INDISTINCTNESS OF IDEAS. 199 



ancient literature would no more exist for us, than the works, if any 

 there were, published before the catastrophe that annihilated that 

 highly scientific nation, which, according to Bailly, existed in remote 

 ages in the centre of Tartary, or at the roots of Caucasus. In the 

 sciences we should have had all to create ; and at the moment when 

 the human mind should have emerged from its stupor and shaken off 

 its slumbers, we should have been no more advanced than the Greeks 

 were after the taking of Troy." He adds, that this consideration in- 

 spires feelings towards the religious orders very different from those 

 which, when he wrote, were prevalent among his countrymen. 



Except so far as their religious opinions interfered, it was natural 

 that men who lived a life of quiet and study, and were necessarily in 

 a great measure removed from the absorbing and blinding interests 

 with which practical life occupies the thoughts, should cultivate science 

 more successfully than others, precisely because their ideas on specu- 

 lative subjects had time and opportunity to become clear and steady. 

 The studies which were cultivated under the name of the Seven Liberal 

 Arts, necessarily tended to favor this effect. The Trivium, 18 indeed, 

 which consisted of Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric, had no direct bear- 

 ing upon those ideas with which physical science is concerned; but 

 the Quadrivium, Music, Arithmetic, Geometry, Astronomy, could not 

 be pursued with any attention, without a corresponding improvement 

 of the mind for the purposes of sound knowledge. 19 



9. Popular Opinions. — That, even in the best intellects, something 

 was wanting to fit them for scientific progress and discovery, is obvious 

 from the fact that science was so long absolutely stationary. And I 

 have endeavored to show that one part of this deficiency was the want 

 of the requisite clearness and vigor of the fundamental scientific ideas. 

 If these were wanting, even in the most powerful and most cultivated 

 minds, we may easily conceive that still greater confusion and obscurity 

 prevailed in the common class of mankind. They actually adopted 

 the belief, however crude and inconsistent, that the form of the earth 

 and heavens really is what at any place it appears to be ; that the 

 earth is flat, and the waters of the sky sustained above a material floor, 

 through which in showers they descend. Yet the true doctrines of 



is Bruck. iii. 597. 



19 Roger Bacon, in his Specula Mathematical cap. i. says, " Harum scientiarutn 

 porta et clavis est mathematica, quam sancti a principio mundi invenerunt, etc. 

 Cujus negligently jam per triginta vel quadraainta annos destruxit totum studium 

 Latinorum." I do not know on what occasion this neglect took place. 



