3IO 



NATURE 



{Aug. 20, 1874 



nor expected, here or hereafter, any personal profit from his rela- 

 tion to the gods. And it is assuredly a fact that loftiness and 

 serenity of thought may be promoted by conceptions which in- 

 volve no idea of profit of this kind. " Did I not believe," said 

 a great man to me once, "that an Intelligence is at the heart of 

 things, my life on earth would be intolerable." The utterer of 

 these words is not, in my opinion, rendered less noble but more 

 noble, by the fact that it was the need of ethical harmony here, 

 and not the thought of personal profit hereafter, that prompted 

 his observation. 



A century and a half after the death of Epicurus, I^ucretius * 

 wrote his great poem, " On the Nature of Things," in which he, 

 a Roman, developed with extraordinary ardour the philosophy 

 of his Greek predecessor. He wishes to win over his friend 

 Memnius to the school of Epicuras ; and although he has no 

 rewards in a future life to offer, although his object appears to 

 be a purely negative one, he addresses his friend with the heat 

 of an apostle. His object, like that of his great forerunner, is 

 the destruction of superstition ; and considering that men trem- 

 bled before every natural event as a direct monition from the 

 gods, and that everlasting torture was also in prospect, the free- 

 dom aimed at by Lucretius might perhaps be deemed a positive 

 good. " This terror," he say;;, "and darkness of mind must be 

 dispelled, not by the rays of the sun and glittering shafts of day, 

 but by the aspect and the law of nature." He refutes the notion 

 that anything can come out of nothing, or that that which is 

 once begotten can be recalled to nothing. The first beginnings, 

 the atoms, are indestructible, and into them all things can be 

 dissolved at last. Bodies are partly atoms and partly combina- 

 tions of atoms ; but tlie atoms nothing can quench. They are 

 strong in solid singleness, and by their denser combination all 

 things can be closely packed and exhibit enduring strength. He 

 denies that matter is infinitely divisible. We come at length to 

 the atoms, without which, as an imperishable substratum, all 

 order in the generation and development of things would be 

 destroyed. 



The mechanical shock of the atoms being in his view the all- 

 sufficient cause of things, he combats the notion that the consti- 

 tution of nature has been in any way determined by intelligent 

 design. The interaction of the atoms throughout infinite time 

 rendered all manner of combinations possible. Of these the fit 

 ones persisted, while the unfit ones disappeared. Not after sage 

 deliberation di 1 the atoms station themselves in their right places, 

 nor did they bargain what motions they should assume. From 

 all eternity they have been driven together, and after trying 

 motions and unions of every kind, they fell at length into the 

 arrangements out of which this system of things has been formed. 

 His grand conception of the atoms falling silently tlirough im- 

 measurable ranges of space and time suggested the nebular 

 hypothesis to Kant, its first propounded " If you will appre- 

 hend and keep in mind these things. Nature, free at once, and rid 

 of her haughty lords, is seen to do all things spontaneously of 

 herself, without the meddling of the gods."t 



During the centuries between the first of these three philoso- 

 phers and the last-, the human intellect was active in other fields 

 than theirs. The Sophists had run through their career. At 

 Athens had appeared the three men, Socrates, Plato, and Aris- 

 totle, whose yoke remains to some extent unbroken to the pre- 

 sent hour. Within this period also the School of Alexandria 

 was founded, Euclid wrote his " Elements," and he and others 

 made some advance in optics. Archimedes had propounded the 

 theory of the lever and the principles of hydristatics. Pytha- 

 goras had made his experiments on the harmonic intervals, while 

 astronomy was immensely enriched by the discoveries ol Hippar- 

 chus, who was followed by the historically more celebrated 

 Ptolemy. Anatomy had been made the basis of scientific medi- 

 cine ; and it is said by Draper J that vivisection then began. 

 In fact, the science of ancient Greece had already cleared the 

 world of the fantastic images of divinities operating capriciously 

 through natural phenomena. It had shaken itself free from that 

 fruitless scrutiny "by the internal light of the mind alone," which 

 had vainly sought to transcend experience and reach a knowledge 

 of ultimate causes. Instead of accidental observation, it had 

 introduced observation with a purpose ; instruments were em- 

 ployed to aid tlie senses ; and scientific method was rendered in 



• Born 99 B.C. 



+ Monro'< translatio 

 viem, 1867) Dr. Haym 

 and subtile observatioi 

 neous, sometimes rests. 



J " History of the Intellectual Development of Europe," p. 295. 



■ork {Cotitniijiorary Kl-- 

 '1-3 liui rtpjjcdi Lu ut vnvare of the really sound 

 which the reasoning of Lucretius, though erro- 



In his criticism of th 

 1 does not appear 



a great measure complete by the union of induction and experi- 

 ment, s 



What, then, stopped its victorious advance ? Why was the 

 scientific intellect compelled, like an exhausted soil, to lie fallow 

 for nearly two millenniums before it could 'regather the'elements 

 necessary to its fertility and strength ? Bacon has already let us 

 know one cause ; WheweM ascribes this stationary period to four 

 causes — obscurity of thought, servility, intolerance of disposition, 

 enthusiasm of temper ; and he gives striking examples of each.* 

 But these characteristics must have had their causes, which lay in 

 the circumstances of the time. Rome and the other cities of the 

 empire had fallen into moral putrefaction. Christianity had 

 appeared, offering the gospel to the poor, and by moderation if 

 not asceticism of life, practically protesting against the prolligacy 

 of the age. The sufferings of the early Christians and the extra- 

 ordinary exaltation of mind which enabled them to triumph over 

 the diabolical tortures to which they were subjected, t must have 

 left traces not easily effaced. They scorned the earth, in view 

 of that " building of God, that house not made with hands, 

 eternal in the heavens." The Scriptures which ministered to 

 their spiritual needs were also the measure of their science. 

 Wlien, for example, the celebrated question of antipodes came 

 to be discussed, the Bible was with many the ultimate court of 

 appeal. Augustine, who flourished a.d. 400, would not deny 

 the rotundity of the earth, but he would deny the possible exist- 

 ence of inhabitants at the other side, " because no such race is 

 recorded in Scripture among the descendants of Adam." Arch- 

 bishop Boniface was shocked at the assumption of a "world of 

 human beings out of the reach of the means of salvation." Thus 

 reined in, science was not likely to make much progress. Later 

 on, the political and theological strife between the Church and 

 civil governments, so powerfully depicted by Draper, must have 

 done much to stifle Investigation. 



Whewell makes many wise and brave remarks regarding the 

 spirit of the Middle Ages. It was a menial spirit. The seekers 

 after natural knowledge had forsaken that fountain of living 

 waters, the direct appeal to nature by observation and experi- 

 ment, and had given themselves up to the remanipulation of the 

 notions of their predecessors. It was a time when thought had 

 become abject, and when the acceptance of mere authority led, 

 as it alw.ays does in science, to intellectual death. Natural 

 events, instead of being traced to physical, were referred to 

 moral causes, while an exercise of the phantasy, almost as 

 degrading as the spiritualism of the present day, took the place 

 of scientific speculation. Then came the mysticism of the Middle 

 Ages, magic, alchemy, the Neo-platonic philosophy, with its 

 visionary though sublime attractions, which caused men to look 

 with shame upon their own bodies as hindrances to the absorption 

 of the creature in the blessedness of the Creator. Finally came 

 the scholastic philosophy, a fusion, according to Lange, of the 

 least mature notions of Aristotle with the Christianity of the west. 

 Intellectual immobility was the result. As a traveller without a 

 compass in a fog may wander long, imagining he is making way, 

 and find himself, after hours of toil at his starting-point, so the 

 schoolmen, having tied and untied the same knots, and formed 

 and dissipated the same clouds, found themselves at the end of 

 centuries in their old position. 



With regard to the influence wielded by Aristotle in the 

 Middle Ages, and which, though to a less extent, he still wields, 

 I would ask permission to make one remark. When the human 

 mind has achieved greatness and given evidence of extraordi- 

 nary power in any domain, there is a tendency to credit it with 

 similar power in all other domains. Thus theologians have 

 found comfort and assurance in the thought that Newton dealt 

 with the question of revelation, forgetful of the fact that the 

 very devotion of his powers, through all the best years of his 

 life, to a totally different class of ideas, not to speak of any 

 natural disqualification, tended to render him less instead of 

 more competent to deal with theological and historic questions. 

 Goethe, starting from his established greatness as a poet, and 

 indeed from his positive discoveries in natural history, produced 

 a profound impression among the painters of Germany when he 

 published his " Farbenlehre," in which he endeavoured to over- 

 throw Newton's theory of colours. This theory he deemed so 

 obviously absurd, that he considered its author a charlatan, and 

 attacked him with a corresponding vehemence of language. In 

 the domain of natural history Goethe had made really consider- 

 able discoveries ; and we have high authority for assuming that 



■^ " History of the Inductive Sciences," vol. i. 



t Dtpictett with terrible vividness in Reuaa'» " Antichrist." 



