XEW CHAPTERS IN THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE. 5 



The establishment of Christianity, though it began a new 

 evolution of religion, arrested the normal development of the 

 physical sciences for over fifteen hundred years. The cause of 

 this arrest was twofold : First, there was created an atmosphere 

 in which the germs of physical science could hardly grow ; an at- 

 mosphere in which all seeking for truth in Nature as truth was re- 

 garded as futile. The general belief derived from the New Testa- 

 ment Scriptures was, that the end of the world was at hand ; that 

 the last judgment was approaching; that all existing physical 

 Nature was soon to be destroyed : hence, the greatest thinkers in 

 the Church generally poured contempt upon all investigators into 

 a science of Nature, and insisted that everything except the saving 

 of souls was folly. 



This belief appears frequently through the entire period of the 

 middle ages, but during the first thousand years it is clearly 

 dominant. From Lactantius and Eusebius, in the third century, 

 pouring contempt, as we have seen, over studies in astronomy, to 

 Peter Damiaii, the noted chancellor of Pope Gregory VII, in the 

 eleventh century, declaring all worldly sciences to be " absurdities " 

 and " fooleries/' it becomes the atmosphere of thought.* 



Then, too, there was established a standard to which all science 

 which did struggle up through this atmosphere must be made to 

 conform a standard which favored magic rather than science, 

 for it was a standard of rigid dogmatism obtained from literal 

 readings in the Jewish and Christian Scriptures. The most care- 

 ful inductions from ascertained facts were regarded as wretchedly 

 fallible when compared with any view of Nature whatever given 

 or even hinted at in any poem, chronicle, code, apologue, myth, 

 legend, allegory, letter, or discourse of any sort which had hap- 

 pened to be preserved in the literature which had come to be held 

 as sacred. 



For twelve centuries, then, the physical sciences were thus dis- 

 couraged or perverted by the dominant orthodoxy. Whoever 

 studied Nature studied it either openly to find illustrations of the 

 sacred text, useful in the " saving of souls," or secretly to gain 

 the aid of occult powers, useful in securing personal advantage. 

 Great men like Bede, Isidore of Seville, Rabanus Maurus, accepted 



study, see Grote's Greece, vol. i, pp. 495 and 504, 505 ; also Jowett's introduction to his 

 translation of the Thnaeus, and Whewell's History of the Inductive Sciences. For examples 

 showing the incompatibility of Plato's methods in physical science with that pursued in mod- 

 ern times, see Zeller, Plato and the Older Academy, English translation by Alleyne and Good- 

 win, pp. 375 et seq. The supposed opposition to freedom of opinion in the " Laws " of Plato, 

 toward the end of his life, ran hardly make against the whole spirit of Greek thought. 



* For the view of Peter Damian and others through the middle ages as to the futility of 

 scientific investigation, see citations in Eicken, Geschichte und System der niitteliilterlichen 

 Weltanschauung, chap. vi. 



