Historical Relations 129 



God an artist. Vesalius was no philosopher, nor must we seek 

 in his pages for any formal justification of this view. But so much 

 he says and says well, over and over again. Men and women he 

 saw, as it were, as " studies " for God's great design. Imperfect 

 studies indeed. Vesalius did not, like Galen, harp constantly on 

 the perfection of man's form. He had only the bodies of criminals 

 and worn-out paupers on which to practise his arts. Yet even 

 these were worthy of attention as setting forth, however distantly, 

 the design in the mind of the Godhead. To reach closer than these 

 poor corpses to that design was the real aim of Vesalius. We think 

 of biological investigations in terms of evolution and our questions 

 are whence ? and how ? Our evolutionary doctrine has perforce 

 answered these questions in a way far different from that conveyed 

 to us by the religious tradition. But to Vesalius no such dis- 

 crepancy was present. He thought of anatomy in terms not of 

 evolution but of design, and his questions, had he been philosophically 

 articulate, would have been whither ? and why ? To these 

 questions he and his followers, for generations to come, had no 

 answer other than that provided by the religious systems of their 

 day. Thus, though Vesalius profoundly altered the attitude 

 towards biological phenomena, he yet prosecuted his researches 

 undisturbed by the ecclesiastical authorities. 



To us who live only a generation or two after the disturbances 

 of the spirit caused by the Evolution controversy, it may seem that 

 biological rather than physical science is the department likely to 

 clash with the claims of traditional religion. Yet historically this 

 is not the case. The successors of Vesalius continued to prosecute 

 their studies until the nineteenth century unnoticed or even directly 

 aided by the Churches. It was the cosmical speculations of the 

 astronomers and physicists, not the investigations of the biologists, 

 that attracted unwelcome ecclesiastical attention. 



Before we leave Vesalius and Copernicus we would draw 

 attention to one direction in which their work was an actual aid 

 to the current religious attitude. The beliefs of mankind con- 

 cerning the physical constitution of the world had been based on 

 the idea of a parallel between the Macrocosm and Microcosm. 

 This doctrine had developed as the characteristic astrology of the 

 Middle Ages. The Church at first had been at war with the 

 doctrine, but later she had compromised and finally accepted it. 

 The acceptance was, however, with an ill grace, for extreme 



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