CHAPTER VIII 



THE DECLINE OF SCIENCE IN LATE ANTIQUITY 



The decline of ancient civilisation: its causes 



IT HAS ALREADY been pointed out that the natural science of antiquity 

 reached its zenith in Aristotle, and a number of reasons have been given 

 for the fact that only in points of detail, but never in regard to the sum- 

 marizing of the results achieved, did it advance beyond his standpoint. While 

 Rome, first as a republic and then as an empire, was conquering and adminis- 

 tering the whole of the civilized world, there began an era which, more than 

 any other, should have been devoted to promoting the work of intellectual 

 culture. The universal peace that prevailed during the first two centuries of 

 the Christian era has never had its counterpart either before or since, for the 

 border feuds and insurrections which disturbed it were entirely local and 

 transient. And as there was peace, there was also prosperity; even up to the 

 present day the ruins of buildings bear witness to the common and private 

 wealth of those days throughout the length and breadth of the Roman 

 Empire. And yet it was this very epoch which witnessed the decline of an- 

 cient science — indeed the whole of the culture of antiquity. It was not long 

 before the best minds in the intellectual world of the time realized this fact. 

 Pliny, for instance, is never tired of repeating that humanity is corrupt and 

 that his age was worse than the era that had passed. The reason he gives is 

 the increasing corruption of morals — an assertion with which innumerable 

 other ancient authors are in agreement and which has therefore been re- 

 peated in more recent times. The cause cannot lie there, however; moral cor- 

 ruption is always a symptom and not a cause of cultural decadence. The cause 

 is far more likely to be found in the change in the common conception of life 

 which was a consequence of subjection under the Empire. The ancient provin- 

 cial patriotism had lost its power to survive and there was no possibility of 

 any fresh form of social community developing; instead the individual per- 

 sonality appears as struggling for freedom from external oppression and 

 grievances. This self-assertion against an oppressive existence both Epicu- 

 reans and Stoics sought to put into practice, each in their own way; but, as 

 we have seen, their teachings formed no good soil in which to cultivate 

 empirical research. In the long run, however, the purely negative insensibility 

 to suffering which constituted the philosophy of life of these schools of 

 thought could not suffice; in their place appeared lines of thought start- 



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