274 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



city life of antiquity, but with these modern differences, that religion 

 was separate from the state, and that the institution of human slavery 

 found no place in the medieval town. There the freeman was not 

 ashamed to toil, and the runaway serf could acquire liberty. Slavery 

 has been reckoned by one historian of science as one of the five great 

 obstacles to the advance of science in antiquity; if so, the middle ages 

 were better off in this respect. 



Early in the twelfth century there was a great outburst of enthusiasm 

 for learning and of intellectual curiosity. Students swarmed from all 

 parts of western Europe seeking teachers ; the result was that foundation 

 of the European universities whose intellectual life has been continuous 

 from then until now. Eoman law was revived and studied scientifically. 

 The fruits of Greek philosophy, preserved by the Arabs in Spain or the 

 Orient in translations and commentaries, were translated again, — this 

 time into Latin, which in the Christian West was now the universal 

 language of scholarship. Humanism, classical scholarship in the strict 

 and narrow sense, and the great paintings and sculptures of the Italians 

 in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, were but later phases of 

 the same movement. Petrarch, the first great humanist, who adored 

 Cicero, wrote letters like Pliny the Younger, collected and copied ancient 

 manuscripts, and came to scorn all contemporary interests except his own 

 fame, has often been called the first modern man, but in many ways seems a 

 reactionary looking backward. Abelard, the first great schoolman, who 

 over two centuries before Petrarch's time wandered forth from his 

 native Brittany, first seeking teachers, then triumphing over them, then 

 attracting students to himself ; Abelard, who dared to show that even the 

 church fathers held conflicting opinions, and who advocated sceptical 

 and systematic criticism as the best road to knowledge; Abelard, more 

 than Petrarch, deserves the title of the first modern man. 



Turning now from medieval civilization as a whole to this medieval 

 learning in particular, let us correct some erroneous notions concerning 

 it. For one thing, we have been taught to call medieval learning 

 scholasticism, and to think of it as concerned almost exclusively with 

 logic, metaphysics and theology ; while we have been taught to associate 

 the beginnings of modern science with the Italian Eenaissance. But the 

 fact is that the narrow humanist of the Eenaissance took no more inter- 

 est in natural science than did the narrow schoolman of the middle ages. 

 The sciences which they cultivated were philology and theology. The 

 fact is that natural science has had a more or less continuous develop- 

 ment of its own, largely independent of the middle ages and Eenaissance. 

 Books on nature written in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were 

 still satisfactory to readers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as is 

 shown by numerous editions of them which were printed then. 



The reliance of the middle ages upon the authority of the Greek 



