THE 



POPULAR SCIENCE 



MONTHLY. 



JANUARY, 1893. 



NEW CHAPTERS IN THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE. 



XVIII.— FROM MAGIC TO CHEMISTRY AND PHYSICS. 



By ANDKEW DICKSON WHITE, LL.D., L. II. D., 



EX-PRESIDENT OF CORNELL UNIVERSITY. 



PART II. 



WE have seen thus far, first, how such men as Eusebius, Lac- 

 tantius, and their compeers, discouraged scientific investi- 

 gation as futile; next, how such men as Albert the Great, St. 

 Thomas Aquinas, and the multitude who followed them, turned 

 the main current of mediaeval thought from science to theology ; 

 and, finally, how such Church authorities as Popes John XXII 

 and Innocent VIII, and the heads of the great religious orders, 

 endeavored to crush what was left of scientific research as dan- 

 gerous. 



Yet, injurious as all this was to the evolution of science, there 

 was developed something far more destructive ; and this was the 

 influence of mystic theology, penetrating, permeating, sterilizing 

 nearly every branch of science for hundreds of years. Among the 

 forms taken by this development in the earlier middle ages we 

 find a mixture of physical science with a pseudo-science obtained 

 from texts of Scripture. In compounding this mixture, Jews and 

 Christians vied with each other. In this process the sacred books 

 were used as a fetich ; every word, every letter, being considered to 

 have a divine and hidden meaning. By combining various script- 

 ural letters in various abstruse ways, new words of prodigious sig- 

 nificance in magic were obtained, and among them the great word 

 embracing the seventy-two mystical names of God — the mighty 

 word " Schemhamphoras." Why should men seek knowledge by 



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