THE MEDIAEVAL ATTITUDE 



itual and natural fortunes of men, and to relieve 

 them from disease and death. In the popular mind and 

 even, frequently, amongst the learned, such studies 

 were held to be allied to magic and the black arts; the 

 masters of these sciences were often either Arabs 

 or Jews who were execrated as damnable heretics 

 and against whom the Christians, in their crusades, 

 found the only sufficient cause for any general unity 

 of action. Far outnumbering the genuine seekers of 

 knowledge, charlatans infested society and claimed 

 to know how to find the philosopher's stone and to 

 transmute lead into gold, or to tell fortunes by the 

 stars. Civil and ecclesiastical rulers frequently main- 

 tained alchemists and astrologers in their courts in 

 order to obtain material and supernatural advantages 

 from their skill, and at the same time feared and de- 

 tested them lest these advantages should be reaped 

 at the risk of their own damnation. 



There is no evidence of organized opposition to the 

 sciences themselves, as shown by edicts of the Church, 

 until the twelfth and thirteenth centuries when the 

 power of the ascetic monkish orders was at its height. 

 Even then, we find none against the study of mathe- 

 matics because it was regarded as purely a mental 

 exercise and did not concern man's place in this world 

 or his relation to God. Both the Church and the Uni- 

 versity of Paris strictly forbade the study and teach- 

 ing of physics because that science was based on the 

 atomic theory and the principle of natural law; both 



[83] 



