246 EPOCHS IN THE HISTOEY OF THE CONTEMPLATION OF 



least indirectly influential on the cultivation of experimental 

 natural knowledge; but even where the views of the Realists 

 were still exclusively prevalent, acquaintance with Arabian 

 literature had fostered a love for natural knowledge, and 

 aided it to assert its place successfully, amidst the exclusively 

 absorbing tendency of theological studies. Thus, we see 

 that in the different periods of the middle ages, to which too 

 great a unity of character is perhaps usually ascribed, the 

 way for the great work of discoveries over the surface of the 

 earth, and for their successful employment in the enlarge- 

 ment of the circle of cosmical ideas, was gradually prepared 

 through wholly different trains of thought, the one purely 

 ideal and the other empirical. 



Natural knowledge was intimately connected among the 

 learned Arabians with the study of medicines and with 

 philosophy; and in the Christian middle ages with philo- 

 sophy and with dogmatic theological studies. The latter 

 from their tendency to claim exclusive dominion repressed 

 empirical investigation in physics, organic morphology, and 

 astronomy, which indeed was for the most part allied to 

 astrology. The study of the works of the all-embracing 

 mind of Aristotle, which had been brought in by Arabs and 

 Jewish Rabbis, ( 38 ) had tended to produce a philosophical 

 fusion of different branches of study; and thus Ibn-Sina 

 (Avicenna) and Ibn-Roschd (Averroes), Albertus Magnus 

 and Roger Bacon, passed as the representatives of all human 

 knowledge possessed by -their age. We may hence estimate 

 the fame which in the middle ages surrounded the names of 

 these eminent men. 



Albertus Magnus, of the family of the Counts of Bollstadt, 

 must be cited as himself an observer in the domain of 



