HIPPARCHUS OF NICEA 7 



obviously become incapable of such activity. Besides, for a 

 long time it was forbidden by force to cast doubt either 

 upon Aristotle or upon the Bible. The University and the 

 Inquisition took care of this, which fact is a further proof of 

 the low level to which intellectual activity had sunk. 



The healing effect of the passage of centuries, which 

 allowed men of sufficient purity of blood again to reach 

 dominance^ was first seen in two events of a more superficial 

 character, though art in the form of the Gothic cathedrals 

 had already developed. Gutenberg invented printing in the 

 year 1440; Columbus in 1492 began his bold and protracted 

 journey to the West, and brought back the astonishing news 

 of the circumnavigability of the earth, which showed it to 

 be a sphere freely suspended in space; with living beings 

 upon it with their feet towards us (Antipodes). Hitherto it 

 had been forbidden even to speak openly of the possibility 

 of their existence; while Gutenberg's achievement now 

 made it much easier than before to bring living and enquiring 

 spirits into contact with one another, Columbus' discovery 

 showed the assumption of a fixed and immovable earth, one 

 of the chief doctrines of Aristotle and the Bible, to be at 

 least extremely doubtful. 



Upon this followed, step by step, a new era of investiga- 

 tion, the main steps of which we shall now follow in connec- 

 tion with their chief representatives^ 



Before doing so, I should like to express my opposition 

 to a point of view which is frequently put forward to-day; 

 the view that this new era of investigation depended upon 

 a new method of investigation, namely observation and 

 experiment; and that Tycho, Stevin, and Galileo were funda- 

 mentally different in type from Archimedes and Hipparchus. 



^ This effect was certainly aided by the spread of a wider knowledge of 

 Greek literature (after 1453); but these writings were also previously not 

 entirely lost to knowledge, and the fundamental reason for their tem- 

 porary disappearance still remains the absence of persons capable of 

 properly understanding them. 



