PROGRESS OF SCIENCE TO 1450 A.D. 177 



It was from this time and from this time only (though the change 

 had been prepared in the region of pure Theology by Peter the Lom- 

 bard) that the Scholastic Philosophy became distinguished by that 

 servile deference to authority with which it has been in modern times 

 too indiscriminately reproached. And the discovery of the new Aris- 

 totle was by itself calculated to check the originality and speculative 

 freedom which, in the paucity of books, had characterized the active 

 minds of the twelfth century. The tendency of the sceptics was to 

 transfer to Aristotle or Averroes the authority which the orthodox 

 had attributed to the Bible and the Fathers of the Church. 



Rashdall. 



DAWN OF THE RENAISSANCE. In the thirteenth century 

 it becomes plain that a new spirit is arising in Europe. We 

 cannot fail to detect at this time the existence, even at places as 

 far apart as Oxford and Bologna infinitely further apart then 

 than now, of a widespread desire for knowledge and a zeal 

 for learning such as had not been known for centuries. Arabic 

 mathematical science is introduced from northern Africa by 

 Leonardo Pisano. A fresh and notable philosopher Albertus 

 Magnus appears. Thomas Aquinas writes his famous Imi- 

 tatio Christi. Great Gothic cathedrals arise, more universities are 

 founded, and, most noteworthy of all for the history of science, 

 an original student of nature appears, in Roger Bacon. 



By the beginning of the thirteenth century, in consequence of 

 the opening up of communications with the East through inter- 

 course with the Moors in Spain, through the conquest of Constanti- 

 nople, through the Crusades, through the travels of enterprising scholars 

 the whole of the works of Aristotle were gradually making their 

 way into the Western world. Some became known in translations 

 direct from the Greek; more in Latin versions of older Syriac or 

 Arabic translations. And now the authority which Aristotle had 

 long enjoyed as a logician nay, it may almost be said the authority 

 of logic itself communicated itself in a manner to all that he wrote. 

 Aristotle was accepted as a well-nigh final authority upon Meta- 

 physics, upon Moral Philosophy, and with far more disastrous results 

 upon Natural Science. The awakened intellect of Europe busied 



