208 PHYSICAL SCIENCE IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 



totle ; Psellus the younger, in the eleventh century, attempted to 

 restore the New Platonic school. The former of these two writers 

 had for his pupils two men, the emperor Leo, surnamed the Philos- 

 opher, and Photius the patriarch, who exerted themselves to restore 

 the study of literature at Constantinople. We still possess the Collec- 

 tion of Extracts of Photius, which, like that of Stobaeus and others, 

 shows the tendency of the age to compilations, abstracts, and epitomes, 

 — the extinction of philosophical vitality. 



5. Arabian Commentators of Aristotle. — The reader might perhaps 

 have expected, that when the philosophy of the Greeks was carried 

 among a new race of intellects, of a different national character and 

 condition, the train of this servile tradition would have been broken : 

 that some new thoughts would have started forth ; that some new direc- 

 tion, some new impulse, would have been given to the search for truth. 

 It might have been anticipated that we should have had schools among 

 the Arabians which should rival the Peripatetic, Academic, and Stoic 

 among the Greeks ; — that they would preoccupy the ground on which 

 Copernicus and Galileo, Lavoisier and Linnaeus, won their fame ; — that 

 they would make the next great steps in the progressive sciences. 

 Nothing of this, however, happened. The Arabians cannot claim, in 

 science or philosophy, any really great names ; they produced no men 

 and no discoveries which have materially influenced the course and 

 destinies of human knowledge ; they tamely adopted the intellectual 

 servitude of the nation which they conquered by their arms ; they joined 

 themselves at once to the string of slaves who were dragging the car of 

 Aristotle and Plotinus. Nor, perhaps, on a little further reflection, shall 

 we be surprised at this want of vigor and productive power, in this 

 period of apparent national youth. The Arabians had not been duly 

 prepared rightly to enjoy and use the treasures of which they became 

 possessed. They had, like most uncivilized nations, been passionately 

 fond of their indigenous poetry ; their imagination had been awakened, 

 but their rational powers and speculative tendencies were still torpid. 

 They received the Greek philosophy without having passed through 

 those gradations of ardent curiosity and keen research, of obscurity 

 brightening into clearness, of doubt succeeded by the joy of discovery, 

 by which the Greek mind had been enlarged and exercised. Nor had 

 the Arabians ever enjoyed, as the Greeks had, the individual conscious- 

 ness, the independent volition, the intellectual freedom, arising from 

 the freedom of political institutions. They had not felt the contagions 

 mental activity of a small city, — the elation arising from the general 



