EVOLUTION OF THE SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATOR 143 



of knowledge taken at that time that, instead of claiming credit for 

 bringing to light great truths before unknown, he made a labored 

 attempt to show that, after all, there was nothing really new in his 

 system, which he claimed to date from Pythagoras and Philolaus. 

 In this connection it is curious that he makes no mention of Aris- 

 tarchus, who I think will be regarded by conservative historians as 

 his only demonstrated predecessor. To the hold of the older ideas 

 upon his mind we must attribute the fact that in constructing his 

 system he took great pains to make as little change as possible in 

 ancient conceptions. 



Luther, the greatest thought-stirrer of them all, practically of the 

 same generation with Copernicus, Leonardo, and Columbus, does not 

 come in as a scientific investigator, but as the great loosener of chains 

 which had so fettered the intellect of men that they dared not think 

 otherwise than as the authorities thought. 



Almost coeval with the advent of these intellects was the invention 

 of printing with movable type. Gutenberg was born during the first 

 decade of the century, and his associates and others credited with the 

 invention not many years afterward. If we accept the principle on 

 which I am basing my argument, that we should assign the first place 

 to the birth of those psychic agencies which started men on new lines 

 of thought, then surely was the fifteenth the wonderful century. 



Let us not forget that, in assigning the actors then born to their 

 places, we are not narrating history, but studying a special phase of 

 evolution. It matters not for us that no university invited Leonardo 

 to its halls, and that his science was valued by his contemporaries 

 only as an adjunct to the art of engineering. The great fact still is 

 that he was the first of mankind to propound laws of motion. It is 

 not for anything in Luther's doctrines that he finds a place in our 

 scheme. No matter for us whether they were sound or not. What he 

 did toward the evolution of the scientific investigator was to show by 

 his example that a man might question the best-established and most 

 venerable authority and still live --still preserve his intellectual 

 integrity -- still command a hearing from nations and their rulers. 

 It matters not for us whether Columbus ever knew that he had dis- 

 covered a new continent. His work was to teach that neither h}^dra, 

 chimera, nor abyss -- neither divine injunction nor infernal machina- 

 tion was in the way of men visiting every part of the globe, and 

 that the problem of conquering the world reduced itself to one of 

 sails and rigging, hull and compass. The better part of Copernicus 

 was to direct man to a viewpoint whence he should see that the 

 heavens were of like matter with the earth. All this done, the acorn 

 was planted from which the oak of our civilization should spring. 

 The mad quest for gold which followed the discovery of Columbus, 

 the questionings which absorbed the attention of the learned, the 



