NEW CHAPTERS IN THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE. 151 



blessing of Heaven rested upon his labors ; and among the legends 

 embodying this claim is that given by the Bollandists and immor- 

 talized by a renowned painter. The great philosopher and saint is 

 represented in the habit of his order, with book and pen in hand, 

 kneeling before the image of Christ crucified, and as he kneels the 

 image thus addresses him : " Thomas, thou hast written well con- 

 cerning me; what price wilt thou receive for thy labor?" The 

 myth-making faculty of the people at large was also brought into 

 play. According to a wide-spread and circumstantial legend, Al- 

 bert, by magical means, created an android — an artificial man, liv- 

 ing, speaking, and answering all questions with such subtlety that 

 St. Thomas, unable to answer its reasoning, broke it to pieces with 

 his staff. 



To this day historians of the Roman Church like Rohrbacher, 

 and historians of science like Pouchet, find it convenient to pro- 

 pitiate the Church by dilating upon the glories of St. Thomas 

 Aquinas in thus making an alliance between religious and scien- 

 tific thought, and laying the foundations for a " sanctified science" ; 

 but the unprejudiced historian can not indulge in this enthusiastic 

 view : the results both for the Church and for science have been 

 most unfortunate. It was a wretched delay in the evolution of 

 fruitful thought; for the first result of this great man's great 

 compromise was to close for ages that path in science which above 

 all others leads to discoveries of value — the experimental method 

 — and to reopen that old path of mixed theology and science 

 which, as Hallam declares, " after three or four hundred years 

 had not untied a single knot or added one unequivocal truth to 

 the domain of philosophy " — the path which, as all modern his- 

 tory proves, has ever since led only to delusion and evil.* 



* For the work of Aquinas, see his Liber de Coelo et Mundo, section xx ; also, Life and 

 Labors of St. Thomas of Aquin, by Archbishop Vaughan, pp. 459 et seq. For his labors in 

 natural science, see Hoefer, Histoire de la Chirnie, Paris, 1843, vol. i, p. 381. For theological 

 views of science in the middle ages, and rejoicing thereat, see Pouchet, Hist, des Sci. Nat. 

 au Moyen Age, ubi supra. Pouchet says : " En general au milieu du moyen age les sciences 

 sont essentiellemcnt chretiennes, leur but est tout-a-fait religieux, et elles semblent beaucoup 

 moins s'inquieter de 1'avancement intellectuel de l'homme que de son salut eternel." Pouchet 

 calls this " conciliation " into a " harmonieux ensemble " " la plus glorieuse des conquetes 

 intellectuelles du moyen age." Pouchet belongs to Rouen, and the shadow of Rouen 

 Cathedi^i seems thrown over all his history. See, also, FAbbe Rohrbacher, Hist, de 

 l'Eglise Catholique, Paris, 1858, vol. xviii, pp. 421 et seq. The abbe dilates upon the fact 

 that " the Church organizes the agreement of all the sciences by the labors of St. Thomas 

 of Aquin and his contemporaries." For the complete subordination of science to theology 

 by St. Thomas, see Eicken, chap. vi. For the theological character of science in the middle 

 ages, recognized by a Protestant philosophic historian, see the well-known passage in Guizot, 

 History of Civilization in Europe ; and by a noted Protestant ecclesiastic, see Bishop Hamp- 

 den's Life of Thomas Aquinas, chaps, xxxvi, xxxvii ; see also Hallam, Middle Ages, chap, 

 ix. For dealings of Pope John XXII, of the Kings of France and England, and of the Re- 

 public of Venice, see Figuier, L'Alchimie et les Alchimistes, pp. 140, 141, where, in a note, 



