248 PHYSICAL SCIENCE IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 



and thus Architecture prepared the way for Mechanics. But this ad- 

 vance required several centuries. The interval between the admirable 

 cathedrals of Salisbury, Amiens, Cologne, and the mechanical treatises 

 of Stevinus, is not less than three hundred years. During this time, 

 men were advancing towards science ; but in the mean time, and per- 

 haps from the very beginning of the time, art had begun to decline. 

 The buildings of the fifteenth century, erected when the principles of 

 mechanical support were just on the verge of being enunciated in gen- 

 eral terms, exhibit those principles with a far less impressive simplicity 

 and elegance than those of the thirteenth. We may hereafter inquire 

 whether we find any other examples to countenance the belief, that the 

 formation of Science is commonly accompanied by the decline of Art. 



The leading principle of the style of the Gothic edifices was, not 

 merely that the weights were supported, but that they were seen to be so; 

 and that not only the mechanical relations of the larger masses, but of 

 the smaller members also, were displayed. Hence we cannot admit, as 

 an origin or anticipation of the Gothic, a style in which this principle 

 is not manifested. I do not see, in any of the representations of the 

 early Arabic buildings, that distribution of weights to supports, and 

 that mechanical consistency of parts, which would elevate them above 

 the character of barbarous architecture. Their masses are broken into 

 innumerable members, without subordination or meaning, in a man- 

 ner suggested apparently by caprice and the love of the marvellous. 

 " In the construction of their mosques, it was a favorite artifice of the 

 Arabs to sustain immense and ponderous masses of stone by the sup- 

 port of pillars so slender, that the incumbent weight seemed, as it were, 

 suspended in the air by an invisible hand." 8 This pleasure in the con- 

 templation of apparent impossibilities is a very general disposition among 

 mankind ; but it appears to belong to the infancy, rather than the ma- 

 turity of intellect. On the other hand, the pleasure in the contempla- 

 tion of what is clear, the craving for a thorough insight into the rea- 

 sons of things, which marks the European mind, is the temper which 

 leads to science. 



6. Treatises on Architecture. — No one who has attended to the 

 architecture which prevailed in England, France, and Germany, from 

 the twelfth to the fifteenth century, so far as to comprehend its beauty, 

 harmony, consistency, and uniformity, even in the minutest parts and 

 most obscure relations, can look upon it otherwise than as a remark- 



8 Mahometanism Unveiled, ii. 255. 



