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during the last three centuries, borne luxuriant fruit, were silently growing up—

"Crescit occulto velut arbor ævo ;"

and there were thrown forth, in the shape of vague conjectures, ideas which the latest developments of science seem tending to confirm. Great truths often dawn upon the mind long before they can be fully understood; or they come like a mirage in shadowy form. Some of the earliest thinkers seem to have attained, as it were through inspiration, the last truths of physics, but it was by the wrong road-the road of metaphysics. They reached the point at which the two meet, but by a premature anticipation of the goal from the start, and they did nothing to fertilise the long track between.

CHAPTER III.

THE DARK AGES.

THE same causes which retarded progress on one side during the ages of antiquity had the same benumbing effect on those immediately succeeding, and there were added new bonds. It is a mistake to suppose that authority has no control over thought; for to impose limits on its expression is to drive it to solitude, inertia, decay, and this was for more than a thousand years the ban placed on the human mind.

Towards the close of the second century of our era we have summed up, in Galen, Ptolemy, and Marcus Aurelius the last records of original speculation on the ancient lines; but the twilight, after the setting of the sun, lingers for three hundred years longer in the mystic eclecticism of Alexandria and the Christianised Stoicism, which heard its swan - song in Boethius. Neo-Platonists supplied a link between the old and new Astronomy (a tradition prevails associating Hypatia with the first European observatory); but their theories were made valueless by a constant confusion of thought with learning, of knowledge with tradition, of inspiration with sentiment. Boethius studied the sciences in the

The

P.--XIV.

C

spirit of Plato: he dwells with special emphasis on the music of the spheres, and urges the smallness of the earth, as compared with the heavens, as an argument against vainglory; but his method was that of a strict Aristotelian, commenting reverentially on the 'Organon' and Porphyry's Predicables, accepting as an axiom the distinction of form and matter, and strenuously asserting the authority of formal logic. In this blending of two systems, and his distinctly expressed belief in genera and species as entities, he is the forerunner of the Realism of the middle ages.

The period from 250-550 A.D. is that of the most famous of the Fathers, of the early Saints, of the Arian and Athanasian wars, and of the first of the great Councils of Christendom,-all hostile to the growth of independent inquiry, and concurring to stifle the progress of mental as of physical research. "It is," says

Eusebius, "through contempt of science that we turn our souls to better things." Tertullian is even more resolutely opposed to the secular learning which Lactantius openly denounces as false and shallow; and even St Augustine imagines himself to refute the belief in the existence of the antipodes by the fact that no such race is mentioned in Scripture.

The Emperors of the age allied themselves with the same obscurantism. Constantine, fresh from his politic

1 Augustine, however, alone among the Church authorities, seems to have had a glimmer of the future conflict, and shows his desire to avert it in the caution: "A Christian should beware how he speaks on questions of natural philosophy, as if they were doctrines of Holy Scripture. The opinions of philosophers should never be proposed as doctrines of faith, or rejected as contrary to faith, when it is not certain that they are so."

Influence of the Church.

35

conversion, closed the schools, dispersed the libraries, and allowed science to be branded as magic; while Julian, whose love of nature was merely artistic, as reactionary on the other side, wished to interdict the Christians from the pursuit of studies that might be perverted to support their heresies. It has been said that Justinian, in banishing the later seven sages from Constantinople to the Court of Chosroes, "dug the grave of Greek philosophy." Charlemagne, Alfred, and our Norman kings, were patrons of the scant culture of their respective reigns; and Frederick II. of Germany established a new centre of polite learning in his Sicilian Court: but the Caliphs were the sole throned promoters of science down to the time of Alphonso of Castile. The history of thought during the dark ages is mainly the history of the Church. In the sixth century her struggle for existence was succeeded by imperious claims to supremacy, only held in check by the secular and national resistance of the Plantagenets, Capets, and Hohenstauffens. Hildebrand established a universal court of appeal, and dispensed to monarchs their right to rule. The candle that had been carried warily through the catacombs was now exalted on the shrine.

It is admitted that civilisation owes to the medieval Church a debt difficult to overstate. Her Popes fostered the early arts, her monasteries were the repositories of books, and the use of the Latin language, preserved in her ceremonials and her controversies, helped to bridge the gulf between two worlds. But these influences were injuriously exclusive; they gave a single bent to energies that might have otherwise expanded with the variety

of life, and gagged the free development of thought. The price mankind had to pay for a partial enlightenment was the sacrifice of its birthright to look beyond a fixed horizon. Under this paternal government all study had a preordained result--not truth, but orthodoxy; and the faithful had to enter the kingdom of St Peter's "as a little child." Dogmatism grew more and more intolerant of philosophy and afraid of science. The licensers of the intellect discouraged familiarity with the classics, and encouraged the superstitions that had the effect of threats on a fenced and guarded ignorance. The old manly Periclean virtues, ἀνδρεία, σωφροσύνη, σοφία, and Sikaloσúvn, were replaced by the spectres, chastity, humility, and obedience, which the monks and friars were supposed to represent, and the knightly orders were theoretically enlisted to enforce. The duration of this period of tutelage has been roughly marked by Hallam in speaking of Nicholas V. "How striking the contrast between this Pope and his predecessor, Gregory I. ! These eminent men, like Michael Angelo's figures of Night and Morning, seem to stand at the two gates of the middle ages, emblems and heralds of the mind's long sleep, and of its awakening." This somewhat sweeping generalisation ignores the rehearsal of the Renaissance under Dante, Petrarch, and Chaucer, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries a period almost as fertile in invention as in fancy; but it indicates the limits on either hand of ecclesiastical absolutism.

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We must not, however, fail to note that, even in the soundest sleep of the dark ages, there were premonitory dreams. Gregory's missionary zeal was an incentive

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