158 THE LIFE OF SCIENCE 



by their political servitude and by the jealous intolerance and the 

 utter lack of generosity (to put it mildly!) of their rivals. More- 

 over, for the reason explained above, the main sources of knowl- 

 edge were now less available to them than to their persecutors. 

 This went much deeper than it seems, for when an abundant 

 treasure of knowledge becomes suddenly available to a group of 

 people, it is not only the knowledge itself that matters, but the 

 stimulation following in its wake. The Jews were steadily driven 

 into the background, and in proportion as they were more isolated, 

 they tended to increase their isolation by devoting their attention 

 more exclusively to their own Talmudic studies. 



Toward the end of the thirteenth century some of the greatest 

 doctors of Christendom, Albert the Great, Roger Bacon, Ramon 

 Lull, were ready to acknowledge the many superiorities of Arabic 

 culture. It is paradoxical but not surprising that at the very time 

 when that full realization had come to them, that culture was 

 already declining, and their own was finally triumphing. From 

 that time on, the Christians enjoyed the political and intellectual 

 hegemony. The center of gravity of the learned world was in the 

 West and it has remained there until our own days ; by a strange 

 irony of fate it may even pass some day beyond the western 

 ocean which was then supposed to be an insuperable barrier. 

 Moreover, because of the decadence and fall of Muslim Spain 

 and of the growing isolation and aloofness of the Jews, the 

 West became more and more westernized. Of course Muslim 

 and Jewish efforts went on and both faiths produced many great 

 men in the following centuries, yet the western supremacy con- 

 tinued to wax until a time was reached, in the sixteenth century, 

 when the expanding civilization was so deeply westernized that 

 the people — even those of the Orient — began to forget its oriental 

 origins, and when the very conception of Muslim and Jewish 

 science almost disappeared. That conception may seem artificial 

 to us, but I believe I have made it clear enough that it was a per- 

 fectly natural and necessary one in medieval times. The final 

 results of science are, of course, independent of the people who 



