I04 Science Religion and Reality 



" religious " of the later pagan schools, would reply that what is 

 left to the man himself is the will, the power, to play his part like a 

 man, doing his duty in that walk of life to which Providence has 

 called him. We are j ust parts of Nature. " Thou hast subsisted as 

 part of the whole. Thou shalt vanish into that which begat thee, or 

 rather thou shalt be taken again into its Seminal Reason by a process 

 of change" (" Meditations" iv. § 14), so muses the Stoic Emperor, 

 Marcus Aurelius (121- 180 A.n.). Such philosophers would take 

 little interest in this tyrant Nature. Why should they ,? In our 

 age men learn the ways of Nature that they may control her, but the 

 time for that was not yet. Epicurus would have us know only so 

 much about her as would remove from us all fear of supernatural 

 interference. Stoic and Epicurean literature show therefore in later 

 antiquity a flagging of scientific curiosity. Men were weary of the 

 world. For what reason should they seek to know Nature more 

 intimately. Nature the compassionless, the tyrannical, the cruel ^. 



With this fading of interest among philosophers, something had 

 happened also among the more ordinary run of men that turned 

 their eyes and hands from investigating Nature too nearly. Into 

 the welter of philosophic sects, of contending oriental cults, of 

 decaying scientific interest, of rhetorical exercise, that made up the 

 spiritual life of later antiquity there came a new ray of hope. That 

 hope suggested not indeed that man might control his fate but that 

 he might at least come to know it and so prepare himself the better 

 for it. Astrology came to the West and was eagerly absorbed into 

 popular as well as into philosophical thought. This was essentially 

 a task for the " Chaldaean " specialist to whom alone the details 

 themselves were of interest. The future, it was believed, could 

 be read, and once read — who cared then for the wretched rules by 

 which it had been read .? They were at best but means. It was 

 the end that mattered. 



The astrological system of antiquity was, after all, only a formal 

 statement of those beliefs concerning the nature and working of our 

 mundane sphere that had been fostered by the ideas of such science 

 as had survived. Faith in astrology became part of the Stoic creed. 

 It gave an inevitable interrelationship of all things. In the 

 presentment of the world thus made, there was no room for those 

 anthropomorphic gods the belief in whom was still urged by the 

 priests and held to by the multitude. The spread of science, or of 

 what passed for science, had led at last to a complete breach between 



