238 SCIENCE. [x. 



dread of Nature, and of the powers thereof. For 

 when the authority of great names has reigned un- 

 questioned for many centuries, those names become, 

 to the human mind, integral and necessary parts of 

 Nature itself. They are, as it were, absorbed into it ; 

 they become its laws, its canons, its demiurges, and 

 guardian spirits; their words become regarded as 

 actual facts ; in one word, they become a superstition, 

 and are feared as parts of the vast unknown; and 

 to deny what they have said is, in the minds of the 

 many, not merely to fly in the face of reverent wisdom, 

 but to fly in the face of facts. During a great part of 

 the Middle Ages, for instance, it was impossible for 

 an educated man to think of nature itself, without 

 thinking first of what Aristotle had said of her. 

 Aristotle's dicta were Nature ; and when Benedetti, at 

 Venice, opposed in 1585 Aristotle's opinions on violent 

 and natural motion, there were hundreds, perhaps, in the 

 universities of Europe as there certainly were in the 

 days of the immortal "Epistolse Obscurorum Virorum" 

 who were ready, in spite of all Benedetti's professed 

 reverence for Aristotle, to accuse him of outraging not 

 only the father of philosophy, but Nature itself and its 

 palpable and notorious facts. For the restoration of 

 letters in the fifteenth century had not at first mended 

 matters, so strong was the dread of Nature in the 

 minds of the masses. The minds of men had sported 

 forth, not toward any sound investigation of facts, 

 but toward an eclectic resuscitation of Neoplatonism ; 

 which endured, not without a certain beauty and use 

 as let Spenser's " Faerie Queen " bear witness till 

 the latter half of the seventeenth century. 



After that time a rapid change began. It is marked 



