NEW CHAPTERS IN THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE. 293 



Of the general reasoning enforced by theology regarding 

 physical science, every age has shown examples ; yet out of them 

 all I will select but two, and I present these because they show 

 how this mixture of theological with scientific ideas took hold 

 upon the strongest supporters of better reasoning even after the 

 power of mediaeval theology seemed broken. 



The first of these examples is Melanchthon. He was the scholar 

 of the Reformation, and justly won the title " Preceptor of Ger- 

 many " ; his mind was singularly open, his sympathies broad, and 

 his freedom from bigotry drew down upon him that wrath of 

 Protestant heresy-hunters which embittered the last years of his 

 life and tortured him upon his death-bed. During his career at 

 the University of Wittenberg he gave a course of lectures on 

 physics. In this he dwells upon scriptural texts as affording sci- 

 entific proofs, accepts the interference of the devil in physical 

 phenomena as in other directions, and applies the mediaeval theo- 

 logical method throughout his whole work.* 



Yet far more remarkable was the example, a century later, of 

 the man who more than any other led the modern world out of 

 the path opened by Aquinas, and into that which Roger Bacon 

 had sought to open and which has led modern thought to its 

 greatest conquests. Strange as it may at first seem, Francis 

 Bacon, whose keenness of sight revealed the delusions of the old 

 path and the promises of the new, and whose boldness did so 

 much to turn the world from the old path into the new, presents 

 in his own writings one of the most striking examples of the evil 

 he did so much to destroy. 



The Novum Organon, considering the time when it came from 

 his pen, is doubtless one of the greatest exhibitions of genius in 

 the history of human thought. It showed the modern world the 

 way out of the scholastic method and reverence for dogma into 

 the experimental method and reverence for fact. In it occur 

 many passages which show that the great philosopher was fully 

 alive to the danger both to religion and to science arising from 

 their mixture. He declares that the "corruption of philosophy 

 from superstition and theology introduced the greatest amount of 



possibilities of God assuming forms of stone, or log, or beast, see Lippert, Christenthum, 

 Volksglaube, und Volksbrauch, pp. 372, 373, where citations are given, etc. For the syllo- 

 gism regarding Solomon, see Figuier, L'Alchemie et les Alchemistes, pp. 106, 107. For 

 careful appreciation of Becher's position in the history of chemistry, see Kopp, Ansichten 

 iiber die Aufgabe der Chemie, etc., von Geber bis Stahl, Braunschweig, 1875, pp. 201 et 

 seq. For the text proving the existence of the philosopher's stone from the book of Revela- 

 tion, see Figuier, p. 22. 



* For Melanchthon's ideas on physics, see his Initia Doctrina? Physica?, Wittenberg, 1557, 

 especially pp. 243 and 274 ; also in vol. xiii of Bretschneider's edition of the collected works, 

 and especially pp. 339-343. 



