.[268]



[268] For the view of Peter Damian and others through the Middle

Ages as to the futility of scientific investigation, see

citations in Eicken, Geschichte und System der mittelalterlichen

Weltanschauung, chap. vi.





Then, too, there was established a standard to which all science

which did struggle up through this atmosphere must be made to

conform--a standard which favoured magic rather than science, for

it was a standard of rigid dogmatism obtained from literal

readings in the Jewish and Christian Scriptures.  The most

careful inductions from ascertained facts were regarded as

wretchedly fallible when compared with any view of nature

whatever given or even hinted at in any poem, chronicle, code,

apologue, myth, legend, allegory, letter, or discourse of any

sort which had happened to be preserved in the literature which

had come to be held as sacred.



For twelve centuries, then, the physical sciences were thus

discouraged or perverted by the dominant orthodoxy.  Whoever

studied nature studied it either openly to find illustrations of

the sacred text, useful in the "saving of souls," or secretly to

gain the aid of occult powers, useful in securing personal

advantage.  Great men like Bede, Isidore of Seville, and Rabanus

Maurus, accepted the scriptural standard of science and used it

as a means of Christian edification.  The views of Bede and

Isidore on kindred subjects have been shown in former chapters;

and typical of the view taken by Rabanus is the fact that in his

great work on the Universe there are only two chapters which

seem directly or indirectly to recognise even the beginnings of a

real philosophy of nature.  A multitude of less-known men found

warrant in Scripture for magic applied to less worthy

purposes.[269]



[269] As typical examples, see utterances of Eusibius and

Lactantius regarding astronomers given in the chapter on

Astronomy.  For a summary of Rabanus Maurus's doctrine of

physics, see Heller, Geschichte der Physik, vol. i, pp. 172 et

seq.  For Bede and Isidore, see the earlier chapters of this

work.  For an excellent statement regarding the application of

scriptural standards to scientific research in the Middle Ages,

see Kretschemr, Die physische Erdkunde im christlichen

Mittelalter, pp. 5 et seq.  For the distinctions in magic

recognised in the mediaeval Church, see the long catalogue of

various sorts given in the Abbe Migne's Encyclopedie Theologique,

third series, article Magic.





But after the thousand years had passed to which various thinkers

in the Church, upon supposed scriptural warrant, had lengthened

out the term of the earth's existence, "the end of all things"

seemed further off than ever; and in the twelfth and thirteenth

centuries, owing to causes which need not be dwelt upon here,

came a great revival of thought, so that the forces of theology

and of science seemed arrayed for a contest.  On one side came a

revival of religious fervour, and to this day the works of the

cathedral builders mark its depth and strength; on the other

side came a new spirit of inquiry incarnate in a line of powerful

thinkers.



First among these was Albert of Bollstadt, better known as Albert

the Great, the most renowned scholar of his time.  Fettered

though he was by the methods sanctioned in the Church, dark as

was all about him, he had conceived better methods and aims; his

eye pierced the mists of scholasticism.  he saw the light, and

sought to draw the world toward it.  He stands among the great

pioneers of physical and natural science; he aided in giving

foundations to botany and chemistry; he rose above his time, and

struck a heavy blow at those who opposed the possibility of human

life on opposite sides of the earth; he noted the influence of

mountains, seas, and forests upon races and products, so that

Humboldt justly finds in his works the germs of physical

geography as a comprehensive science.



But the old system of deducing scientific truth from scriptural

texts was renewed in the development of scholastic theology, and

ecclesiastical power, acting through thousands of subtle

channels, was made to aid this development.  The old idea of the

futility of physical science and of the vast superiority of

theology was revived.  Though Albert's main effort was to

Christianize science, he was dealt with by the authorities of the

Dominican order, subjected to suspicion and indignity, and only

escaped persecution for sorcery by yielding to the ecclesiastical

spirit of the time, and working finally in theological channels

by, scholastic methods.



It was a vast loss to the earth; and certainly, of all

organizations that have reason to lament the pressure of

ecclesiasticism which turned Albert the Great from natural

philosophy to theology, foremost of all in regret should be the

Christian Church, and especially the Roman branch of it.  Had

there been evolved in the Church during the thirteenth century a

faith strong enough to accept the truths in natural science which

Albert and his compeers could have given, and to have encouraged

their growth, this faith and this encouragement would to this day

have formed the greatest argument for proving the Church directly

under Divine guidance; they would have been among the brightest

jewels in her crown.  The loss to the Church by this want of

faith and courage has proved in the long run even greater than

the loss to science.[270]



[270] For a very careful discussion of Albert's strength in

investigation and weakness in yielding to scholastic authority,

see Kopp, Ansichten uber die Aufgabe der Chemie von Geber bis

Stahl, Braunschweig, 1875, pp. 64 et seq.  For a very extended

and enthusiastic biographical sketch, see Pouchet.  For

comparison of his work with that of Thomas Aquinas, see Milman,

History of Latin Christianity, vol. vi, p. 461.  "Il etat aussi

tres-habile dans les arts mecaniques, ce que le fit soupconner

d'etre sorcier" (Sprengel, Histoire de la Medecine, vol. ii, p.

389).  For Albert's biography treated strictly in accordance with

ecclesiastical methods, see Albert the Great, by Joachim Sighart,

translated by the Rev. T. A. Dickson, of the Order of Preachers,

published under the sanction of the Dominican censor and of the

Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, London, 1876.  How an

Englishman like Cardinal Manning could tolerate among Englishmen

such glossing over of historical truth is one of the wonders of

contemporary history.  For choice specimens, see chapters ii, and

iv.  For one of the best and most recent summaries, see Heller,

Geschichte der Physik, Stuttgart, 1882, vol. i, pp. 179 et seq.





The next great man of that age whom the theological and

ecclesiastical forces of the time turned from the right path was

Vincent of Beauvais.  During the first half of the twelfth

century he devoted himself to the study of Nature in several of

her most interesting fields.  To astronomy, botany, and zoology

he gave special attention, but in a larger way he made a general

study of the universe, and in a series of treatises undertook to

reveal the whole field of science.  But his work simply became a

vast commentary on the account of creation given in the book of

Genesis.  Beginning with the work of the Trinity at the creation,

he goes on to detail the work of angels in all their fields, and

makes excursions into every part of creation, visible and

invisible, but always with the most complete subordination of his

thought to the literal statements of Scripture.  Could he have

taken the path of experimental research, the world would have

been enriched with most precious discoveries; but the force

which had given wrong direction to Albert of Bollstadt, backed as

it was by the whole ecclesiastical power of his time, was too

strong, and in all the life labour of Vincent nothing appears of

any permanent value.  He reared a structure which the adaptation

of facts to literal interpretations of Scripture and the

application of theological subtleties to nature combine to make

one of the most striking monuments of human error.[271]



[271] For Vincent de Beauvais, see Etudes sur Vincent de

Beauvais, par l'Abbe Bourgeat, chaps. xii, xiii, and xiv; also

Pouchet, Histoire des Sciences Naturelles au Moyen Age, Paris,

1853, pp. 470 et seq; also other histories cited hereafter.





But the theological spirit of the thirteenth century gained its

greatest victory in the work of St. Thomas Aquinas.  In him was

the theological spirit of his age incarnate.  Although he yielded

somewhat at one period to love of natural science, it was he who

finally made that great treaty or compromise which for ages

subjected science entirely to theology.  He it was who reared the

most enduring barrier against those who in that age and in

succeeding ages laboured to open for science the path by its own

methods toward its own ends.



He had been the pupil of Albert the Great, and had gained much

from him.  Through the earlier systems of philosophy, as they

were then known, and through the earlier theologic thought, he

had gone with great labour and vigour; and all his mighty powers,

thus disciplined and cultured, he brought to bear in making a

truce which was to give theology permanent supremacy over

science.



The experimental method had already been practically initiated:

Albert of Bollstadt and Roger Bacon had begun their work in

accordance with its methods; but St. Thomas gave all his

thoughts to bringing science again under the sway of theological

methods and ecclesiastical control.  In his commentary on

Aristotle's treatise upon Heaven and Earth he gave to the world a

striking example of what his method could produce, illustrating

all the evils which arise in combining theological reasoning and

literal interpretation of Scripture with scientific facts; and

this work remains to this day a monument of scientific genius

perverted by theology.[272]



[272] For citations showing this subordination of science to

theology, see Eicken, chap. vi.





The ecclesiastical power of the time hailed him as a deliverer,

it was claimed that miracles were vouchsafed, proving that the

blessing of Heaven rested upon his labours, and among the legends

embodying this claim is that given by the Bollandists and

immortalized by a renowned painter.  The great philosopher and

saint is represented in the habit of his order, with book and pen

in hand, kneeling before the image of Christ crucified, and as he

kneels the image thus addresses him:  "Thomas, thou hast written

well concerning me; what price wilt thou receive for thy

labour?"   The myth-making faculty of the people at large was

also brought into play.  According to a widespread and

circumstantial legend, Albert, by magical means, created an

android--an artificial man, living, speaking, and answering all

questions with such subtlety that St. Thomas, unable to answer

its reasoning, broke it to pieces with his staff.



Historians of the Roman Church like Rohrbacher, and historians of

science like Pouchet, have found it convenient to propitiate the

Church by dilating upon the glories of St. Thomas Aquinas in

thus making an alliance between religious and scientific thought,

and laying the foundations for a "sanctified science"; but the

unprejudiced historian can not indulge in this enthusiastic view:

the results both for the Church and for science have been most

unfortunate.  It was a wretched delay in the evolution of

fruitful thought, for the first result of this great man's great

compromise was to close for ages that path in science which above

all others leads to discoveries of value--the experimental

method--and to reopen that old path of mixed theology and science

which, as Hallam declares, "after three or four hundred years had

not untied a single knot or added one unequivocal truth to the

domain of philosophy"--the path which, as all modern history

proves, has ever since led only to delusion and evil.[273]



[273] For the work of Aquinas, see his Liber de Caelo et Mundo,

section xx; also Life and Labours of St. Thomas of Aquin, by

Archbishop Vaughn, pp. 459 et seq.  For his labours in natural

science, see Hoefer, Histoire de la Chimie, Paris, 1843, vol. i,

p. 381.  For theological views of science in the Middle Ages, and

rejoicing thereat, see Pouchet, Hist. des Sci. Nat. au Moyen Age,

ubi supra. Pouchet says: " En general au milieu du moyen age les

sciences sont essentiellement chretiennes, leur but est tout-a-

fait religieux, et elles sembent beaucoup moins s'inquieter de

l'avancement intellectuel de l'homme que de son salut eternel."

Pouchet calls this "conciliation" into a "harmonieux ensemble"

"la plus glorieuse des conquetes intellectuelles du moyen age."

Pouchet belongs to Rouen, and the shadow of the Rouen Cathedral

seems thrown over all his history.  See, also, l'Abbe Rohrbacher,

Hist. de l'Eglise Catholique, Paris, 1858, vol. xviii, pp. 421 et

seq.  The abbe dilates upon the fact that "the Church organizes

the agreement of all the sciences by the labours of St. Thomas of

Aquin and his contemporaries."  For the complete subordination of

science to theology by St. Thomas, see Eicken, chap. vi.  For the

theological character of science in the Middle Ages, recognised

by a Protestant philosophic historian, see the well-known passage

in Guizot, History of Civilization in Europe; and by a noted

Protestant ecclesiatic, see Bishop Hampden's Life of Thomas

Aquinas, chaps. xxxvi, xxxvii; see also Hallam, Middle Ages,

chap. ix.  For dealings of Pope John XXII, of the Kings of France

and England, and of the Republic of Venice, see Figuier,

L'Alchimie et la Alchimistes, pp. 140, 141, where, in a note, the

text of the bull Spondet paritur is given.  For popular legends

regarding Albert and St. Thomas, see Eliphas Levi, Hist. de la

Magie, liv. iv, chap. iv.





The theological path thus opened by these strong men became the

main path for science during ages, and it led the world ever

further and further from any fruitful fact or useful method.

Roger Bacon's investigations already begun were discredited:

worthless mixtures of scriptural legends with imperfectly

authenticated physical facts took their place.  Thus it was that

for twelve hundred years the minds in control of Europe regarded

all real science as FUTILE, and diverted the great current of

earnest thought into theology.



The next stage in this evolution was the development of an idea

which acted with great force throughout the Middle Ages--the idea

that science is DANGEROUS.  This belief was also of very ancient

origin.  From the time when the Egyptian magicians made their

tremendous threat that unless their demands were granted they

would reach out to the four corners of the earth, pull down the

pillars of heaven, wreck the abodes of the gods above and crush

those of men below, fear of these representatives of science is

evident in the ancient world.



But differences in the character of magic were recognised, some

sorts being considered useful and some baleful.  Of the former

was magic used in curing diseases, in determining times

auspicious for enterprises, and even in contributing to

amusement; of the latter was magic used to bring disease and

death on men and animals or tempests upon the growing crops.

Hence gradually arose a general distinction between white magic,

which dealt openly with the more beneficent means of nature, and

black magic, which dealt secretly with occult, malignant powers.



Down to the Christian era the fear of magic rarely led to any

persecution very systematic or very cruel.  While in Greece and

Rome laws were at times enacted against magicians, they were only

occasionally enforced with rigour, and finally, toward the end of

the pagan empire, the feeling against them seemed dying out

altogether.  As to its more kindly phases, men like Marcus

Aurelius and Julian did not hesitate to consult those who claimed

to foretell the future.  As to black magic, it seemed hardly

worth while to enact severe laws, when charms, amulets, and even

gestures could thwart its worst machinations.



Moreover, under the old empire a real science was coming in, and

thought was progressing.  Both the theory and practice of magic

were more and more held up to ridicule.  Even as early a writer

as Ennius ridiculed the idea that magicians, who were generally

poor and hungry themselves, could bestow wealth on others; Pliny,

in his Natural Philosophy, showed at great length their

absurdities and cheatery; others followed in the same line of

thought, and the whole theory, except among the very lowest

classes, seemed dying out.



But with the development of Christian theology came a change.

The idea of the active interference of Satan in magic, which had

come into the Hebrew mind with especial force from Persia during

the captivity of Israel, had passed from the Hebrew Scriptures

into Christianity, and had been made still stronger by various

statements in the New Testament.  Theologians laid stress

especially upon the famous utterances of the Psalmist that "all

the gods of the heathen are devils," and of St. Paul that "the

things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to devils";

and it was widely held that these devils were naturally indignant

at their dethronement and anxious to wreak vengeance upon

Christianity.  Magicians were held to be active agents of these

dethroned gods, and this persuasion was strengthened by sundry

old practitioners in the art of magic--impostors who pretended to

supernatural powers, and who made use of old rites and phrases

inherited from paganism.



Hence it was that as soon as Christianity came into power it more

than renewed the old severities against the forbidden art, and

one of the first acts of the Emperor Constantine after his

conversion was to enact a most severe law against magic and

magicians, under which the main offender might be burned alive.

But here, too, it should be noted that a distinction between the

two sorts of magic was recognised, for Constantine shortly

afterward found it necessary to issue a proclamation stating that

his intention was only to prohibit deadly and malignant magic;

that he had no intention of prohibiting magic used to cure

diseases and to protect the crops from hail and tempests.  But as

new emperors came to the throne who had not in them that old

leaven of paganism which to the last influenced Constantine, and

as theology obtained a firmer hold, severity against magic

increased.  Toleration of it, even in its milder forms, was more

and more denied.  Black magic and white were classed together.



This severity went on increasing and threatened the simplest

efforts in physics and chemistry; even the science of

mathematics was looked upon with dread.  By the twelfth and

thirteenth centuries, the older theology having arrived at the

climax of its development in Europe, terror of magic and

witchcraft took complete possession of the popular mind.  In

sculpture, painting, and literature it appeared in forms ever

more and more striking. The lives of saints were filled with it.

The cathedral sculpture embodied it in every part.  The storied

windows made it all the more impressive.  The missal painters

wrought it not only into prayer books, but, despite the fact that

hardly a trace of the belief appears in the Psalms, they

illustrated it in the great illuminated psalters from which the

noblest part of the service was sung before the high altar.  The

service books showed every form of agonizing petition for

delivery from this dire influence, and every form of exorcism for

thwarting it.



All the great theologians of the Church entered into this belief

and aided to develop it.  The fathers of the early Church were

full and explicit, and the medieval doctors became more and more

minute in describing the operations of the black art and in

denouncing them.  It was argued that, as the devil afflicted Job,

so he and his minions continue to cause diseases; that, as Satan

is the Prince of the power of the air, he and his minions cause

tempests; that the cases of Nebuchadnezzar and Lot's wife prove

that sorcerers can transform human beings into animals or even

lifeless matter; that, as the devils of Gadara were cast into

swine, all animals could be afflicted in the same manner; and

that, as Christ himself had been transported through the air by

the power of Satan, so any human being might be thus transported

to "an exceeding high mountain."



Thus the horror of magic and witchcraft increased on every hand,

and in 1317 Pope John XXII issued his bull Spondent pariter,

levelled at the alchemists, but really dealing a terrible blow at

the beginnings of chemical science.  That many alchemists were

knavish is no doubt true, but no infallibility in separating the

evil from the good was shown by the papacy in this matter.  In

this and in sundry other bulls and briefs we find Pope John, by

virtue of his infallibility as the world's instructor in all that

pertains to faith and morals, condemning real science and

pseudo-science alike.  In two of these documents, supposed to be

inspired by wisdom from on high, he complains that both he and

his flock are in danger of their lives by the arts of the

sorcerers; he declares that such sorcerers can send devils into

mirrors and finger rings, and kill men and women by a magic word;

that they had tried to kill him by piercing a waxen image of him

with needles in the name of the devil.  He therefore called on

all rulers, secular and ecclesiastical, to hunt down the

miscreants who thus afflicted the faithful, and he especially

increased the powers of inquisitors in various parts of Europe

for this purpose.



The impulse thus given to childish fear and hatred against the

investigation of nature was felt for centuries; more and more

chemistry came to be known as one of the "seven devilish arts."



Thus began a long series of demonstrations against magic from the

centre of Christendom.  In 1437, and again in 1445, Pope Eugene

IV issued bulls exhorting inquisitors to be more diligent in

searching out and delivering over to punishment magicians and

witches who produced bad weather, the result being that

persecution received a fearful impulse.  But the worst came forty

years later still, when, in 1484, there came the yet more

terrible bull of Pope Innocent VIII, known as Summis

Desiderantes, which let inquisitors loose upon Germany, with

Sprenger at their head, armed with the Witch-Hammer, the fearful

manual Malleus Maleficarum, to torture and destroy men and women

by tens of thousands for sorcery and magic.  Similar bulls were

issued in 1504 by Julius II, and in 1523 by Adrian VI.



The system of repression thus begun lasted for hundreds of years.

The Reformation did little to change it, and in Germany, where

Catholics and Protestants vied with each other in proving their

orthodoxy, it was at its worst.  On German soil more than one

hundred thousand victims are believed to have been sacrificed to

it between the middle of the fifteenth and the middle of the

sixteenth centuries.



Thus it was that from St. Augustine to St. Thomas Aquinas, from

Aquinas to Luther, and from Luther to Wesley, theologians of both

branches of the Church, with hardly an exception, enforced the

belief in magic and witchcraft, and, as far as they had power,

carried out the injunction, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to

live."



How this was ended by the progress of scientific modes of thought

I shall endeavour to show elsewhere:  here we are only concerned

with the effect of this widespread terrorism on the germs and

early growth of the physical sciences.



Of course, the atmosphere created by this persecution of

magicians was deadly to any open beginnings of experimental

science.  The conscience of the time, acting in obedience to the

highest authorities of the Church, and, as was supposed, in

defence of religion, now brought out a missile which it hurled

against scientific investigators with deadly effect.  The

mediaeval battlefields of thought were strewn with various forms

of it. This missile was the charge of unlawful compact with

Satan, and it was most effective.  We find it used against every

great investigator of nature in those times and for ages after.

The list of great men in those centuries charged with magic, as

given by Naude, is astounding; it includes every man of real

mark, and in the midst of them stands one of the most thoughtful

popes, Sylvester II (Gerbert), and the foremost of mediaeval

thinkers on natural science, Albert the Great.  It came to be the

accepted idea that, as soon as a man conceived a wish to study

the works of God, his first step must be a league with the devil.



It was entirely natural, then, that in 1163 Pope Alexander III,

in connection with the Council of Tours, forbade the study of

physics to all ecclesiastics, which, of course, in that age meant

prohibition of all such scientific studies to the only persons

likely to make them.  What the Pope then expressly forbade was,

in the words of the papal bull, "the study of physics or the laws

of the world," and it was added that any person violating this

rule "shall be avoided by all and excommunicated."[274]



[274] For the charge of magic against scholars and others, see

Naude, Apologie pour les Grands Hommes soupconnes de Magie,

passim; also Maury, Hist. de la Magie, troisieme edition, pp.

214, 215; also Cuvier, Hist. des Sciences Naturelles, vol. i, p.

396.  For the prohibition by the Council of Tours and Alexander

III, see the Acta Conciliorum (ed. Harduin), tom. vi, pars ii, p.

1598, Canon viii.





The first great thinker who, in spite of some stumbling into

theologic pitfalls, persevered in a truly scientific path, was

Roger Bacon.  His life and works seem until recently to have been

generally misunderstood:  he was formerly ranked as a

superstitious alchemist who happened upon some inventions, but

more recent investigation has shown him to be one of the great

masters in the evolution of human thought.  The advance of sound

historical judgment seems likely to bring the fame of the two who

bear the name of Bacon nearly to equality.  Bacon of the

chancellorship and of the Novum Organum may not wane, but Bacon

of the prison cell and the Opus Majus steadily approaches him in

brightness.



More than three centuries before Francis Bacon advocated the

experimental method, Roger Bacon practised it, and the results as

now revealed are wonderful.  He wrought with power in many

sciences, and his knowledge was sound and exact.  By him, more

than by any other man of the Middle Ages, was the world brought

into the more fruitful paths of scientific thought--the paths

which have led to the most precious inventions; and among these

are clocks, lenses, and burning specula, which were given by him

to the world, directly or indirectly.  In his writings are found

formulae for extracting phosphorus, manganese, and bismuth.  It

is even claimed, with much appearance of justice, that he

investigated the power of steam, and he seems to have very nearly

reached some of the principal doctrines of modern chemistry.  But

it should be borne in mind that his METHOD of investigation was

even greater than its RESULTS.  In an age when theological

subtilizing was alone thought to give the title of scholar, he

insisted on REAL reasoning and the aid of natural science by

mathematics; in an age when experimenting was sure to cost a man

his reputation, and was likely to cost him his life, he insisted

on experimenting, and braved all its risks.  Few greater men have

lived.  As we follow Bacon's process of reasoning regarding the

refraction of light, we see that he was divinely inspired.



On this man came the brunt of the battle.  The most conscientious

men of his time thought it their duty to fight him, and they

fought him steadily and bitterly.  His sin was not disbelief in

Christianity, not want of fidelity to the Church, not even

dissent from the main lines of orthodoxy; on the contrary, he

showed in all his writings a desire to strengthen Christianity,

to build up the Church, and to develop orthodoxy.  He was

attacked and condemned mainly because he did not believe that

philosophy had become complete, and that nothing more was to be

learned; he was condemned, as his opponents expressly declared,

"on account of certain suspicious novelties"--"propter quasdam

novitates suspectas."



Upon his return to Oxford, about 1250, the forces of unreason

beset him on all sides.  Greatest of all his enemies was

Bonaventura.  This enemy was the theologic idol of the period:

the learned world knew him as the "seraphic Doctor"; Dante gave

him an honoured place in the great poem of the Middle Ages; the

Church finally enrolled him among the saints.  By force of great

ability in theology he had become, in the middle of the

thirteenth century, general of the Franciscan order:  thus, as

Bacon's master, his hands were laid heavily on the new teaching,

so that in 1257 the troublesome monk was forbidden to lecture;

all men were solemnly warned not to listen to his teaching, and

he was ordered to Paris, to be kept under surveillance by the

monastic authorities.  Herein was exhibited another of the myriad

examples showing the care exercised over scientific teaching by

the Church.  The reasons for thus dealing with Bacon were

evident: First, he had dared attempt scientific explanations of

natural phenomena, which under the mystic theology of the Middle

Ages had been referred simply to supernatural causes.  Typical

was his explanation of the causes and character of the rainbow.

It was clear, cogent, a great step in the right direction as

regards physical science:  but there, in the book of Genesis,

stood the legend regarding the origin of the rainbow, supposed to

have been dictated immediately by the Holy Spirit; and, according

to that, the "bow in the cloud" was not the result of natural

laws, but a "sign" arbitrarily placed in the heavens for the

simple purpose of assuring mankind that there was not to be

another universal deluge.



But this was not the worst:  another theological idea was arrayed

against him--the idea of Satanic intervention in science; hence

he was attacked with that goodly missile which with the epithets

"infidel" and "atheist" has decided the fate of so many

battles--the charge of magic and compact with Satan.



He defended himself with a most unfortunate weapon--a weapon

which exploded in his hands and injured him more than the enemy;

for he argued against the idea of compacts with Satan, and showed

that much which is ascribed to demons results from natural means.

This added fuel to the flame.  To limit the power of Satan was

deemed hardly less impious than to limit the power of God.



The most powerful protectors availed him little.  His friend Guy

of Foulques, having in 1265 been made Pope under the name of

Clement IV, shielded him for a time; but the fury of the enemy

was too strong, and when he made ready to perform a few

experiments before a small audience, we are told that all Oxford

was in an uproar.  It was believed that Satan was about to be let

loose.  Everywhere priests, monks, fellows, and students rushed

about, their garments streaming in the wind, and everywhere rose

the cry, "Down with the magician!" and this cry, "Down with the

magician!" resounded from cell to cell and from hall to hall.



Another weapon was also used upon the battlefields of science in

that time with much effect.  The Arabs had made many noble

discoveries in science, and Averroes had, in the opinion of many,

divided the honours with St. Thomas Aquinas; these facts gave

the new missile--it was the epithet "Mohammedan"; this, too, was

flung with effect at Bacon.



The attack now began to take its final shape.  The two great

religious orders, Franciscan and Dominican, then in all the

vigour of their youth, vied with each other in fighting the new

thought in chemistry and physics.  St. Dominic solemnly

condemned research by experiment and observation; the general of

the Franciscan order took similar ground.  In 1243 the Dominicans

interdicted every member of their order from the study of

medicine and natural philosophy, and in 1287 this interdiction

was extended to the study of chemistry.



In 1278 the authorities of the Franciscan order assembled at

Paris, solemnly condemned Bacon's teaching, and the general of

the Franciscans, Jerome of Ascoli, afterward Pope, threw him into

prison, where he remained for fourteen years, Though Pope Clement

IV had protected him, Popes Nicholas III and IV, by virtue of

their infallibility, decided that he was too dangerous to be at

large, and he was only released at the age of eighty--but a year

or two before death placed him beyond the reach of his enemies.

How deeply the struggle had racked his mind may be gathered from

that last affecting declaration of his, "Would that I had not

given myself so much trouble for the love of science!"



The attempt has been made by sundry champions of the Church to

show that some of Bacon's utterances against ecclesiastical and

other corruptions in his time were the main cause of the severity

which the Church authorities exercised against him.  This helps

the Church but little, even if it be well based; but it is not

well based.  That some of his utterances of this sort made him

enemies is doubtless true, but the charges on which St.

Bonaventura silenced him, and Jerome of Ascoli imprisoned him,

and successive popes kept him in prison for fourteen years, were

"dangerous novelties" and suspected sorcery.



Sad is it to think of what this great man might have given to the

world had ecclesiasticism allowed the gift.  He held the key of

treasures which would have freed mankind from ages of error and

misery.  With his discoveries as a basis, with his method as a

guide, what might not the world have gained! Nor was the wrong

done to that age alone; it was done to this age also.  The

nineteenth century was robbed at the same time with the

thirteenth.  But for that interference with science the

nineteenth century would be enjoying discoveries which will not

be reached before the twentieth century, and even later.

Thousands of precious lives shall be lost, tens of thousands

shall suffer discomfort, privation, sickness, poverty, ignorance,

for lack of discoveries and methods which, but for this mistaken

dealing with Roger Bacon and his compeers, would now be blessing

the earth.



In two recent years sixty thousand children died in England and

in Wales of scarlet fever; probably quite as many died in the

United States.  Had not Bacon been hindered, we should have had

in our hands, by this time, the means to save two thirds of these

victims; and the same is true of typhoid, typhus, cholera, and

that great class of diseases of whose physical causes science is

just beginning to get an inkling.  Put together all the efforts

of all the atheists who have ever lived, and they have not done

so much harm to Christianity and the world as has been done by

the narrow-minded, conscientious men who persecuted Roger Bacon,

and closed the path which he gave his life to open.



But despite the persecution of Bacon and the defection of those

who ought to have followed him, champions of the experimental

method rose from time to time during the succeeding centuries.

We know little of them personally; our main knowledge of their

efforts is derived from the endeavours of their persecutors.



Under such guidance the secular rulers were naturally vigorous.

In France Charles V forbade, in 1380, the possession of furnaces

and apparatus necessary for chemical processes; under this law

the chemist John Barrillon was thrown into prison, and it was

only by the greatest effort that his life was saved.  In England

Henry IV, in 1404, issued a similar decree.  In Italy the

Republic of Venice, in 1418, followed these examples.  The

judicial torture and murder of Antonio de Dominis were not simply

for heresy his investigations in the phenomena of light were an

additional crime.  In Spain everything like scientific research

was crushed out among Christians.  Some earnest efforts were

afterward made by Jews and Moors, but these were finally ended by

persecution; and to this hour the Spanish race, in some respects

the most gifted in Europe, which began its career with everything

in its favour and with every form of noble achievement, remains

in intellectual development behind every other in Christendom.



To question the theological view of physical science was, even

long after the close of the Middle Ages, exceedingly perilous.

We have seen how one of Roger Bacon's unpardonable offences was

his argument against the efficacy of magic, and how, centuries

afterward, Cornelius Agrippa, Weyer, Flade, Loos, Bekker, and a

multitude of other investigators and thinkers, suffered

confiscation of property, loss of position, and even torture and

death, for similar views.[275]



[275] For an account of Bacon's treatise, De Nullitate Magiae,

see Hoefer.  For the uproar caused by Bacon's teaching at Oxford,

see Kopp, Geschichte der Chemie, Braunschweig, 1869, vol. i, p.

63; and for a somewhat reactionary discussion of Bacon's relation

to the progress of chemistry, see a recent work by the same

author, Ansichten uber die Aufgabe der Chemie, Braunschweig,

1874, pp. 85 et seq.; also, for an excellent summary, see Hoefer,

Hist. de la Chimie, vol. i, pp. 368 et seq.  For probably the

most thorough study of Bacon's general works in science, and for

his views of the universe, see Prof. Werner, Die Kosmologie und

allgemeine Naturlehre des Roger Baco, Wein, 1879.  For summaries

of his work in other fields, see Whewell, vol. i, pp. 367, 368;

Draper, p. 438; Saisset, Descartes et ses Precurseurs, deuxieme

edition, pp. 397 et seq.; Nourrisson, Progres de la Pensee

humaine, pp. 271, 272; Sprengel, Histoire de la Medecine, Paris,

1865, vol. ii, p. 397; Cuvier, Histoire des Sciences Naturelles,

vol. i, p. 417.  As to Bacon's orthodoxy, see Saisset, pp. 53,

55.  For special examination of causes of Bacon's condemnation,

see Waddington, cited by Saisset, p. 14.  For a brief but

admirable statement of Roger Bacon's realtion to the world in his

time, and of what he might have done had he not been thwarted by

theology, see Dollinger, Studies in European History, English

translation, London, 1890, pp. 178, 179. For a good example of

the danger of denying the full power of Satan, even in much more

recent times and in a Protestant country, see account of

treatment in Bekker's Monde Enchante by the theologians of

Holland, in Nisard, Histoire des Livres Populaires, vol. i, pp.

172, 173.  Kopp, in his Ansichten, pushes criticism even to some

scepticism as to Roger Bacon being the DISCOVERER of many of the

things generally attributed to him; but, after all deductions are

carefully made, enough remains to make Bacon the greatest

benefactor to humanity during the Middle Ages.  For Roger Bacon's

deep devotion to religion and the Church, see citation and

remarks in Schneider, Roger Bacon, Augsburg, 1873, p. 112; also,

citation from the Opus Majus, in Eicken, chap. vi.  On Bacon as a

"Mohammedan," see Saisset, p. 17.  For the interdiction of

studies in physical science by the Dominicans and Franciscans,

see Henri Martin, Histoire de France, vol. iv, p. 283.  For

suppression of chemical teaching by the Parliament of Paris, see

ibid., vol. xii, pp. 14, 15.  For proofs that the world is

steadily working toward great discoveries as to the cause and

prevention of zymotic diseases and their propogation, see Beale's

Disease Germs, Baldwin Latham's Sanitary Engineering, Michel

Levy's Traite a Hygiene Publique et Privee.  For a summary of the

bull Spondent pariter, and for an example of injury done by it,

see Schneider, Geschichte der Alchemie, p. 160; and for a

studiously moderate statement, Milman, Latin Christianity, book

xii, chap. vi.  For character and general efforts of John XXII,

see Lea, Inquisition, vol. iii, p. 436, also pp. 452 et seq.  For

the character of the two papal briefs, see Rydberg, p. 177.  For

the bull Summis Desiderantes, see previous chapters of this work.

For Antonio de Dominis, see Montucla, Hist. des Mathematiques,

vol. i, p. 705; Humboldt, Cosmos; Libri, vol. iv, pp. 145 et seq.

For Weyer, Flade, Bekker, Loos, and others, see the chapters of

this work on Meteorology, Demoniacal Possession and Insanity, and

Diabolism and Hysteria.





The theological atmosphere, which in consequence settled down

about the great universities and colleges, seemed likely to

stifle all scientific effort in every part of Europe, and it is

one of the great wonders in human history that in spite of this

deadly atmosphere a considerable body of thinking men, under such

protection as they could secure, still persisted in devoting

themselves to the physical sciences.



In Italy, in the latter half of the sixteenth century, came a

striking example of the difficulties which science still

encountered even after the Renaissance had undermined the old

beliefs.  At that time John Baptist Porta was conducting his

investigations, and, despite a considerable mixture of

pseudo-science, they were fruitful.  His was not "black magic,"

claiming the aid of Satan, but "white magic," bringing into

service the laws of nature--the precursor of applied science.

His book on meteorology was the first in which sound ideas were

broached on this subject; his researches in optics gave the

world the camera obscura, and possibly the telescope; in

chemistry he seems to have been the first to show how to reduce

the metallic oxides, and thus to have laid the foundation of

several important industries.  He did much to change natural

philosophy from a black art to a vigorous open science.  He

encountered the old ecclesiastical policy.  The society founded

by him for physical research, "I Secreti," was broken up, and he

was summoned to Rome by Pope Paul III and forbidden to continue

his investigations.



So, too, in France.  In 1624, some young chemists at Paris having

taught the experimental method and cut loose from Aristotle, the

faculty of theology beset the Parliament of Paris, and the

Parliament prohibited these new chemical researches under the

severest penalties.



The same war continued in Italy.  Even after the belief in magic

had been seriously weakened, the old theological fear and dislike

of physical science continued.  In 1657 occurred the first

sitting of the Accademia del Cimento at Florence, under the

presidency of Prince Leopold de' Medici This academy promised

great things for science; it was open to all talent; its only

fundamental law was "the repudiation of any favourite system or

sect of philosophy, and the obligation to investigate Nature by

the pure light of experiment"; it entered into scientific

investigations with energy.  Borelli in mathematics, Redi in

natural history, and many others, enlarged the boundaries of

knowledge.  Heat, light, magnetism, electricity, projectiles,

digestion, and the incompressibility of water were studied by the

right method and with results that enriched the world.



The academy was a fortress of science, and siege was soon laid to

it.  The votaries of scholastic learning denounced it as

irreligious, quarrels were fomented, Leopold was bribed with a

cardinal's hat and drawn away to Rome, and, after ten years of

beleaguering, the fortress fell:  Borelli was left a beggar;

Oliva killed himself in despair.



So, too, the noted Academy of the Lincei at times incurred the

ill will of the papacy by the very fact that it included

thoughtful investigators.  It was "patronized" by Pope Urban VIII

in such manner as to paralyze it, and it was afterward vexed by

Pope Gregory XVI.  Even in our own time sessions of scientific

associations were discouraged and thwarted by as kindly a pontiff

as Pius IX.[276]



[276] For Porta, see the English translation of his main summary,

Natural Magick, London, 1658.  The first chapters are especially

interesting, as showing what the word "magic" had come to mean in

the mind of a man in whom mediaeval and modern ideas were

curiously mixed; see also Hoefer, Histoire de la Chimie, vol. ii,

pp. 102-106; also Kopp; also Sprengel, Histoire de la Medecine,

vol. iii, p. 239; also Musset-Pathay.  For the Accademia del

Cimento, see Napier, Florentine History, vol. v, p. 485;

Tiraboschi, Storia della Litteratura; Henri Martin, Histoire de

France; Jevons, Principles of Science, vol. ii, pp. 36-40.  For

value attached to Borelli's investigations by Newton and Huygens,

see Brewster's Life of Sir Isaac Newton, London, 1875, pp. 128,

129.  Libri, in his first Essai sur Galilee, p. 37, says that

Oliva was summoned to Rome and so tortured by the Inquisition

that, to escape further cruelty, he ended his life by throwing

himself from a window.  For interference by Pope Gregory XVI with

the Academy of the Lincei, and with public instruction generally,

see Carutti, Storia della Accademia dei Lincei, p. 126.  Pius IX,

with all his geniality, seems to have allowed his hostility to

voluntary associations to carry him very far at times.  For his

answer to an application made through Lord Odo Russell regarding

a society for the prevention of cruelty to animals and his answer

that "such an association could not be sanctioned by the Holy

See, being founded on a theological error, to wit, that

Christians owed any duties to animals," see Frances Power Cobbe,

Hopes of the Human Race, p. 207.





A hostility similar in kind, though less in degree, was shown in

Protestant countries.



Even after Thomasius in Germany and Voltaire in France and

Beccaria in Italy had given final blows to the belief in magic

and witchcraft throughout Christendom, the traditional orthodox

distrust of the physical sciences continued for a long time.



In England a marked dislike was shown among various leading

ecclesiastics and theologians towards the Royal Society, and

later toward the Association for the Advancement of Science; and

this dislike, as will hereafter be seen, sometimes took shape in

serious opposition.



As a rule, both in Protestant and Catholic countries instruction

in chemistry and physics was for a long time discouraged by

Church authorities; and, when its suppression was no longer

possible, great pains were taken to subordinate it to instruction

supposed to be more fully in accordance with the older methods of

theological reasoning.



I have now presented in outline the more direct and open struggle

of the physical sciences with theology, mainly as an exterior

foe.  We will next consider their warfare with the same foe in

its more subtle form, mainly as a vitiating and sterilizing

principle in science itself.



We have seen thus far, first, how such men as Eusebius,

Lactantius, and their compeers, opposed scientific investigation

as futile; next, how such men as Albert the Great, St. Thomas

Aquinas, and the multitude who followed them, turned the main

current of medieval thought from science to theology; and,

finally, how a long line of Church authorities from Popes John

XXII and Innocent VIII, and the heads of the great religious

orders, down to various theologians and ecclesiastics, Catholic

and Protestant, of a very recent period, endeavoured first to

crush and afterward to discourage scientific research as

dangerous.



Yet, injurious as all this was to the evolution of science, there

was developed something in many respects more destructive; and

this was the influence of mystic theology, penetrating,

permeating, vitiating, sterilizing nearly every branch of science

for hundreds of years.  Among the forms taken by this development

in the earlier Middle Ages we find a mixture of physical science

with a pseudo-science obtained from texts of Scripture.  In

compounding this mixture, Jews and Christians vied with each

other.  In this process the sacred books were used as a fetich;

every word, every letter, being considered to have a divine and

hidden meaning.  By combining various scriptural letters in

various abstruse ways, new words of prodigious significance in

magic were obtained, and among them the great word embracing the

seventy-two mystical names of God--the mighty word

"Schemhamphoras."  Why should men seek knowledge by observation

and experiment in the book of Nature, when the book of

Revelation, interpreted by the Kabbalah, opened such treasures to

the ingenious believer?



So, too, we have ancient mystical theories of number which the

theological spirit had made Christian, usurping an enormous place

in medieval science.  The sacred power of the number three was

seen in the Trinity; in the three main divisions of the

universe--the empyrean, the heavens, and the earth; in the three

angelic hierarchies; in the three choirs of seraphim, cherubim,

and thrones; in the three of dominions, virtues, and powers; in

the three of principalities, archangels, and angels; in the

three orders in the Church--bishops, priests, and deacons; in the

three classes--the baptized, the communicants, and the monks; in

the three degrees of attainment--light, purity, and knowledge; in

the three theological virtues--faith, hope, and charity--and in

much else.  All this was brought into a theologico-scientific

relation, then and afterward, with the three dimensions of space;

with the three divisions of time--past, present, and future; with

the three realms of the visible world--sky, earth, and sea; with

the three constituents of man--body, soul, and spirit; with the

threefold enemies of man--the world, the flesh, and the devil;

with the three kingdoms in nature--mineral, vegetable, and

animal; with "the three colours"--red, yellow, and blue; with

"the three eyes of the honey-bee"--and with a multitude of other

analogues equally precious.  The sacred power of the number seven

was seen in the seven golden candlesticks and the seven churches

in the Apocalypse; in the seven cardinal virtues and the seven

deadly sins; in the seven liberal arts and the seven devilish

arts, and, above all, in the seven sacraments.  And as this

proved in astrology that there could be only seven planets, so it

proved in alchemy that there must be exactly seven metals.  The

twelve apostles were connected with the twelve signs in the

zodiac, and with much in physical science.  The seventy-two

disciples, the seventy-two interpreters of the Old Testament, the

seventy-two mystical names of God, were connected with the

alleged fact in anatomy that there were seventy-two joints in the

human frame.



Then, also, there were revived such theologic and metaphysical

substitutes for scientific thought as the declaration that the

perfect line is a circle, and hence that the planets must move in

absolute circles--a statement which led astronomy astray even

when the great truths of the Copernican theory were well in

sight; also, the declaration that nature abhors a vacuum--a

statement which led physics astray until Torricelli made his

experiments; also, the declaration that we see the lightning

before we hear the thunder because "sight is nobler than

hearing."



In chemistry we have the same theologic tendency to magic, and,

as a result, a muddle of science and theology, which from one

point of view seems blasphemous and from another idiotic, but

which none the less sterilized physical investigation for ages.

That debased Platonism which had been such an important factor in

the evolution of Christian theology from the earliest days of the

Church continued its work.  As everything in inorganic nature was

supposed to have spiritual significance, the doctrines of the

Trinity and Incarnation were turned into an argument in behalf of

the philosopher's stone; arguments for the scheme of redemption

and for transubstantiation suggested others of similar

construction to prove the transmutation of metals; the doctrine

of the resurrection of the human body was by similar mystic

jugglery connected with the processes of distillation and

sublimation.  Even after the Middle Ages were past, strong men

seemed unable to break away from such reasoning as this--among

them such leaders as Basil Valentine in the fifteenth century,

Agricola in the sixteenth, and Van Helmont in the seventeenth.



The greatest theologians contributed to the welter of unreason

from which this pseudo-science was developed.  One question

largely discussed was, whether at the Redemption it was necessary

for God to take the human form.  Thomas Aquinas answered that it

was necessary, but William Occam and Duns Scotus answered that it

was not; that God might have taken the form of a stone, or of a

log, or of a beast.  The possibilities opened to wild substitutes

for science by this sort of reasoning were infinite.  Men have

often asked how it was that the Arabians accomplished so much in

scientific discovery as compared with Christian investigators;

but the answer is easy:  the Arabians were comparatively free

from these theologic allurements which in Christian Europe

flickered in the air on all sides, luring men into paths which

led no-whither.



Strong investigators, like Arnold of Villanova, Raymond Lully,

Basil Valentine, Paracelsus, and their compeers, were thus drawn

far out of the only paths which led to fruitful truths.  In a

work generally ascribed to the first of these, the student is

told that in mixing his chemicals he must repeat the psalm

Exsurge Domine, and that on certain chemical vessels must be

placed the last words of Jesus on the cross.  Vincent of Beauvais

insisted that, as the Bible declares that Noah, when five hundred

years old, had children born to him, he must have possessed

alchemical means of preserving life; and much later Dickinson

insisted that the patriarchs generally must have owed their long

lives to such means.  It was loudly declared that the reality of

the philosopher's stone was proved by the words of St. John in

the Revelation.  "To him that overcometh I will give a white

stone."  The reasonableness of seeking to develop gold out of the

baser metals was for many generations based upon the doctrine of

the resurrection of the physical body, which, though explicitly

denied by St. Paul, had become a part of the creed of the Church.

Martin Luther was especially drawn to believe in the alchemistic

doctrine of transmutation by this analogy.  The Bible was

everywhere used, both among Protestants and Catholics, in support

of these mystic adulterations of science, and one writer, as late

as 1751, based his alchemistic arguments on more than a hundred

passages of Scripture.  As an example of this sort of reasoning,

we have a proof that the elect will preserve the philosopher's

stone until the last judgment, drawn from a passage in St.

Paul's Epistle to the Corinthians, "We have this treasure in

earthen vessels."



The greatest thinkers devoted themselves to adding new

ingredients to this strange mixture of scientific and theologic

thought.  The Catholic philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, the

Protestant mysticism of Jacob Boehme, and the alchemistic

reveries of Basil Valentine were all cast into this seething

mass.



And when alchemy in its old form had been discredited, we find

scriptural arguments no less perverse, and even comical, used on

the other side.  As an example of this, just before the great

discoveries by Stahl, we find the valuable scientific efforts of

Becher opposed with the following syllogism:  "King Solomon,

according to the Scriptures, possessed the united wisdom of

heaven and earth; but King Solomon knew nothing about alchemy

[or chemistry in the form it then took], and sent his vessels to

Ophir to seek gold, and levied taxes upon his subjects; ergo

alchemy [or chemistry] has no reality or truth."  And we find

that Becher is absolutely turned away from his labours, and

obliged to devote himself to proving that Solomon used more money

than he possibly could have obtained from Ophir or his subjects,

and therefore that he must have possessed a knowledge of chemical

methods and the philosopher's stone as the result of them.[277]



[277] For an extract from Agrippa's Occulta Philosophia, giving

examples of the way in which mystical names were obtained from

the Bible, see Rydberg, Magic of the Middle Ages, pp. 143 et seq.

For the germs of many mystic beliefs regarding number and the

like, which were incorporated into mediaeval theology, see

Zeller, Plato and the Older Academy, English translation, pp. 254

and 572, and elsewhere.  As to the connection of spiritual things

with inorganic nature in relation to chemistry, see Eicken, p.

634.  On the injury to science wrought by Platonism acting

through mediaeval theology, see Hoefer, Histoire de la Chimie,

vol. i, p. 90.  As to the influence of mysticism upon strong men

in science, see Hoefer; also Kopp, Geschichte der Alchemie, vol.

i, p. 211.  For a very curious Catholic treatise on sacred

numbers, see the Abbe Auber, Symbolisme Religieux, Paris, 1870;

also Detzel, Christliche Ikonographie, pp. 44 et seq.; and for an

equally important Protestant work, see Samuell, Seven the Sacred

number, London 1887.  It is interesting to note that the latter

writer, having been forced to give up the seven planets, consoles

himself with the statement that "the earth is the seventh planet,

counting from Neptune and calling the asteroids one" (see p.

426).  For the electrum magicum, the seven metals composing it,

and its wonderful qualities, see extracts from Paracelsus's

writings in Hartmann's Life of Paracelsus, London, 1887, pp. 168

et seq.  As to the more rapid transition of light than sound, the

following expresses the scholastic method well: "What is the

cause why we see sooner the lightning than we heare the thunder

clappe?  That is because our sight is both nobler and sooner

perceptive of its object than our eare; as being the more active

part, and priore to our hearing: besides, the visible species are

more subtile and less corporeal than the audible species."--

Person's Varieties, Meteors, p. 82.  For Basil Valentine's view,

see Hoefer, vol. i, pp. 453-465; Schmieder, Geschichte der

Alchemie, pp. 197-209; Allgemeine deutsche Biographies, article

Basilius.  For the discussions referred to on possibilities of

God assuming forms of stone, or log, or beast, see Lippert,

Christenthum, Volksglaube, und Volksbrauch, pp. 372, 373, where

citations are given, etc.  For the syllogism regarding Solomon,

see Figuier, L'Alchimie et les Alchimistes, pp. 106, 107.  For

careful appreciation of Becher's position in the history of

chemistry, see Kopp, Ansichten uber die Aufgabe der Chemie, etc.,

von Geber bis Stahl, Braunschweig, 1875, pp. 201 et seq.  For the

text proving the existence of the philosopher's stone from the

book of Revelation, see Figuier, p. 22.





Of the general reasoning enforced by theology regarding physical

science, every age has shown examples; yet out of them all I

will select but two, and these are given because they show how

this mixture of theological with scientific ideas took hold upon

the strongest supporters of better reasoning even after the power

of medieval theology seemed broken.



The first of these examples is Melanchthon.  He was the scholar

of the Reformation, and justly won the title "Preceptor of

Germany." His mind was singularly open, his sympathies broad, and

his usual freedom from bigotry drew down upon him that wrath of

Protestant heresy-hunters which embittered the last years of his

life and tortured him upon his deathbed.  During his career at

the University of Wittenberg he gave a course of lectures on

physics, and in these he dwelt upon scriptural texts as affording

scientific proofs, accepted the interference of the devil in

physical phenomena as in other things, and applied the medieval

method throughout his whole work.[278]



[278] For Melanchthon's ideas on physics, see his Initia

Doctrinae Physicae, Wittenberg, 1557, especially pp. 243 and 274;

also in vol. xiii of Bretschneider's edition of the collected

works, and especially pp. 339-343.





Yet far more remarkable was the example, a century later, of the

man who more than any other led the world out of the path opened

by Aquinas, and into that through which modern thought has

advanced to its greatest conquests.  Strange as it may at first

seem, Francis Bacon, whose keenness of sight revealed the

delusions of the old path and the promises of the new, and whose

boldness did so much to turn the world from the old path into the

new, presents in his own writings one of the most striking

examples of the evil he did so much to destroy.



The Novum Organon, considering the time when it came from his

pen, is doubtless one of the greatest exhibitions of genius in

the history of human thought.  It showed the modern world the way

out of the scholastic method and reverence for dogma into the

experimental method and reverence for fact.  In it occur many

passages which show that the great philosopher was fully alive to

the danger both to religion and to science arising from their

mixture.  He declares that the "corruption of philosophy from

superstition and theology introduced the greatest amount of evil

both into whole systems of philosophy and into their parts."  He

denounces those who "have endeavoured to found a natural

philosophy on the books of Genesis and Job and other sacred

Scriptures, so `seeking the dead among the living.'"  He speaks

of the result as "an unwholesome mixture of things human and

divine; not merely fantastic philosophy, but heretical religion."



He refers to the opposition of the fathers to the doctrine of the

rotundity of the earth, and says that, "thanks to some of them,

you may find the approach to any kind of philosophy, however

improved, entirely closed up."  He charges that some of these

divines are "afraid lest perhaps a deeper inquiry into nature

should, penetrate beyond the allowed limits of sobriety"; and

finally speaks of theologians as sometimes craftily conjecturing

that, if science be little understood, "each single thing can be

referred more easily to the hand and rod of God," and says, "THIS

IS NOTHING MORE OR LESS THAN WISHING TO PLEASE GOD BY A LIE."



No man who has reflected much upon the annals of his race can,

without a feeling of awe, come into the presence of such

clearness of insight and boldness of utterance, and the first

thought of the reader is that, of all men, Francis Bacon is the

most free from the unfortunate bias he condemns; that he,

certainly, can not be deluded into the old path.  But as we go on

through his main work we are surprised to find that the strong

arm of Aquinas has been stretched over the intervening ages, and

has laid hold upon this master-thinker of the seventeenth

century; for only a few chapters beyond those containing the

citations already made we find Bacon alluding to the recent

voyage of Columbus, and speaking of the prophecy of Daniel

regarding the latter days, that "many shall run to and fro, and

knowledge be increased," as clearly signifying "that...the

circumnavigation of the world and the increase of science should

happen in the same age."[279]



[279] See the Novum Organon, translated by the Rev. G. W.

Kitchin, Oxford, 1855, chaps. lxv and lxxxix.





In his great work on the Advancement of Learning the firm grasp

which the methods he condemned held upon him is shown yet more

clearly.  In the first book of it he asserts that "that excellent

book of Job, if it be revolved with diligence, will be found

pregnant and swelling with natural philosophy," and he endeavours

to show that in it the "roundness of the earth," the "fixing of

the stars, ever standing at equal distances," the "depression of

the southern pole," the "matter of generation," and "matter of

minerals" are "with great elegancy noted."  But, curiously

enough, he uses to support some of these truths the very texts

which the fathers of the Church used to destroy them, and those

for which he finds Scripture warrant most clearly are such as

science has since disproved.  So, too, he says that Solomon was

enabled in his Proverbs, "by donation of God, to compile a

natural history of all verdure."[280]



[280] See Bacon, Advancement of Learning, edited by W. Aldis

Wright, London, 1873, pp. 47, 48.  Certainly no more striking

examples of the strength of the evil which he had all along been

denouncing could be exhibited that these in his own writings.

Nothing better illustrates the sway of the mediaeval theology, or

better explains his blindness to the discoveries of Copernicus

and to the experiments of Gilbert.  For a very contemptuous

statement of Lord Bacon's claim to his position as a philosopher,

see Lange, Geschichte des Materialismus, Leipsic, 1872, vol.i, p.

219.  For a more just statement, see Brewster, Life of Sir Isaac

Newton, London, 1874, vol. ii, p. 298.





Such was the struggle of the physical sciences in general.  Let

us now look briefly at one special example out of many, which

reveals, as well as any, one of the main theories which prompted

theological interference with them.



It will doubtless seem amazing to many that for ages the weight

of theological thought in Christendom was thrown against the idea

of the suffocating properties of certain gases, and especially of

carbonic acid.  Although in antiquity we see men forming a right

theory of gases in mines, we find that, early in the history of

the Church, St. Clement of Alexandria put forth the theory that

these gases are manifestations of diabolic action, and that,

throughout Christendom, suffocation in caverns, wells, and

cellars was attributed to the direct action of evil spirits.

Evidences of this view abound through the medieval period, and

during the Reformation period a great authority, Agricola, one of

the most earnest and truthful of investigators, still adhered to

the belief that these gases in mines were manifestations of

devils, and he specified two classes--one of malignant imps, who

blow out the miners' lamps, and the other of friendly imps, who

simply tease the workmen in various ways.  He went so far as to

say that one of these spirits in the Saxon mine of Annaberg

destroyed twelve workmen at once by the power of his breath.



At the end of the sixteenth century we find a writer on

mineralogy complaining that the mines in France and Germany had

been in large part abandoned on account of the "evil spirits of

metals which had taken possession of them."



Even as late as the seventeenth century, Van Helmont, after he

had broken away from alchemy and opened one of the great paths to

chemistry--even after he had announced to the world the existence

of various gases and the mode of their generation--was not strong

enough to free himself from theologic bias; he still inclined to

believe that the gases he had discovered, were in some sense

living spirits, beneficent or diabolical.



But at various.  periods glimpses of the truth had been gained.

The ancient view had not been entirely forgotten; and as far

back as the first part of the thirteenth century Albert the Great

suggested a natural cause in the possibility of exhalations from

minerals causing a "corruption of the air"; but he, as we have

seen, was driven or dragged off into, theological studies, and

the world relapsed into the theological view.



Toward the end of the fifteenth century there had come a great

genius laden with important truths in chemistry, but for whom the

world was not ready--Basil Valentine.  His discoveries

anticipated much that has brought fame and fortune to chemists

since, yet so fearful of danger was he that his work was

carefully concealed. Not until after his death was his treatise

on alchemy found, and even then it was for a long time not known

where and when he lived.  The papal bull, Spondent pariter, and

the various prohibitions it bred, forcing other alchemists to

conceal their laboratories, led him to let himself be known

during his life at Erfurt simply as an apothecary, and to wait

until after his death to make a revelation of truth which during

his lifetime might have cost him dear.  Among the legacies of

this greatest of the alchemists was the doctrine that the air

which asphyxiates workers in mines is similar to that which is

produced by fermentation of malt, and a recommendation that, in

order to drive away the evil and to prevent serious accidents,

fires be lighted and jets of steam used to ventilate the

mines--stress being especially laid upon the idea that the danger

in the mines is produced by "exhalations of metals."



Thanks to men like Valentine, this idea of the interference of

Satan and his minions with the mining industry was gradually

weakened, and the working of the deserted mines was resumed; yet

even at a comparatively recent period we find it still lingering,

and among leading divines in the very heart of Protestant

Germany.  In 1715 a cellar-digger having been stifled at Jena,

the medical faculty of the university decided that the cause was

not the direct action of the devil, but a deadly gas.  Thereupon

Prof. Loescher, of the University of Wittenberg, entered a solemn

protest, declaring that the decision of the medical faculty was

"only a proof of the lamentable license which has so taken

possession of us, and which, if we are not earnestly on our

guard, will finally turn away from us the blessing of God."[281]

But denunciations of this kind could not hold back the little

army of science; in spite of adverse influences, the evolution

of physics and chemistry went on.  More and more there rose men

bold enough to break away from theological methods and strong

enough to resist ecclesiastical bribes and threats.  As alchemy

in its first form, seeking for the philosopher's stone and the

transmutation of metals, had given way to alchemy in its second

form, seeking for the elixir of life and remedies more or less

magical for disease, so now the latter yielded to the search for

truth as truth.  More and more the "solemnly constituted

impostors" were resisted in every field.  A great line of

physicists and chemists began to appear.[282]



[281] For Loescher's protest, see Julian Schmidt, Geschichte des

geistigen Lebens, etc., vol. i, p. 319.



[282] For the general view of noxious gases as imps of Satan, see

Hoefer, Histoire de la Chimie, vol. i, p. 350; vol. ii, p. 48.

For the work of Black, Priestley, Bergmann, and others, see main

authorities already cited, and especially the admirable paper of

Dr. R. G. Eccles on The Evolution of Chemistry, New York, D.

Appleton & Co., 1891.  For the treatment of Priesley, see

Spence's Essays, London, 1892; also Rutt, Life and Correspondence

of Priestley, vol. ii, pp. 115 et seq.







II.





Just at the middle of the seventeenth century, and at the very

centre of opposition to physical science, Robert Boyle began the

new epoch in chemistry.  Strongly influenced by the writings of

Bacon and the discoveries of Galileo, he devoted himself to

scientific research, establishing at Oxford a laboratory and

putting into it a chemist from Strasburg.  For this he was at

once bitterly attacked.  In spite of his high position, his

blameless life, his liberal gifts to charity and learning, the

Oxford pulpit was especially severe against him, declaring that

his researches were destroying religion and his experiments

undermining the university.  Public orators denounced him, the

wits ridiculed him, and his associates in the peerage were

indignant that he should condescend to pursuits so unworthy.  But

Boyle pressed on.  His discoveries opened new paths in various

directions and gave an impulse to a succession of vigorous

investigators.  Thus began the long series of discoveries

culminating those of Black, Bergmann, Cavendish, Priestley, and

Lavoisier, who ushered in the chemical science of the nineteenth

century.



Yet not even then without a sore struggle against unreason.  And

it must here be noticed that this unreason was not all

theological.  The unreasoning heterodox when intrusted with

irresponsible power can be as short-sighted and cruel as the

unreasoning orthodox.  Lavoisier, one of the best of our race,

not only a great chemist but a true man, was sent to the scaffold

by the Parisian mob, led by bigoted "liberals" and atheists, with

the sneer that the republic had no need of savants.  As to

Priestley, who had devoted his life to science and to every good

work among his fellow-men, the Birmingham mob, favoured by the

Anglican clergymen who harangued them as "fellow-churchmen,"

wrecked his house, destroyed his library, philosophical

instruments, and papers containing the results of long years of

scientific research, drove him into exile, and would have

murdered him if they could have laid their hands upon him.  Nor

was it entirely his devotion to rational liberty, nor even his

disbelief in the doctrine of the Trinity, which brought on this

catastrophe.  That there was a deep distrust of his scientific

pursuits, was evident when the leaders of the mob took pains to

use his electrical apparatus to set fire to his papers.



Still, though theological modes of thought continued to sterilize

much effort in chemistry, the old influence was more and more

thrown off, and truth sought more and more for truth's sake.

"Black magic" with its Satanic machinery vanished, only

reappearing occasionally among marvel-mongers and belated

theologians.  "White magic" became legerdemain.



In the early years of the nineteenth century, physical research,

though it went on with ever-increasing vigour, felt in various

ways the reaction which followed the French Revolution.  It was

not merely under the Bourbons and Hapsburgs that resistance was

offered; even in England the old spirit lingered long.  As late

as 1832, when the British Association for the Advancement of

Science first visited Oxford, no less amiable a man than John

Keble--at that time a power in the university--condemned

indignantly the conferring of honorary degrees upon the leading

men thus brought together.  In a letter of that date to Dr. Pusey

he complained bitterly, to use his own words, that "the Oxford

doctors have truckled sadly to the spirit of the times in

receiving the hotchpotch of philosophers as they did."  It is

interesting to know that among the men thus contemptuously

characterized were Brewster, Faraday, and Dalton.



Nor was this a mere isolated exhibition of feeling; it lasted

many years, and was especially shown on both sides of the

Atlantic in all higher institutions of learning where theology

was dominant.  Down to a period within the memory of men still in

active life, students in the sciences, not only at Oxford and

Cambridge but at Harvard and Yale, were considered a doubtful if

not a distinctly inferior class, intellectually and socially--to

be relegated to different instructors and buildings, and to

receive their degrees on a different occasion and with different

ceremonies from those appointed for students in literature.  To

the State University of Michigan, among the greater American

institutions of learning which have never possessed or been

possessed by a theological seminary, belongs the honour of first

breaking down this wall of separation.



But from the middle years of the century chemical science

progressed with ever-accelerating force, and the work of Bunsen,

Kirchhoff, Dalton, and Faraday has, in the last years of the

century, led up to the establishment of Mendeleef's law, by which

chemistry has become predictive, as astronomy had become

predictive by the calculations of Newton, and biology by the

discoveries of Darwin.



While one succession of strong men were thus developing chemistry

out of one form of magic, another succession were developing

physics out of another form.



First in this latter succession may be mentioned that line of

thinkers who divined and reasoned out great physical laws--a line

extending from Galileo and Kepler and Newton to Ohm and Faraday

and Joule and Helmholtz.  These, by revealing more and more

clearly the reign of law, steadily undermined the older

theological view of arbitrary influence in nature.  Next should

be mentioned the line of profound observers, from Galileo and

Torricelli to Kelvin.  These have as thoroughly undermined the

old theologic substitution of phrases for facts.  When Galileo

dropped the differing weights from the Leaning Tower of Pisa, he

began the end of Aristotelian authority in physics.  When

Torricelli balanced a column of mercury against a column of water

and each of these against a column of air, he ended the theologic

phrase that "nature abhors a vacuum."  When Newton approximately

determined the velocity of sound, he ended the theologic argument

that we see the flash before we hear the roar because "sight is

nobler than hearing."  When Franklin showed that lightning is

caused by electricity, and Ohm and Faraday proved that

electricity obeys ascertained laws, they ended the theological

idea of a divinity seated above the clouds and casting

thunderbolts.



Resulting from the labour of both these branches of physical

science, we have the establishment of the great laws of the

indestructibility of matter, the correlation of forces, and

chemical affinity.  Thereby is ended, with various other sacred

traditions, the theological theory of a visible universe created

out of nothing, so firmly imbedded in the theological thought of

the Middle Ages and in the Westminster Catechism.[283]



[283] For a reappearance of the fundamental doctrines of black

magic among theologians, see Rev. Dr. Jewett, Professor of

Pastoral Theology in the Prot. Episc. Gen. Theolog. Seminary of

New York, Diabolology: The Person and the Kingdom of Satan, New

York, 1889.  For their appearance among theosophists, see Eliphas

Levi, Histoire de la Magie, especially the final chapters.  For

opposition to Boyle and chemistry studies at Oxford in the latter

half of the seventeenth century, see the address of Prof. Dixon,

F. R. S., before the British Association, 1894.  For the recent

progress of chemistry, and opposition to its earlier development

at Oxford, see Lord Salisbury's address as President of the

British Association, in 1894.  For the Protestant survival of the

mediaeval assertion that the universe was created out of nothing,

see the Westminster Catechism, question 15.





In our own time some attempt has been made to renew this war

against the physical sciences.  Joseph de Maistre, uttering his

hatred of them, declaring that mankind has paid too dearly for

them, asserting that they must be subjected to theology, likening

them to fire--good when confined and dangerous when scattered

about--has been one of the main leaders among those who can not

relinquish the idea that our body of sacred literature should be

kept a controlling text-book of science.  The only effect of such

teachings has been to weaken the legitimate hold of religion upon

men.



In Catholic countries exertion has of late years been mainly

confined to excluding science or diluting it in university

teachings.  Early in the present century a great effort was made

by Ferdinand VII of Spain.  He simply dismissed the scientific

professors from the University of Salamanca, and until a recent

period there has been general exclusion from Spanish universities

of professors holding to the Newtonian physics.  So, too, the

contemporary Emperor of Austria attempted indirectly something of

the same sort; and at a still later period Popes Gregory XVI and

Pius IX discouraged, if they did not forbid, the meetings of

scientific associations in Italy.  In France, war between

theology and science, which had long been smouldering, came in

the years 1867 and 1868 to an outbreak.  Toward the end of the

last century, after the Church had held possession of advanced

instruction for more than a thousand years, and had, so far as it

was able, kept experimental science in servitude--after it had

humiliated Buffon in natural science, thrown its weight against

Newton in the physical sciences, and wrecked Turgot's noble plans

for a system of public instruction--the French nation decreed the

establishment of the most thorough and complete system of higher

instruction in science ever known.  It was kept under lay control

and became one of the glories of France; but, emboldened by the

restoration of the Bourbons in 1815, the Church began to

undermine this hated system, and in 1868 had made such progress

that all was ready for the final assault.



Foremost among the leaders of the besieging party was the Bishop

of Orleans, Dupanloup, a man of many winning characteristics and

of great oratorical power.  In various ways, and especially in an

open letter, he had fought the "materialism" of science at Paris,

and especially were his attacks levelled at Profs.  Vulpian and

See and the Minister of Public instruction, Duruy, a man of great

merit, whose only crime was devotion to the improvement of

education and to the promotion of the highest research in

science.[284]



[284] For the exertions of the restored Bourbons to crush the

universities of Spain, see Hubbard, Hist. Contemporaine de

l'Espagne, Paris, 1878, chaps. i and ii.  For Dupanloup, Lettre a

un Cardinal, see the Revue de Therapeutique of 1868, p. 221.





The main attack was made rather upon biological science than upon

physics and chemistry, yet it was clear that all were involved

together.



The first onslaught was made in the French Senate, and the

storming party in that body was led by a venerable and

conscientious prelate, Cardinal de Bonnechose, Archbishop of

Rouen.  It was charged by him and his party that the tendencies

of the higher scientific teaching at Paris were fatal to religion

and morality.  Heavy missiles were hurled--such phrases as

"sapping the foundations," "breaking down the bulwarks," and the

like; and, withal, a new missile was used with much effect--the

epithet "materialist."



The results can be easily guessed:  crowds came to the

lecture-rooms of the attacked professors, and the lecture-room of

Prof. See, the chief offender, was crowded to suffocation.



A siege was begun in due form.  A young physician was sent by the

cardinal's party into the heterodox camp as a spy.  Having heard

one lecture of Prof. See, he returned with information that

seemed to promise easy victory to the besieging party:  he

brought a terrible statement--one that seemed enough to overwhelm

See, Vulpian, Duruy, and the whole hated system of public

instruction in France--the statement that See had denied the

existence of the human soul.



Cardinal Bonnechose seized the tremendous weapon at once.  Rising

in his place in the Senate, he launched a most eloquent invective

against the Minister of State who could protect such a fortress

of impiety as the College of Medicine; and, as a climax, he

asserted, on the evidence of his spy fresh from Prof. See's

lecture-room, that the professor had declared, in his lecture of

the day before, that so long as he had the honour to hold his

professorship he would combat the false idea of the existence of

the soul.  The weapon seemed resistless and the wound fatal, but

M. Duruy rose and asked to be heard.



His statement was simply that he held in his hand documentary

proofs that Prof. See never made such a declaration.  He held

the notes used by Prof. See in his lecture.  Prof. See, it

appeared, belonged to a school in medical science which combated

certain ideas regarding medicine as an ART.  The inflamed

imagination of the cardinal's heresy-hunting emissary had, as the

lecture-notes proved, led him to mistake the word "art" for

"ame," and to exhibit Prof. See as treating a theological when he

was discussing a purely scientific question.  Of the existence of

the soul the professor had said nothing.



The forces of the enemy were immediately turned; they retreated

in confusion, amid the laughter of all France; and a quiet,

dignified statement as to the rights of scientific instructors by

Wurtz, dean of the faculty, completed their discomfiture.  Thus a

well-meant attempt to check science simply ended in bringing

ridicule on religion, and in thrusting still deeper into the

minds of thousands of men that most mistaken of all mistaken

ideas:  the conviction that religion and science are

enemies.[285]



[285] For a general account of the Vulpian and See matter, see

Revue des Deux Mondes, 31 mai, 1868, "Chronique de la Quinzaine,"

pp. 763-765.  As to the result on popular thought, may be noted

the following comment on the affair by the Revue, which is as

free as possible from anything like rabid anti-ecclesiastical

ideas: "Elle a ete vraiment curieuse, instructive, assez triste

et meme un peu amusante."  For Wurtz's statement, see Revue de

Therapeutique for 1868, p. 303.





But justice forbids raising an outcry against Roman Catholicism

for this.  In 1864 a number of excellent men in England drew up a

declaration to be signed by students in the natural sciences,

expressing "sincere regret that researches into scientific truth

are perverted by some in our time into occasion for casting doubt

upon the truth and authenticity of the Holy Scriptures."  Nine

tenths of the leading scientific men of England refused to sign

it; nor was this all:  Sir John Herschel, Sir John Bowring, and

Sir W.  R.  Hamilton administered, through the press,

castigations which roused general indignation against the

proposers of the circular, and Prof. De Morgan, by a parody,

covered memorial and memorialists with ridicule.  It was the old

mistake, and the old result followed in the minds of multitudes

of thoughtful young men.[286]



[286] De Morgan, Paradoxes, pp. 421-428; also Daubeny's Essays.





And in yet another Protestant country this same mistake was made.

In 1868 several excellent churchmen in Prussia thought it their

duty to meet for the denunciation of "science falsely so called."

Two results followed:  upon the great majority of these really

self-sacrificing men--whose first utterances showed complete

ignorance of the theories they attacked--there came quiet and

widespread contempt; upon Pastor Knak, who stood forth and

proclaimed views of the universe which he thought scriptural, but

which most schoolboys knew to be childish, came a burst of

good-natured derision from every quarter of the German

nation.[287]



[287] See the Berlin newspapers for the summer of 1868,

especially Kladderdatsch.





But in all the greater modern nations warfare of this kind, after

the first quarter of the nineteenth century, became more and more

futile.  While conscientious Roman bishops, and no less

conscientious Protestant clergymen in Europe and America

continued to insist that advanced education, not only in

literature but in science, should be kept under careful control

in their own sectarian universities and colleges, wretchedly

one-sided in organization and inadequate in equipment; while

Catholic clerical authorities in Spain were rejecting all

professors holding the Newtonian theory, and in Austria and Italy

all holding unsafe views regarding the Immaculate Conception, and

while Protestant clerical authorities in Great Britain and

America were keeping out of professorships men holding

unsatisfactory views regarding the Incarnation, or Infant

Baptism, or the Apostolic Succession, or Ordination by Elders, or

the Perseverance of the Saints; and while both Catholic and

Protestant ecclesiastics were openly or secretly weeding out of

university faculties all who showed willingness to consider

fairly the ideas of Darwin, a movement was quietly in progress

destined to take instruction, and especially instruction in the

physical and natural sciences, out of its old subordination to

theology and ecclesiasticism.[288]



[288] Whatever may be thought of the system of philosophy

advocated by President McCosh at Princeton, every thinking man

must honor him for the large way in which he, at least, broke

away from the traditions of that centre of thought; prevented, so

far as he was able, persecution of scholars for holding to the

Darwinian view; and paved the way for the highest researches in

physical science in that university.  For a most eloquent

statement of the opposition of modern physical science to

mediaeval theological views, as shown in the case of Sir Isaac

Newton, see Dr. Thomas Chalmers, cited in Gore, Art of Scientific

Discovery, London, 1878, p. 247.





The most striking beginnings of this movement had been seen when,

in the darkest period of the French Revolution, there was founded

at Paris the great Conservatory of Arts and Trades, and when, in

the early years of the nineteenth century, scientific and

technical education spread quietly upon the Continent.  By the

middle of the century France and Germany were dotted with

well-equipped technical and scientific schools, each having

chemical and physical laboratories.



The English-speaking lands lagged behind.  In England, Oxford and

Cambridge showed few if any signs of this movement, and in the

United States, down to 1850, evidences of it were few and feeble.

Very significant is it that, at that period, while Yale College

had in its faculty Silliman and Olmsted--the professor of

chemistry and the professor of physics most widely known in the

United States--it had no physical or chemical laboratory in the

modern sense, and confined its instruction in these subjects to

examinations upon a text-book and the presentation of a few

lectures.  At the State University of Michigan, which had even

then taken a foremost place in the higher education west of the

Great Lakes, there was very meagre instruction in chemistry and

virtually none in physics.  This being the state of things in the

middle of the century in institutions remarkably free from

clerical control, it can be imagined what was the position of

scientific instruction in smaller colleges and universities where

theological considerations were entirely dominant.



But in 1851, with the International Exhibition at London, began

in Great Britain and America a movement in favour of scientific

education; men of wealth and public spirit began making

contributions to them, and thus came the growth of a new system

of instruction in which Chemistry and Physics took just rank.



By far the most marked feature in this movement was seen in

America, when, in 1857, Justin S.  Morrill, a young member of

Congress from Vermont, presented the project of a law endowing

from the public lands a broad national system of colleges in

which scientific and technical studies should be placed on an

equality with studies in classical literature, one such college

to be established in every State of the Union.  The bill, though

opposed mainly by representatives from the Southern States, where

doctrinaire politics and orthodox theology were in strong

alliance with negro slavery, was passed by both Houses of

Congress, but vetoed by President Buchanan, in whom the

doctrinaire and orthodox spirit was incarnate.  But Morrill

persisted and again presented his bill, which was again carried

in spite of the opposition of the Southern members, and again

vetoed in 1859 by President Buchanan.  Then came the civil war;

but Morrill and his associates did not despair of the republic.

In the midst of all the measures for putting vast armies into the

field and for saving the Union from foreign interference as well

as from domestic anarchy, they again passed the bill, and in

1862, in the darkest hour of the struggle for national existence,

it became a law by the signature of President Lincoln.



And here it should not be unrecorded, that, while the vast

majority of the supporters of the measure were laymen, most

efficient service was rendered by a clergyman, the Rev. Dr.

Amos Brown, born in New Hampshire, but at that time an instructor

in a little village of New York.  His ideas were embodied in the

bill, and his efforts did much for its passage.



Thus was established, in every State of the American Union, at

least one institution in which scientific and technical studies

were given equal rank with classical, and promoted by

laboratories for research in physical and natural science.  Of

these institutions there are now nearly fifty:  all have proved

valuable, and some of them, by the addition of splendid gifts

from individuals and from the States in which they are situated,

have been developed into great universities.



Nor was this all.  Many of the older universities and colleges

thus received a powerful stimulus in the new direction.  The

great physical and chemical laboratories founded by gifts from

public-spirited individuals, as at Harvard, Yale, and Chicago, or

by enlightened State legislators, as in Michigan, Wisconsin,

Minnesota, California, Kansas, and Nebraska, have also become

centres from which radiate influences favouring the unfettered

search for truth as truth.



This system has been long enough in operation to enable us to

note in some degree its effects on religion, and these are

certainly such as to relieve those who have feared that religion

was necessarily bound up with the older instruction controlled by

theology.  While in Europe, by a natural reaction, the colleges

under strict ecclesiastical control have sent forth the most

powerful foes the Christian Church has ever known, of whom

Voltaire and Diderot and Volney and Sainte-Beuve and Renan are

types, no such effects have been noted in these newer

institutions.  While the theological way of looking at the

universe has steadily yielded, there has been no sign of any

tendency toward irreligion.  On the contrary, it is the testimony

of those best acquainted with the American colleges and

universities during the last forty-five years that there has been

in them a great gain, not only as regards morals, but as regards

religion in its highest and best sense.  The reason is not far to

seek.  Under the old American system the whole body of students

at a university were confined to a single course, for which the

majority cared little and very many cared nothing, and, as a

result, widespread idleness and dissipation were inevitable.

Under the new system, presenting various courses, and especially

courses in various sciences, appealing to different tastes and

aims, the great majority of students are interested, and

consequently indolence and dissipation have steadily diminished.

Moreover, in the majority of American institutions of learning

down to the middle of the century, the main reliance for the

religious culture of students was in the perfunctory presentation

of sectarian theology, and the occasional stirring up of what

were called "revivals," which, after a period of unhealthy

stimulus, inevitably left the main body of students in a state of

religious and moral reaction and collapse.  This method is now

discredited, and in the more important American universities it

has become impossible.  Religious truth, to secure the attention

of the modern race of students in the better American

institutions, is presented, not by "sensation preachers," but by

thoughtful, sober-minded scholars.  Less and less avail sectarian

arguments; more and more impressive becomes the presentation of

fundamental religious truths.  The result is, that while young

men care less and less for the great mass of petty, cut-and-dried

sectarian formulas, they approach the deeper questions of

religion with increasing reverence.



While striking differences exist between the European

universities and those of the United States, this at least may be

said, that on both sides of the Atlantic the great majority of

the leading institutions of learning are under the sway of

enlightened public opinion as voiced mainly by laymen, and that,

this being the case, the physical and natural sciences are

henceforth likely to be developed normally, and without fear of

being sterilized by theology or oppressed by ecclesiasticism.