452 FRAGMENTS OF 8CIKNCE. 



acteristics must have bad their antecedents in the circum- 

 stances of the time. Kome, and the other cities of the 

 empire, had fallen into moral putrefaction. Christianity 

 had appeared, offering the Gospel to the poor, and hy 

 moderation, if not asceticism of life, practically protesting 

 against the profligacy of the age. The sufferings of the 

 early Christians, and the extraordinary exaltation of mind 

 which enabled them to triumph over the diabolical tortures 

 to which they were' subjected,* must have left traces not 

 easily effaced. They scorned the earth, in view of that 

 " building of God, that house not made with hands, eternal 

 in the heavens." The Scriptures which ministered to 

 their spiritual needs were also the measure of their Science. 

 AV hen, for example, the celebrated question of Antipodes 

 came to be discussed, the Bible was with many the ultimate 

 court of appeal. Augustine, who flourished A.D. 400, 

 would not deny the rotundity of the earth; but he would 

 deny the possible existence of inhabitants at the other side, 

 " because no such race is recorded in Scripture among the 

 descendants of Adam." Archbishop Boniface was shocked 

 at the assumption 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 progress. 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 natural knowledge had forsaken the 

 fountain of living waters, the direct appeal to nature by 

 observation and experiment, and given themselves up to 

 the rernanipulation of the notions of their predecessors. 

 It was a time when thought had become abject, and when 

 the acceptance of mere authority led, as it always does in 

 science, to intellectual death. Natural events, instead of 

 being traced to physical, were referred to moral causes; 

 while an exercise of the phantasy, almost as degrading as 

 the spiritualism of the present day, took the place of scien- 

 tific speculation. Then came the mysticism of the middle 

 ages, magic, alchemy, the NenplatoniG philosophy, with 

 its visionary though sublime abstractions, which caused 



* Described with terrible vividness in Kenan's " Antichrist." 



