126 A Century of Science 



Such was the age in which the work of Eng- 

 lish colonization in America was beginning. In 

 looking for the origins of liberal thought in Amer- 

 ica, it is chiefly with English-speaking America 

 that we are concerned. The Spanish mind, in- 

 deed, felt strongly the stimulus of the maritime 

 discoveries and the contact with strange races of 

 men, until an age of chivalrous enterprise bloomed 

 forth in the literature of Calderon and Lope de 

 Vega and Cervantes ; but the new spirit was not 

 strong enough to prevail over an ecclesiastical or- 

 ganization that had been growing in power since 

 the Visigothic times. The higher intellectual life 

 of Spain perished in the fires of the Inquisition, 

 and art and song failed to lead the way to science 

 and free thought ; no Spanish Locke or Newton 

 followed in the train of a Lope and a Murillo, but 

 so lately as the year 1771 the University of Sala- 

 manca prohibited the teaching of the law of gravi- 

 tation as discordant with revealed religion. 1 With 

 such a state of things in the mother country, lib- 

 eral thought in the Spanish colonies was a plant of 

 very slow growth. As for France at the end of 

 the sixteenth century, there was a sturdy intellec- 

 tual life there which no efforts of tyranny could 

 more than partially repress; but circumstances 



1 Sempere, Monarchic Espagnole, ii. 152. 



