August i8, 192 i] 



NATURE 



771 



local societies throughout the country could par- 

 ticipate to some degree. The local archaeological 

 societies have done good work, but in the present 

 state of our knowledge there is great need that 

 their work should be standardised and given 

 direction on a more or less common basis. This 

 object might be attained by a system of affiliation 

 and co-operation, more close than any now exist- 

 ing, with some central body such as the institute 

 here suggested. 



Astrology. 



(i) The Mediaeval Attitude toward Astrology, par- 

 ticularly in England. By Theodore Otto Wedel. 

 (Vale Studies in English. No. Ix.) Pp. vii-l- 

 168. (New Haven: Yale University Press; 

 London : Humphrey Milford : Oxford Univer- 

 sity Press, 1920.) 10s. 6d. net. 

 (2) Opera hactenus inedita Rogeri Baconi, 

 Fasc. V. Secretum Secretorum cum glossis et 

 notulis ; Tractatus brevis et utilis ad declaran- 

 dum quedam obscure dicta. By Fratris Rogeri. 

 Nunc primum edidit Robert Steele. Accedunt 

 versio Anglicana ex Arabico edita per A. S. 

 Fulton. Versio retusta Anglo-Normanica nunc 

 primum edita. Pp. lxiv + 317. (Oxford: Claren- 

 don Press.) 285. net. 



THE attitude of man towards Nature may be 

 said to have two stages — the " magical " 

 and the "scientific." In the former, man lives 

 in a world surrounded by other ill-defined beings 

 and powers. From time to time he finds, or 

 thinks he finds, some way to make these subserve 

 his will, but he has as yet no apprehension of a 

 constant relation of cause and effect. In the 

 later, scientific stage — which first presents itself 

 clearly to our view in the Ionian philosophers of 

 the sixth century B.C. — a belief has arisen in 

 natural law, in an invariable relation of cause 

 and effect. Perhaps the most important step in 

 the journey towards this belief was the discovery 

 of the regularity in the movements of the heavenly 

 bodies. The laws that these movements exhibit 

 had long been the subject of organised observa- 

 tion in the Mesopotamian civilisations from which 

 the lonians inherited a wealth of data. But the 

 Greeks had a passionate, almost an instinctive, 

 belief in natural law, though few such laws had 

 been demonstrated. Perceiving the majestic and 

 regular recurrence of heavenly phenomena, they 

 learned to predict them. They saw, too, that 

 winter and summer, seed-time and harvest, day 

 and night, and all the other broadly cyclic events 

 of life, could be brought into some sort of rela- 

 tion with the heavenly cycle. Outside and beyond 

 NO. 2703, VOL. 107] 



these there were, indeed, innumerable less regular 

 and unpredictable phenomena, for there was as 

 yet no biology, no chemistry, practically no 

 physics, and scarcely any mathematics. What 

 more reasonable than to attribute a relation be- 

 tween the phenomena observed to be cyclic and 

 those the laws of which were yet unknown? 

 Natural laws there must be, and the field of the 

 known was but extended into the unknown. 

 Thus astrology was born. 



Later a definite geocentric spherical system of 

 the universe was introduced — a system that held 

 its own right down to Copernicus and Galileo and 

 beyond. The earth was surrounded by those 

 mysterious concentric spheres in which the stars 

 and planets held their place — the heavenly bodies 

 considered by the greatest of the philosophers to 

 be eternal and divine. Spatially the universe was 

 Umited ; outside the outmost sphere was nothing ; 

 within the inmost sphere was the little w'orld on 

 which we live. To such a view the theory of 

 astral and planetary control of our world was 

 attractive, satisfying, well-nigh inevitable. It 

 needed only verification, but verification was not 

 the strong point of the scientific system of 

 antiquity, still less of the Dark and Middle Ages 

 which followed. The belief in the value of astro- 

 logy thus remained almost universal from Greek 

 times until the seventeenth century. It is unfair to 

 regard it as a superstition. It is but a discarded 

 and untenable scientific hypothesis. 



Astrology, however, had a foe, and that foe 

 was the Church, or rather the Churches. But 

 the opposition of the Churches must not be 

 accounted to them for scientific righteousness; 

 rather it was the other way. The Churches were 

 ever insistent on man's dependence on God. 

 How, then, could man's existence be regulated 

 by the action of the stars that were but God's 

 creatures? Yet as time went on the opposition 

 of all religions. Christian and other, gradually 

 weakened. It became evident that even God 

 Himself worked through agents, and why should 

 not these agents be the stars that He had made? 

 Thus room was made for the acceptance of astro- 

 logical belief, which from patristic times onward 

 gained steadily on men's minds. In the twelfth 

 and thirteenth centuries, as the great Arabian 

 revival of learning penetrated to the West, astro- 

 logy became a highly elaborate science ; by the 

 fifteenth century, with the ebb of the scholastic 

 movement, it had become a widespread obsession 

 that infected alike the university, the council 

 chamber, the law court, and the physician's con- 

 sulting-room. 



(i) The general history of this extraordinary 



