THE HIGHER VALUES OF SCIENCE 297 



attainment. But in some respects esthetic appreciation 

 was undeveloped even among the Greeks. The beauties of 

 the landscape seem to have been largely ignored, at least 

 such beauty is not commonly referred to in the Greek liter- 

 ature that has been preserved. The influence of Christian 

 theology partly obliterated what remained of the classical 

 artistic sense after the fall of the Roman Empire. Despite 

 the Gothic cathedrals, which typify medieval exaltation 

 and aspiration, the modern esthetic spirit has been a new 

 birth coincident with the rise of the rationalistic spirit. 

 Dante's appreciation of nature was a new note and is dis- 

 tinctly modern. Petrarch's descriptions of natural scenes, 

 his mountain climbing, and the beginning of modern land- 

 scape painting in the work of the Italian and Flemish artists 

 of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, are examples of the 

 lifting of the veil thrown over nature during the Middle 

 Ages. These esthetic developments have occurred in a 

 period dominated by science. 8 



It is, therefore, hard to believe that there exists in science 

 anything hostile to the esthetic frame of mind, when we 

 realize that this re-creation of the esthetic sense and its 

 subsequent development have been accomplished in part by 

 individuals, who, from Petrarch onward, have been imbued 

 with the spirit of the modern scientific mind. The Greek 

 use of art to inculcate right thinking meets the unqualified 

 approval of the modern scientific student of the methods of 

 education. And it is recognized by every broad-minded 

 follower of science that outside the sphere of scientific in- 

 vestigation there exists another approach by which men may 

 draw near to nature, namely, through the appreciation of 

 nature's beauty. The scientist, therefore, finds esthetic 

 delight in his intellectual endeavor, and he does not find his 

 senses dulled to the beauties of nature, save as the intensive 

 study of particular phenomena inevitably leads to a certain 



8 Burckhardt, J., "The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy," Pt. IV, 

 Chap. Ill, "The Discovery of Natural Beauty." 



