PROGRESS OF THE ARTS. 240 



Mid manufactures, luxury and art, medicine and engineering, in which 

 there were not going on innumerable processes, which may be termed 

 Experiments ; and, in addition to these, the Arabians adopted the pur- 

 suit of alchemy, and the love of exotic plants and animals. But so far 

 from their being, as has been maintained, 3 a people whose " experi- 

 mental intellect" fitted them to form sciences which the " abstract in- 

 tellect" of the Greeks failed in producing, it rather appears, that several 

 of the sciences which the Greeks had founded, were never even com- 

 prehended by the Arabians. I do not know any evidence that these 

 pupils ever attained to understand the real principles of Mechanics, 

 Hydrostatics, and Harmonics, which their masters had established. At 

 any rate, when these sciences again became progressive, Europe had 

 to start where Europe had stopped. There is no Arabian name which 

 any one has thought of interposing between Archimedes the ancient, 

 and Stevinus and Galileo the moderns. 



4. Roger Bacon. There is one writer of the middle ages, on whom 

 much stress has been laid, and who was certainly a most remarkable 

 person. Roger Bacon's works are not only so far beyond his age in 

 the knowledge which they contain, but so different from the temper of 

 the times, in his assertion of the supremacy of experiment, and in his 

 contemplation of the future progress of knowledge, that it is difficult 

 to conceive how such a character could then exist. That he received 

 much of his knowledge from Arabic writers, there can be no doubt ; 

 for they were in his time the repositories of all traditionary knowledge. 

 But that he derived from them his disposition to shake off the author- 

 ity of Aristotle, to maintain the importance of experiment, and to look 

 upon knowledge as in its infancy, I cannot believe, because I have not 

 myself hit upon, nor seen quoted by others, any passages in which 

 Arabian writers express such a disposition. On the other hand, we do 

 find in European writers, in the authors of Greece and Rome, the 

 solid sense, the bold and hopeful spirit, which suggest such tendencies. 

 We have already seen that Aristotle asserts, as distinctly as words can 

 express, that all knowledge must depend on observation, and that 

 science must be collected from facts by induction. We have seen, too, 

 that the Roman writers, and Seneca in particular, speak with an en- 

 thusiastic confidence of the progress which science must make in the 

 course of ages. When Roger Bacon holds similar language in the 

 thirteenth century, the resemblance is probably rather a sympathy of 

 character, than a matter of direct derivation ; but I know of nothing 



3 Mahomcfanitm U/ivelled, ii. 271. 



