NATURAL SCIENCE IN THE MIDDLE AGES 271 



NATURAL SCIENCE IN THE MIDDLE AGES 



By Professor LYNN THORNDIKE 



■WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY 



PROBABLY ninety-nine out of every hundred educated persons 

 would be surprised to learn that there was any such thing as 

 natural science in the middle ages. Lest I seem to impute too much 

 ignorance to my present audience, perhaps I should lower the ratio to 

 nine persons out of ten. That is really a flattering estimate, since one 

 of the most recent works on the middle ages, Taylor's "The Medieval 

 Mind," while it devotes two volumes to monasticism, scholasticism and 

 other features of medieval thought, treats of natural science in the 

 middle ages only incidentally in two chapters upon Albertus Magnus 

 and Roger Bacon, and dismisses all other medieval students of nature 

 with the words, 



Assuredly, through all the middle ages there were men who noticed such 

 physical phenomena as bore upon their lives, even men who cared for the dumb 

 beginnings of what eventually might lead to natural science. But they were 

 not representative of their epoch's master energies. 



Such an attitude is due partly to the fact that the history of science 

 has as yet been little investigated ; it is also partly due to misconceptions 

 concerning the middle ages. If we appreciate what the middle ages 

 really were, we shall not be amazed to find an interest in natural science 

 then. 



Every one knows that by the term "middle ages" is roughly indi- 

 cated the period between ancient civilization and modern civilization, 

 or, more specifically, between the. decline of the Roman Empire and the 

 Italian Renaissance or the discovery of America. For a time historians, 

 under the influence either of classical or of Protestant prejudices, seemed 

 to think that between ancient civilization and modern civilization there 

 was no civilization. Therefore, the term " dark ages " was applied to the 

 middle ages. Everything worth while in modern life was supposed 

 either to have been rescued from the ruins of antiquity by the men of 

 the Renaissance, or to have originated at some time since. Every disused 

 and decadent idea or custom which modern men threw away on to the 

 historical ash-heap was designated as medieval. 



But after a while the middle ages were studied more thoroughly and 

 sympathetically. Monasticism, feudalism, scholasticism, the social and 



