NATURAL SCIENCE IN THE MIDDLE AGES 273 



The results of this contact were felt first in Spain and Italy, but 

 the new civilization became generally manifest throughout western 

 Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. This is the period of 

 which I shall speak this afternoon, and I shall now remind you of some 

 things in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that were modern in 

 character, so that you may not be surprised when I suggest that modern 

 science, too, began in the middle ages. A book has been written recently 

 on what we owe to the Greeks ; let us see what we owe to the middle ages. 



In the first place, the Celtic and Teutonic races and the Roman 

 Catholic church. Those races were absorbed, and were trained and 

 inspired to erect a new civilization. In this work the church, as the 

 greatest social force of the times, played the chief part. It has well 

 been said that the Teutonic vigor and originality, and the spirit of 

 western Christianity were quite as responsible for the Italian Renais- 

 sance as was the classical revival. There was no renaissance at Con- 

 stantinople, though there was plenty of study of Greek there. At Con- 

 stantinople classical culture remained as it were in cold storage. In 

 Italy there was a fresh living movement. New blood and new ideals 

 were responsible. 



Secondly and more specifically, our modern languages and literatures 

 began in the middle ages before the classical revival. Already in the 

 twelfth and thirteenth centuries the languages of modern Europe were 

 taking on literary form, and poets were expressing in their own tongues 

 the spirit of a new age. A specialist in comparative literature assures 

 us that the popular literature of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries 

 resembles eighteenth and nineteenth century literature more than it 

 does that of the ninth and tenth centuries which were so much nearer 

 in mere point of time. 



In art we owe to the middle ages the marvelous Gothic style of archi- 

 tecture with its new structural conceptions and infinite resource of 

 adornment. 



In politics there began then national states in contrast to the city 

 states and empires of antiquity. - Representative government, too, was 

 developed as it had not been in ancient times. Representative institu- 

 tions were widespread in western Europe at the close of the thirteenth 

 century, and survived in England through succeeding centuries to 

 furnish a model for other nations which reintroduced parliamentary 

 government in the nineteenth century. Bishop Stubbs limited his 

 famous " Constitutional History of England " to the medieval period. 

 During that time the English were busy making their constitution; 

 ever since they have been busy breaking it. 



The middle ages recovered from the economic dry-rot which had 

 ruined the Roman empire from within before ever the barbarians broke 

 through its military shell from without. The middle ages revived the 



vol. lxxxvii. — 19. 



