272 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



traveler a Leopold von Buch, for instance through the infernal re- 

 gions. 



It was not only by depreciating in the estimation of mankind the 

 world of phenomena that Christianity, during this dreary period, dis- 

 couraged the study of Nature, but also by proposing to them new and 

 peculiar aims, before unheard of. Amid a darkness of their own pro- 

 curing, men busied themselves with such problems that to them might 

 well have been addressed the reproof of Romeo to Mercutio : " Peace, 

 peace ! thou talk'st of nothing." The best minds of the time expended 

 no end of labor and ingenuity in distinguishing between absurdity and 

 nonsense. Like a plant in the dark, the ancient philosophy put forth 

 colorless and weakly sprouts which sought the light mainly in two di- 

 rections, platonistic tendencies finding expression in an insane gnosti- 

 cism, and Aristotelian tendencies in barren scholasticism. Scholasticism 

 held the ground longest, and the scholastico-ascetic period will always 

 remain as a warning to show to what length the unaided human mind, 

 divorced from the world of reality, and without the revelation of Nature, 

 can go astray. 



V. The Rise op Modern Science. 



Inasmuch as humanity recovered from this madness through the 

 study of the ancients, revived by Petrarca and Boccaccio, the next en- 

 suing stage of development is called the stage of humanism. In the 

 dusty codices the mind of the Christian West, awakened as it were 

 from a bewildering dream, got a glimpse of the grand old heathen 

 world ; and, hardly believing its own eyes, began to understand how 

 deplorably narrow was the circle of ideas within which it had in some 

 unaccountable way suffered itself to be confined for a thousand years. 

 A flood of reawakened ideas coursed through school and castle and 

 town, and even through the cloisters ; and, as it might be increased, 

 swept away the musty trumpery of mediaeval hallucination. With the 

 ideas of the ancients, their works of art, too, arose from the grave. To 

 the newly-awakened antique spirit corresponded the new form of the 

 beautiful ; and in an instant, almost, art flourished as it never has 

 flourished since, with a bloom which is to the bloom of Hellenic art 

 what a flower, perhaps of less perfect form, but of heavenly sweet odor, 

 is to a flower of perfect beauty but odorless. 



This resurrection of the human mind, with its natural consequences 

 the reformation of the Church, and the new birth of philosophy and 

 the other sciences of mind has oftentimes been described at length. 

 Still, one point has commonly been overlooked, which it is not so easy 

 satisfactorily to deduce. As we have seen, the ancients knew nothing 

 of natural science, in our sense of the term. Is it not, then, a very 

 curious circumstance that the resuscitation of classical studies should 

 have given the impulse to the development of modern natural science ? 

 that the ancients, who themselves could not think scientifically, nor 



