time: the refreshing river 



number, believe it to embody a world-outlook of great value and to 

 be capable of providing the working researcher with a reliable guide 

 to his thought, not indeed telling him what he is likely to find, but 

 ensuring that when he has found it he shall avoid making the various 

 kinds of mistakes which builders of scientific theory have often made. 

 If we look back at the beginnings of the scientific movement in 

 England and throughout Europe, we see at once that the "founding 

 fathers" of science were by no means indifferent to philosophy. The 

 rise of the "new or experimental philosophy" was carried through to 

 the accompaniment of a furious battle with the surviving representa- 

 tives of the Aristotelian or scholastic tradition. In order to gain some 

 understanding of what the early scientific workers were up against, 

 every student of science to-day should read the Scepsis Scientifica of 

 Joseph Glanville,^ or the classical essay on this seventeenth-century 

 struggle by Francis Gotch.^ In the year 1631 a young man delivered 

 in the Old Schools of Cambridge University, only a stone's throw 

 from where I write these lines, an "academic prolusion" in the 

 form of a frontal attack on scholastic philosophy. That young 

 man was John Milton, later to be Latin or Foreign Secretary of the 

 Commonwealth of England. The studies of scholastic philosophy, 

 he said:^ 



"are as fruitless as they are joyless, and can add nothing 

 whatever to true knowledge. If we set before our eyes those 

 hordes of old men in monkish garb, the chief authors of these 

 quibbles, how many among them have ever contributed anything 

 to the enrichment of literature ? Beyond a doubt, by their harsh 

 and uncouth treatment they have nearly rendered hideous that 

 philosophy which was once courteous, well-ordered, and urbane, 

 and like evil genii they have implanted thorns and briars in 

 men's hearts, and introduced discord into the schools, which has 

 wondrously retarded the progress of our scholars. For these 

 quick-change philosophasters of ours argue back and forth, one 

 bolstering up his thesis on every side, another labouring hard 



•^ Scepsis Scientifica; or Confest Ignorance the Way to Science, in an essay on the Vanity 

 of Dogmatising and Confident Opinion by Joseph Glanville, F.R.S. (London, 1661, 

 reprinted 1885). 



^ In Lectures on the Method of Science, ed. T. B. Strong (Oxford, 1906). For other 

 details on the twilight of Aristotelianism, see my History of Embryology (Cambridge, 



1934). 



^ John Milton's Private Correspondence and Academic Exercises, tr. P. B. Tillyard, 

 ed. E. M. W. Tillyard (Cambridge, 1932). The third Prolusion, pp. 67 ff. 



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