658 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



but he would deny the possible existence of inhabitants at the other 

 side, " because no such race is recorded in Scripture among the de- 

 scendants of Adam." Archbishop Boniface was shocked at the as- 

 sumption of a " world of human beings out of the reach of the means 

 of salvation." Thus reined in, science was not likely to make much 

 j^rogress. Later on, the political and theological strife between the 

 Church and civil governments, so powerfully depicted by Draper, 

 must have done much to stifle investigation. 



Whewell makes many wise and brave remarks regarding the spirit 

 of the middle ages. It was a menial spirit. The seekers after nat- 

 ural knowledge had forsaken that fountain of living waters, the direct 

 appeal to Nature by observation and experiment, and had given them- 

 selves up to the remanipulation of the notions of their predecessors. 

 It was a time when thought had become abject, and when the accept- 

 ance of mere authority led, as it always does in science, to intellectual 

 death. Natural events, instead of being traced to physical, were re- 

 ferred to moral causes, while an exercise of the fantasy, almost as 

 degrading as the spiritualism of the present day, took the place of 

 scientific speculation. Then came the mysticism of the middle ages, 

 magic, alchemy, the Neo-pl atonic philosophy, with its visionary though 

 sublime attractions, which caused men to look with shame upon their 

 own bodies as hindrances to the absorption of the creature in the 

 blessedness of the Creator. Finally came the scholastic philosophy, 

 a fusion, according to Lange, of the least mature notions of Aristotle 

 with the Christianity of the West. Intellectual immobility was the 

 result. As a traveler without a compass in a fog may wander long, 

 imagining he is making way, and find himself, after hours of toil, at 

 his starting-point, so the schoolmen, having tied and imtied the same 

 knots, and formed and dissipated the same clouds, found themselves 

 at the end of centuries in their old position. 



With regard to the influence wielded by Aristotle in the middle 

 ages, and which, though to a less extent, he still wields, I would ask 

 permission to make one remark. When the human mind has achieved 

 greatness and given evidence of extraordinary power in any domain, 

 there is a tendency to credit it with similar power in all other do- 

 mains. Thus theologians have found comfort and assurance in the 

 thought that Newton dealt with the question of revelation, forgetful 

 of the fact that the very devotion of his powers, through all the best 

 years of his life, to a totally difierent class of ideas, not to speak of 

 any natural disqualification, tended to render him less instead of more 

 competent to deal with theological and historic questions. Goethe, 

 starting from his established greatness as a poet, and indeed from his 

 positive discoveries in natural history, produced a profound impres- 

 sion among the painters of Germany when he published his " Farben- 

 lehre," in which he endeavored to overthrow Newton's theory of col- 

 ors. This theory he deemed so obviously absurd, that he considered 



