INTRODUCTION 7 



surveying and measuring land, developed on its true 

 method of logical deduction from a few self-evident 

 axioms. A beginning was also made in the co-ordina- 

 tion of information gleaned by experience of animals 

 and plants, and in the arts of agriculture and medicine. 

 But, in spite of these and other successful applications, 

 there was no conception of the power that lay in the 

 pursuit of learning for its own sake, in the possession 

 of organized knowledge ; and natural science re- 

 mained a strange mixture of the obvious and the im- 

 possible, in which the lore of the priest, the ingenuity 

 of the craftsman, and the fevered dreams of the 

 magician were inextricably blended with the self- 

 centred reason of the philosopher. Not until, follow- 

 ing the decay of the Roman Empire, the Dark Ages 

 had passed into the twilight of Medievalism, did the 

 attitude of mind begin to show signs of change ; and 

 the dawn of the modern world was breaking in the era 

 of the Renaissance before natural science took its stand 

 on the firm ground of slowly won observation. Then, 

 ceasing to be speculative philosophy, tossed about by 

 every wind of doctrine, it became an independent and 

 progressive branch of knowledge, developed by the 

 healthy interaction of inductive observation and 

 deductive reasoning. 



This chronicle sums up the growth of science and 

 explains the slow retreat of philosophy, of which the 

 claims once filled the schools of Greece and Western 

 Europe. While a subject is not within reach of that 

 union of observation with logical or mathematical 

 deduction which constitutes science, as we know it 

 now, while it is only amenable to speculative treat- 

 ment and imaginative analysis, the philosophers 



