6 SCIENCE AND THE HUMAN MIND 



at the dawn of Greek history or at the Renaissance 

 of learning after the gloom of the Middle Ages, is the 

 liberation of philosophy from religion, and the next 

 stage is the separation of natural science from them 

 both. 



The Greek philosophers effected completely the 

 first of these changes : they freed philosophy from 

 dependence on theology, but they never distinguished 

 science from philosophy. 



Theories of the solar system, or of the continuous as 

 opposed to the atomic structure of matter, were to the 

 Greeks almost as much an affair of speculation as the 

 nature of reality or the conception of the absolute. 

 On a narrow basis of observation the active mind of 

 each Greek philosopher built an imposing superstruc- 

 ture of conjecture, far in advance of any possibility of 

 demonstration. But he had not sought these prob- 

 lems in any spirit of arrogance. They were part of a 

 legacy from the earlier stages, an inheritance of out- 

 standing puzzles from religion and magic ; and, as 

 time has shown, true subject matter for scientific 

 and therefore, at that early period, for philosophic 

 enquiry. To the ancients, astronomy except in 

 so far as the movements of the heavenly bodies 

 were noted and used to measure time and physics 

 outside the elements of geometry, land measurement 

 and engineering were both in truth and fact branches 

 of philosophy, subjects as yet beyond the range of 

 experiment and inductive reasoning. 



Yet science in its earliest days advanced far in direc- 

 tions where immediate practical application supplied 

 the necessary stimulus. Geometry, established on a 

 basis of experimental knowledge, won by the need of 



