14 GREEK SCIENCE AND 



Free _speculatJQirwa^as yet an ^impossibility for the age, 

 and the rulers of the age were in union agai fist 1C But 

 minds closed to argument may be open to evidence. 

 7* Prince and Prelate were ready enough to curtail the 

 activities of one who held unsettling views on the ideal 

 nature of the State or the theoretical form of the World. 

 ./Yet these potentates were perfectly willing, nay were 

 eager, to experiment on their enemies with the newly 

 discovered combination of carbon, sulphur, and nitre 

 known as gunpowder, or to aid their failing vision by 

 the contrivance of a spectacle lens in order to draw up 

 an appropriately minatory denunciation of the critics of 

 the old order. 



Nothing could be less like the Greek environment. 

 Nothing could be more detestable and hampering from 

 the point of view of Modern Science. Yet the question 

 may be seriously raised whether this mediaeval limitation 

 of liberty has not been of some value to Science. That it 

 has done much harm, more harm than good, we are all 

 of us of course quite satisfied, but the point I want to 

 raise with you is that there are in fact certain elements 

 in our Science which we do, in part at least, owe to this 

 limitation. 



The trouble about Greek Science excepting always 



1 its mathematical work is the intolerable amount of 



.A reckless speculation of a philosophical or semi-philo- 



( sophical character that it contains, or rather that contains 



j it. The Greek was always seeking to introduce general 



1 laws rather than actual instances, and the greatest of the 



I schoolmen, ^Albertus, Magmis r taking his parable from 



] them and becoming more Greek than the Greeks, 



\ gravely assures us that scientia concerns herself only 



^with universals, not particulars. Science, as we know 



it to-day, could never flourish under such a theory. 



