CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY, MIDDLE AGES 65 



the purely ancient school his romantic piety must have been repulsive, while 

 the more mystically minded, who even then represented the majority, were 

 on the whole not at all interested in exact natural science. The miracle- 

 workers' laying on of hands and invocations were undoubtedly more relied 

 upon than Galen's curative method, based on anatomical studies. On the 

 whole, during this period interest in the study of nature waned more and 

 more, at least in the sense in which the philosophers of old times understood 

 it; the most one could do for educational purposes was to collect stories 

 about natural objects. One such collection is the treatise still preserved in 

 our day On the Habits of Animals, which was written by Claudius v^lianus 

 a generation after Galen. This writer, who was an orator by profession — 

 that is to say, a public lecturer — lived in Rome in the first half of the third 

 century; he is believed to have died in the year x6o. His work is a collection 

 of anecdotes about animals, gathered from various sources — thus following 

 the method of Pliny. But while in Pliny the interest in nature is the prin- 

 cipal motive, i^lianus is actuated by a feeling of pure edification. Pliny, it 

 is true, can also edify his readers with the examples he cites of the virtues 

 of elephants, but they are related in order to testify to the animals' great 

 qualities of soul. In .^lianus even the lowest creatures are uplifted by a 

 purely personal reverence for the Creator, so that the ecclesiastical writers 

 of the Middle Ages had only to substitute the names of Christian saints 

 for those of the gods quoted and they thus found ready to hand a collection 

 of the most edifying sermons. Thus i^lianus tells of a cock that had one 

 of its legs broken; the bird hopped on its other leg before a statue of a god, 

 and stretching out the broken foot, crowed so pathetically that the god 

 showed his mercy by miraculously healing the injury, whereupon the cock, 

 gratefully flapping its wings, went on its way. Here we find the purely 

 mediaeval conception, and this more than a century before the final victory 

 of Christianity; an example, i^iter alia, of the incorrectness of the frequent 

 assertion that the Christian Church after its victory eradicated the culture 

 of antiquity. 



Neo-Platonists 

 With regard to the natural sciences an attempt has been made in the fore- 

 going to throw light on the process of internal dissolution which gradually 

 led biology from Aristotle's magnificent system of thought down to i^li- 

 anus' collection of legends. The interest in natural phenomena which had 

 for so long been a living factor in the ancient world of culture had now 

 entirely disappeared. What was left of the spirit of research turned to ideal- 

 istic philosophy, Plato's creation, which was further developed by thinkers 

 who adopted his name and made his theory of ideas their starting-point, 

 proceeding thence in a curious direction, at the same time speculative and 

 full of religious mysticism. In their relations with the outer world these 



