io8 SCIENCE AND THE HUMAN MIND 



But Leonardo reasons with a perfectly open mind. 

 When he turns to theology at all, he attacks openly 

 and lightly the ecclesiastical abuses and absurdities 

 which had become part of the system of the Church. 

 His own philosophical position seems to have been 

 an idealistic pantheism, in the light of which he saw 

 everywhere the living spirit of the Universe. Yet, 

 with the fine balance of a great mind, he saw the good 

 beneath the load of inconsequent evil, and accepted 

 the essential Christian doctrine as an outward and 

 visible form for his inward spiritual life. " I leave 

 on one side the sacred writings," he says, " because 

 they are the supreme truth." A great gentleman as 

 well as a great man, the fanaticism of the rude icono- 

 clast was far from Leonardo, and he lived in the 

 brief interval when the Papacy itself was liberal and 

 humanist, and all seemed pointing to a new and 

 comprehensive Catholicism, in which freedom of 

 thought could exist side by side with earnest mystical 

 faith. The dream passed, the Church of Rome 

 became reactionary, and freedom was won painfully 

 and slowly by the rough path opened by Luther. 

 Fifty years later, Leonardo's position would have been 

 impossible. 



Leonardo's note-books have enabled us to trace the 

 origins of modern science in a way quite impossible 

 before. Da Vinci, great as he was, must not be 

 represented as the originator de novo of the scientific 

 spirit he displays. Before him Alberti (1404-1472) 

 had studied mathematics and made physical experi- 

 ments. At Florence Leonardo met Paolo Toscanelli 

 (d. 1482), an astronomer who had instigated the voyage 

 of Columbus ; Amerigo Vespucci gave him a book on 



