THE RENAISSANCE OF SCIENCE. n 



them to be made harmless — and then slew the magician; so that to 



this day the water is safe. Stories of this sort are interwoven with 



admirably intelligent accounts of these distant countries. All are 



equally credited and credible. 



What strikes a modern reader with astonishment is by no means 



the ignorance of the writer, but rather his entire lack of the critical 



faculty. This lack, for Europeans as well as for Arabs, may be taken 



as characteristic of the middle ages. Our ancestors appear, at times, 



nothing but adventurous Eskimo who had read Aristotle. 



In the year 1238 the inhabitants of Sweden Avere prevented by their fear of 

 the Tartars, from sending as usual, their ships to the herring fishery on the 

 coast of England; and as there was no exportation, forty or fifty of these fish 

 sold for a shilling. " It is whimsical enough," says Gibbon, " that the orders 

 of a Mogul Khan, who reigned on the borders of China, should have lowered 

 the price of herrings in the English market." 



The reign of Faith appears, at first glance, so absolute during the 

 Middle Ages, that one is tempted to believe that for a thousand years 

 no voice was lifted against established religion. A study of the 

 details of history brings, however, many episodes to light that exhibit 

 something like a continuous change from the rationalism of the ancients 

 to that of the moderns. The chain is easiest to trace, of course, in 

 the history of philosophy. It existed likewise in the history of science. 

 The whole of the thirteenth century, exclusively religious as it appears 

 at first sight, was stirred by an undercurrent of free inquiry which has 

 left little trace in written history solely because the history of that 

 period was written by the Dominican school. Eoger Bacon was a 

 product of his age, then, not a lusus naturae. 



The philosophy of the Arab commentators of Aristotle — pantheistic 

 in its essence — was utterly opposed to the philosophy of orthodox 

 scholastics. In the year 1209 the council of Paris condemned the 

 Natural Philosophy of Aristotle and its commentaries. A bull of 

 Gregory IX. in 1231 confirmed the condemnation. Such condemna- 

 tions demonstrated the prevalence of presumed error. By the middle of 

 the century Albertus Magnus had arranged Aristotelian teachings so 

 that they were again in favor, and he incorporated in his text, from 

 the Arabs, all that was useful to his argument. Heterodox comments 

 were refuted when they were not rejected outright. St. Thomas 

 Aquinas gave an even more solid form to orthodox philosophy and 

 waged persistent war on the specific doctrines of the Arabs. In the 

 year 1277 a series of thirteen propositions, mostly taken from Avicenna 

 and Averroes, was formally condemned at Paris and at Oxford. In 

 the general chapter of the Franciscans held at Assisi in 1295, an 

 especial warning was given against 'exotic' opinions. These instances 

 from the history of a single century indicate that there was no universal 

 stagnation. Condemnations of heterodox philosophizing were required 



