276 PHYSICAL SCIENCE IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 



thoughts, should cultivate science more successfully 

 than others, precisely because their ideas on specu- 

 lative subjects had time and opportunity to become 

 clear and steady. The studies which were culti- 

 vated under the name of the Seven Liberal Arts 

 necessarily tended to favour this effect. The 

 Trivium, indeed, which consisted of Grammar, 

 Logic, and Rhetoric, had no direct bearing upon 

 those ideas with which physical science is con- 

 cerned; but the Quadrivium, Music, Arithmetic, 

 Geometry, Astronomy, could not be pursued with 

 any attention, without a corresponding improve- 

 ment of the mind for purposes of sound know- 

 ledge 16 . 



9. Popular Opinions. That, even in the best 

 intellects, something was wanting to fit them for 

 scientific progress and discovery, is obvious from the 

 fact that science was so long absolutely stationary. 

 And I have endeavoured to show that one part of 

 this deficiency was the want of the requisite clear- 

 ness and vigour of the fundamental scientific ideas. 

 If these were wanting, even in the most powerful and 

 most cultivated minds, we may easily conceive that 

 still greater confusion and obscurity prevailed in 



15 Bruck. iii. 597- 



1(5 Roger Bacon, in his Specula Mathematica, cap. i., says, 

 " Harum scientiarum porta et clavis est mathematica, quam 

 sancti a principio mundi invenerunt, etc. Cujus negligentia 

 jam per triginla vel quadraginta annos destruxit totum studium 

 Latinorum " I do not know on what occasion this neglect took 

 place. 



