392 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XX. No. 508. 



Luther, the greatest thought-stirrer of 

 them all, practically of the same genera- 

 tion with Copernicus, Leonardo and Co- 

 lumbus, does not come in as a scientific in- 

 vestigator, but as the great loosener of 

 chains which had so fettered the intellects 

 of men that they dared not think otherwise 

 than as the authorities had thought. Later 

 in the same century was born Paracelsus, in 

 whose checkered life we see, as in the case 

 of Copernicus, the struggle between the old 

 modes of thought and the new. 



Almost coeval with the advent of those 

 intellects was the discovei'y of the art of 

 printing with movable type. Gutenberg 

 was born during the first decade of the cen- 

 tury, and his associates and others credited 

 with the invention not many years after- 

 ward. If we accept the principle on which 

 I am basing my argument, that we should 

 assign the first place to the birth of those 

 psychic agencies which started men on new 

 lines of thought, then surely was the fif- 

 teenth the wonderful century! 



Let us not forget that, in assigning the 

 actors then born to their places, we are 

 not recounting history, but studying a spe- 

 cial pha^e of evolution. It matters not for 

 us that no university invited Leonardo to 

 its halls, and that his science was valued 

 by his contemporaries only as an adjunct 

 to the art of engineering. The great fact 

 still is that he was the first of mankind to 

 propound laws of motion. It is not for 

 anything in Luther's doctrines that he 

 finds a place in our scheme. No matter 

 for us whether they were true or false. 

 What he did toward the evolution of the 

 scientific investigator was to show by his 

 example that a man might question the 

 best established and most venerable au- 

 thority and still live— still preserve his 

 intellectual integrity— still command a 

 hearing from nations and their rulers. It 

 matters not for us whether Columbus ever 

 knew that he had discovered a new conti- 



nent. His work was to teach that neither 

 hydra, chimera nor abyss— neither divine 

 injunction nor infernal machination— was 

 in the way of men visiting every part of 

 the globe, and that the problem of conquer- 

 ing the world reduced itself to one of sails 

 and rigging— hull and compass. The bet- 

 ter part of Copernicus was to direct man 

 to a view point whence he should see that 

 the heavens were of like matter with the 

 earth. All this done, the acorn was planted 

 from which the oak of our civilization 

 should spring. The mad quest for gold 

 which followed the discovery of Columbus 

 — the questionings which absorbed the at- 

 tention of the learned — the indignation ex- 

 cited by the seeming vagaries of a Paracel- 

 sus, the fear and trembling lest the strange 

 doctrine of Copernicus should undermine 

 the faith of centuries — were all helps to 

 the germination of the seed — stimuli to 

 thought which urged it on to explore the 

 new fields opened up to its occupation. 

 This given, all that has since followed came 

 out in the regular order of development, 

 and need be here considered only in those 

 phases having a special relation to the pur- 

 pose of the present assembly. 



So slow was the growth at first that the 

 sixteenth century may scarcely have recog- 

 nized the inauguration of a new era. Tor- 

 ricelli and Benedetti were of the third gen- 

 eration after Leonardo; and Galileo, the 

 first to make a substantial advance upon 

 his theory, was born more than a century 

 after him. Only two or three men ap- 

 peared in a generation who, working alone, 

 could make real progress in discovery, and 

 even these could do little in leavening the 

 minds of their fellowmen with the new 

 ideas. Up to the middle of the seventeenth 

 century an agent which all our experience 

 since that time shows to be necessary to 

 the most productive intellectual activity 

 was wanting. This was the attrition of 

 like minds, making suggestions to each 



