77 



mysticism was less unfavourable to natural science 

 than the passionate dogmatism of Clairvaux, or 

 the dogmatism by ratiocination of St Thomas ; the 

 Victorians, as Gerson after them, despised reason 

 rather than feared it ; they would not accept the 

 services of philosophy even with its wings clipped. 



"Cujus laus est ex ore infantum, 

 Haec est sapientia"! 



Mysticism makes for individual religion, as with 

 Glisson and Newton, rather than for a Church, 



his rendering of the ninth book of the De ccelo and elsewhere. 

 We know from other sources that a few treatises, such as the 

 De anima, and the first two books of the Ethics, existed 

 in Greco-latin rendering before the Arab-latin versions of 

 Michael Scot and others (12201225). In later life Albert 

 had the assistance of Aquinas to whom we have attributed 

 some knowledge of Greek ; for we find Aquinas, with the 

 countenance of Urban the Fourth, not only searching 

 Europe for Greek manuscripts, sending emissaries to Spain 

 to make versions for him, and supervising the prepara- 

 tion of translations directly into Latin, but also personally 

 comparing the Latin translations with the Greek texts of 

 the Ethics and Politics, and recording variants; variants 

 which Albert copied from his disciple. (It may be worthy of 

 remark that even so late as 1586 there were no Greek types 

 in Oxford, and that in 1599 Casaubon (Life by Pattison) could 

 find no compositors for Greek in Lyons.) The great debt of 

 the West to the Arabs was a new enthusiasm for learning, and 

 for the "Princeps philosophorum"; not their travestied texts 

 and unwieldy commentaries, which Roger Bacon, probably 

 perceiving that his contemporaries swore by the Arab rather 

 than by the Greek, wished he could burn. 



