In the story of the Good Samaritan there are some interesting details that indicate medical interest on the part of the writer. It is Luke"s characteristic story and a typical medical instance. He employs certain words in it that are used only by medical writers. The use of oil and wine in the treatment of the wounds of the stranger traveller was at one time said to indicate that it could not have been a physician who wrote the story, since the ancients used oil for external applications in such cases but not wine. More careful search of the old masters of medicine, however, has shown that they used oil and wine not only internally but externally. Hippocrates, for instance, has a number of recommendations of this combination for wounds. It is rather interesting to realize this, and especially the wine in addition to the oil, because wine contains enough alcohol to be rather satisfactorily antiseptic. There seems no doubt that wounds that had been bathed in wine and then had oil poured over them would be likely to do better than those which were treated in other ways. The wine would cleanse and at least inhibit bacterial growth. The subsequent covering with oil would serve to protect the wound to some degree from external contamination.
Sometimes there is an application of medical terms to something extraneous from medicine that makes the phrase employed quite amusing.
For instance, when Luke wants to explain how they strengthened the vessel in which they were to sail he describes the process by the term which was used in medical Greek to mean the splinting of a part or at least the binding of it up in such a way as to enable it to be used. The word was quite a puzzle to the commentators until it was pointed out that it was the familiar medical term, and then it was easy to understand. Occasionally this use of a medical term gives a strikingly accurate significance to Luke"s diction. For instance, where other evangelists talk of the Lord looking at a patient or turning to them, Luke uses the expression that was technically employed for a physician"s examination of his patient, as if the Lord carefully looked over the ailing people to see their physical needs, and then proceeded to cure them. Manifestly in Luke"s mind the most interesting phase of the Lord"s life was His exhibition of curative powers, and the Saviour was for him the divine healer, the G.o.d physician of bodies as well as of souls.
There are many little incidents which he relates that emphasize this.
For instance, where St. Mark talks about the healing of the man with a withered hand, St. Luke adds the characteristic medical note that it was the right hand. When he tells of the cutting off of the ear of the servant of the high priest in the Garden of Olives St. Luke takes the story from St. Mark, but adds the information that would appeal to a physician that it was the right ear. Moreover, though all four evangelists record the cutting off of the ear, only St. Luke adds the information that the Lord healed it again. It is as if he were defending the kindly feelings of the Divine Physician and as if it would have been inexcusable had He not exerted His miraculous powers of healing on this occasion. It is St. Luke, too, who has constantly distinguished between natural illnesses and cases of possession. This careful distinction alone would point to the author of the third gospel and the Acts as surely a physician. As it is it confirms beyond all doubt the claim that the writer of these portions of the New Testament was a physician thoroughly familiar with all the medical writings of the time and probably a physician who had practised for a long time.
Certain miracles of healing are related only by St. Luke as if he realized better than any of the other evangelists the evidential value that such instances would have for future generations as to the divinity of the personage who worked them. The beautiful story of the raising from death of the son of the widow of Nain is probably one of the oftenest quoted pa.s.sages from St. Luke. It is a charming bit of literature. While it suggests the writer physician it makes one almost sure that the other tradition according to which St. Luke was also a painter must be true. The scene is as picturesque as it can be. The Lord and His Apostles and the mult.i.tudes coming to the gate of the little city just as in the evening sun the funeral cortege with the widow burying her only son came out of it. The approach of the Lord to the weeping mother, His command to the dead son to arise, and the simple words, "and he gave him back to his mother," const.i.tute as charming a scene as a painter ever tried to visualize. Besides this, Luke alone has the story of the man suffering with dropsy and the woman suffering from weakness. The intensely picturesque quality of many of these scenes that he describes so vividly would indeed seem to place beyond all doubt the old tradition that he was an artist as well as a physician.
It is interesting to realize that it is to Luke alone that we owe the account of the well-known message sent by Christ Himself to John the Baptist when John sent his disciples to inquire as to His mission. After describing His ministry He said: "Go and relate to John what you have heard and seen: the blind see, the lame walk, the deaf hear, the lepers are made clean, the dead rise again, to the poor the Gospel is preached." To no one more than to a physician would that description of His mission appeal as surely divine.
To those who care to follow the subject still further, and above all, to read opinions given before the reversal of the verdict of the higher criticism on the Lucan writings, indeed before ever that trial was brought, there is much in "Horae Lucanae--A Biography of St. Luke," by Henry Samuel Baynes (Longmans, 1870), that will surely be of interest.
He has some interesting quotations which show how thoroughly previous centuries realized all the force of modern arguments. For instance, the following paragraph from Dr. Nathaniel Robinson, a Scotch physician of the eighteenth century, will ill.u.s.trate this. Dr. Robinson said:
It is manifest from his Gospel, that Luke was both an acute observer, and had even given professional attention to all our Saviour"s miracles of healing. Originally, among the Egyptians, divinity and physic were united in the same order of men, so that the priest had the care of souls, and was also the physician. It was much the same under the Jewish economy.
But after physic came to be studied by the Greeks, they separated the two professions. That a physician should write the history of our Saviour"s life was appropriate, as there were divers mysterious things to be noticed, concerning which his education enabled him to form a becoming judgment.
It is even interesting to realize that St. Luke"s tendency to use medical terms has been of definite value in determining the question whether both the third gospel and the Acts of the Apostles are by the same man. They have been attributed to St. Luke traditionally, but in the higher criticism some doubt has been thrown on this and an elaborate hypothesis of dual authorship set up. It has been a.s.serted that it is very improbable on extrinsic grounds that they were both written by one hand and certain intrinsic evidence, changes in the mode of narration, especially the use of the first personal p.r.o.noun in the plural in certain pa.s.sages, has been pointed to as making against single authorship. This tendency to deny old-time traditions of authorship with regard to many cla.s.sical writings was a marked characteristic of the early part of the nineteenth century, but the close of the century saw practically all of these denials discredited. The nineteenth century ushered in studies of Homer, with the separatist school perfectly confident in their a.s.sertion that the Iliad and the Odyssey were not by the same person, and even that the Iliad itself was the work of several hands.
At the beginning of the twentieth century we are quite as sure that both the Iliad and Odyssey were written by the same person and that the separatists were hurried into a contrary decision not a little by the feeling of the sensation that such a contradiction of previously accepted ideas would create. This is a determining factor in many a supposed novel discovery, that it is hard always to discount sufficiently. A thing may be right even though it is old, and most new discoveries, it must not be forgotten, that is, most of those announced with a great blare of trumpets, do not maintain themselves. The simple argument that the separatists would have to find another poet equal to Homer to write the other poem has done more than anything else to bring their opinion into disrepute. It is much easier to explain certain discrepancies, differences of style, and of treatment of subjects, as well as other minor variants, than to supply another great poet. Most of the works of our older literatures have gone through a similar trial during the over-hasty superficially critical nineteenth century. The Nibelungenlied has been attributed to two or three writers instead of one. The Cid, the national epic of Spain, and the Arthur Legends, the first British epic, have been at least supposed to be amenable to the same sort of criticism. In every case, scholars have gone back to the older traditional view of a single author. The phases of literary and historic criticism with regard to Luke"s writings are, then, only a repet.i.tion of what all our great national cla.s.sics have gone through from supercilious scholarship during the past hundred years.
It is not surprising, then, that there should be dual or even triple ascriptions of authorship for various portions of the Scriptures, and Luke"s writings have on this score suffered as much or more even than others, with the possible exception of Moses. It is now definitely settled, however, that the similarities of style between the Acts and the third gospel are too great for them to have come from two different minds. This is especially true, as pointed out by Harnack, in all that regards the use of medical terms. The writer of the Acts and the writer of the third gospel knew Greek from the standpoint of the physician of that time. Each used terms that we find nowhere else in Greek literature except among medical writers. What is thus true for one critical attack on Luke"s reputation is also true in another phase of recent higher criticism. It has been said that certain portions of the Acts which are called the "we" portions because the narration changes in them from the third to the first person were to be attributed to another writer than the one who wrote the narrative portions. Here, once more, the test of the medical words employed has decided the case for Luke"s sole authorship. It is evidently an excellent thing to be able to use medical terms properly if one wants to be recognized with certainty later on in history for just what one"s business was. It has certainly saved the situation for St. Luke, though there may be some doubt as to the real force of objections thus easily overthrown.
It is rather interesting to realize that many scholars of the present generation had allowed themselves to be led away by the German higher criticism from the old tradition with regard to Luke as a physician and now will doubtless be led back to former views by the leader of German biblical critics. It shows how much more distant things may influence certain people than those nearer home--how the hills are green far away.
Harnack confesses that the best book ever written on the subject of Luke as a physician, the one that has proved of most value to him, and that he still recommends everyone to read, was originally written in English.
It is Hobart"s "Medical Language of St. Luke,"[34] written more than a quarter of a century before Harnack. The Germans generally had rather despised what the English were doing in the matter of biblical criticism, and above all in philology. Yet now the acknowledged coryphaeus of them all, Harnack, not only admits the superiority of an old-time English book, but confesses that it is the best statement of the subject up to the present time, including his own. He constantly quotes from it, and it is evident that it has been the foundation of all of his arguments. It is not the first time that men have fetched from afar what they might have got just as well or better at home.
Harnack has made complete the demonstration, then, that the third gospel and the Acts were written by St. Luke, who had been a practising physician. In spite of this, however, he finds many objections to the Luke narratives and considers that they add very little that is valuable to the contemporary evidence that we have with regard to Christ. He impairs with one hand the value of what he has so lavishly yielded with the other. He finds inconsistencies and discrepancies in the narrative that for him destroy their value as testimony. A lawyer would probably say that this is that very human element in the writings which demonstrates their authenticity and adds to their value as evidence, because it shows clearly the lack of any attempt to do anything more than tell a direct story as it had come to the narrator. No special effort was made to avoid critical objections founded on details. It was the general impression that was looked for.
Sir William Ramsay, in his "Luke the Physician and Other Studies in the History of Religion" (New York: Armstrong and Sons, 1908), has answered Harnack from the side of the professional critic with much force. He appreciates thoroughly the value of Professor Harnack"s book, and above all the reactionary tendency away from nihilistic so-called higher criticism which characterized so much of German writing on biblical themes in the nineteenth century. He says (p. 7): "This [book of Harnack"s] alone carries Lukan criticism a long step forwards, and sets it on a new and higher plane. Never has the unity and character of the book been demonstrated so convincingly and conclusively. The step is made and the plane is reached by the method which is practised in other departments of literary criticism, viz., by dispa.s.sionate investigation of the work and by discarding fashionable _a priori_ theories."
The distinguished English traveller and writer on biblical subjects points out, however, that in detail many of Harnack"s objections to the Lukan narratives are due to insufficient consideration of the circ.u.mstances in which they were written and the comparative significance of the details criticised. He says, "Harnack lays much stress on the fact that inconsistencies and inexactnesses occur all through Acts. Some of these are undeniable; and I have argued that they are to be regarded in the same light as similar phenomena in the poem of Lucretius and in other ancient cla.s.sical writers, viz., as proofs that the work never received the final form which Luke intended to give it, but was still incomplete when he died. The evident need for a third book to complete the work, together with those blemishes in expression, form the proof."
Ramsay"s placing of Harnack"s writing in general is interesting in this connection. (P. 8) "Professor Harnack stands on the border between the nineteenth and twentieth century. His book shows that he is to a certain degree sensitive of and obedient to the new spirit; but he is only partially so. The nineteenth century critical method was false, and is already antiquated....
"The first century could find nothing real and true that was not accompanied by the marvellous and the "supernatural." The nineteenth century could find nothing real and true that was. Which view was right and which was wrong? Was either complete? Of these two questions, the second alone is profitable at the present. Both views were right--in a certain way of contemplating; both views were wrong--in a certain way.
Neither was complete. At present, as we are struggling to throw off the fetters which impeded thought in the nineteenth century, it is most important to free ourselves from its prejudices and narrowness."
He adds (pp. 26 and 27): "There are clear signs of the unfinished state in which this chapter was left by Luke; but some of the German scholar"s criticisms show that he has not a right idea of the simplicity of life and equipment that evidently characterized the jailer"s house and the prison. The details which he blames as inexact and inconsistent are sometimes most instructive about the circ.u.mstances of this provincial town and Roman colonia.
"But it is never safe to lay much stress on small points of inexactness or inconsistency in any author. One finds such faults even in the works of modern scholarship if one examines them in the microscopic fashion in which Luke is studied here. I think I can find them in the author [Harnack] himself. His point of view sometimes varies in a puzzling way."
As a matter of fact, Harnack, as pointed out by Ramsay, was evidently working himself more and more out of the old conclusion as to the lack of authenticity of the Lucan writings into an opinion ever more and more favorable to Luke. For instance, in a notice of his own book, published in the _Theologische Literaturzeitung_, "he speaks far more favorably about the trustworthiness and credibility of Luke, as being generally in a position to acquire and transmit reliable information, and as having proved himself able to take advantage of his position. Harnack was gradually working his way to a new plane of thought. His later opinion is more favorable."
Ramsay also points out that Professor Giffert, one of our American biblical critics, had felt compelled by the geographical and historical evidence to abandon in part the older unfavorable criticism of Luke and to admit that the Acts is more trustworthy than previous critics allowed. Above all, "he saw that it was a living piece of literature written by one author." In a word, Luke is being vindicated in every regard.
Some of the supposed inaccuracies of Luke vanish when careful investigation is made. Some of his natural history details, for instance, have been impugned and the story of the viper that "fastened"
itself upon St. Paul in Malta has been cited as an example of a story that would not have been told in that way by a man who knew medicine and the related sciences in Luke"s time. Because the pa.s.sage ill.u.s.trates a number of phases of the discussion with regard to Luke"s language I make a rather long quotation from Ramsay:
Take as a specimen with which to finish off this paper the pa.s.sage Acts xxviii, 9 _et seq._, which is very fully discussed by Harnack twice. He argues that the true meaning of the pa.s.sage was not understood until medical language was compared, when it was shown that the Greek word by which the act of the viper to Paul"s hand is described, implies "bit"
and not merely "fastened upon." But it is a well-a.s.sured fact that the viper, a poisonous snake, only strikes, fixes the poison fangs on the flesh for a moment, and withdraws its head instantly. Its action could never be what is attributed by Luke the eye witness to this Maltese viper; that it hung from Paul"s hand and was shaken off into the fire by him. On the other hand, constrictors, which have no poison fangs, cling in the way described, but as a rule do not bite. Are we, then, to understand in spite of the medical style and the authority of Professor Bla.s.s (who translates "momordit" in his edition), that the viper fastened upon the apostle"s hand? Then, the very name viper is a difficulty. Was Luke mistaken about the kind of snake which he saw? A trained medical man in ancient times was usually a good authority about serpents, to which great respect was paid in ancient medicine and custom.
Mere verbal study is here utterly at fault. We can make no progress without turning to the realities and facts of Maltese natural history. A correspondent obligingly informed me some years ago that Mr. Bryan Hook, of Farnham, Surrey (who, my correspondent a.s.sures me, is a thoroughly good naturalist), had found in Malta a small snake, _Coronella austriaca_, which is rare in England, but common in many parts of Europe. It is a constrictor, without poison fangs, which would cling to the hand or arm as Luke describes. It is similar in size to the viper, and so like in markings and general appearance that Mr.
Hook, when he caught his specimen, thought he was killing a viper.
My friend, Prof. J.W.H. Trail, of Aberdeen, whom I consulted, replied that _Coronella laevis_ or _austriaca_, is known in Sicily and the adjoining islands; but he can find no evidence of its existence in Malta. It is known to be rather irritable, and to fix its small teeth so firmly into the human skin as to need a little force to pull it off, though the teeth are too short to do any real injury to the skin. Coronella is at a glance very much like a viper; and in the flames it would not be closely examined. While it is not reported as found in Malta except by Mr. Hook, two species are known there belonging to the same family and having similar habits (_leopardinus_ and _zamenis_ (or _coluber_) _gemonensis_). The coloring of _Coronella leopardinus_ would be the most likely to suggest a viper.
The observations justify Luke entirely. We have here a snake so closely resembling a viper as to be taken for one by a good naturalist until he had caught and examined a specimen. It clings, and yet it also bites without doing harm. That the Maltese rustics should mistake this harmless snake for a venomous one is not strange. Many uneducated people have the idea that all snakes are poisonous in varying degrees, just as the vulgar often firmly believe that toads are poisonous.
Every detail as related by Luke is natural, and in accordance with the facts of the country.
In a word, then, the whole question as to Luke"s authority as a writer, as an eye-witness of many things, and as the relator of many others with regard to which he had obtained the testimony of eye-witnesses is fully vindicated. Twenty years ago many scholars were p.r.o.ne to doubt this whole question. Ten years ago most of them were convinced that the Luke traditions were not justified by recent investigation. Now we have come back once more to the complete acceptance of the old traditions.
Perhaps the most unfortunate characteristic of much nineteenth-century criticism in all departments, even those strictly scientific, was the marked tendency to reject previous opinions for new ones. Somehow men felt themselves so far ahead of old-time writers and thinkers that they concluded they must hold opinions different from their ancestors. In nearly every case the new ideas that they evolved by supposedly newer methods are not standing the test of time and further study. There had been a continuous belief in men"s minds, having its basis very probably on a pa.s.sage in one of St. Peter"s Epistles, that the earth would dissolve by fire. This was openly contradicted all during the nineteenth century and the time when the earth would freeze up definitely calculated by our mathematicians. Now after having studied radioactivity and learned from the physicist that the earth is heating up and will eventually get too hot for life, we calmly go back to the old Petrine declaration. Some of the most distinguished of the German biologists of the present day, such men as Driesch and others, calmly tell us that the edifice erected by Darwin will have to come down because of newly discovered evidence, and indeed some of them go so far as to declare that Darwinism was a crude hypothesis very superficial in its philosophical aspects and therefore acceptable to a great many people who, because it was easy to understand and was very different from what our fathers had believed, hastened to accept it. Nothing shows the necessity for being conservative in the matter of new views in science or ethics or religion more than the curious transition state in which we are with regard to many opinions at the present time, with a distinct tendency toward reaction to older views that a few years ago were thought quite untenable. We are rather proud of the advance that we are supposed to be making along many lines in science and scholarship, and yet over and over again, after years of work, we prove to have been following a wrong lead and must come back to where we started. This has been the way of man from the beginning and doubtless will continue. The present generation are having this curious regression that follows supposed progress strongly emphasized for them.
APPENDIX II
SCIENCE AT THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITIES[35]
With the growth of interest in science and in nature study in our own day, one of the expressions that is probably oftenest heard is surprise that the men of preceding generations and especially university men did not occupy themselves more with the world around them and with the phenomena that are so tempting to curiosity. Science is usually supposed to be comparatively new and nature study only a few generations old. Men are supposed to have been so much interested in book knowledge and in speculations and theories of many kinds, that they neglected the realities of life around them while spinning fine webs of theory.
Previous generations, of course, have indulged in theory, but then our own generation is not entirely free from that amusing occupation.
Nothing could well be less true, however, than that the men of preceding generations were not interested in science even in the sense of physical science, or that nature study is new, or that men were not curious and did not try to find out all they could about the phenomena of the world around them.
The medieval universities and the school-men who taught in them have been particularly blamed for their failure to occupy themselves with realities instead of with speculation. We are coming to recognize their wonderful zeal for education, the large numbers of students they attracted, the enthusiasm of their students, since they made so many handwritten copies of the books of their masters, the devotion of the teachers themselves, who wrote at much greater length than do our professors even now and on the most abstruse subjects, so that it is all the more surprising to think they should have neglected science. The thought of our generation in the matter, however, is founded entirely on an a.s.sumption. Those who know anything about the writers of the Middle Ages at first hand are not likely to think of them as neglectful of science even in our sense of the term. Those who know them at second hand are, however, very sure in the matter.
The a.s.sumption is due to the neglect of history that came in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. We have many other similar a.s.sumptions because of the neglect of many phases of mental development and applied science at this time. For instance, most of us are very proud of our modern hospital development and think of this as a great humanitarian evolution of applied medical science. We are very likely to think that this is the first time in the world"s history that the building of hospitals has been brought to such a climax of development, and that the houses for the ailing in the olden time were mere refuges, p.r.o.ne to become death traps and at most makeshifts for the solution of the problem of the care of the ailing poor. This is true for the hospitals of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but it is not true at all for the hospitals of the thirteenth and fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Miss Nutting and Miss Dock in their "History of Nursing"[36] have called attention to the fact that the lowest period in hospital development is during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Hospitals were little better than prisons, they had narrow windows, were ill provided with light and air and hygienic arrangements, and in general were all that we should imagine old-time hospitals to be.
The hospitals of the earlier time, however, had fine high ceilings, large windows, abundant light and air, excellent arrangements for the privacy of patients, and in general were as worthy of the architects of the earlier times as the munic.i.p.al buildings, the cathedrals, the castles, the university buildings, and every other form of construction that the late medieval centuries devoted themselves to.
The trouble with those who a.s.sume that there was no study of science and practically no attention to nature study in the Middle Ages is that they know nothing at all at first hand about the works of the men who wrote in the medieval period. They have accepted declarations with regard to the absolute dependence of the scholastics on authority, their almost divine worship of Aristotle, their utter readiness to accept authoritative a.s.sertions provided they came with the stamp of a mighty name, and then their complete lack of attention to observation and above all to experiment. Nothing could well be more ridiculous than this ignorant a.s.sumption of knowledge with regard to the great teachers at the medieval universities. Just as soon as there is definite knowledge of what these great teachers wrote and taught, not only does the previous mood of blame for them for not paying much more attention to science and nature at once disappear, but it gives place to the heartiest admiration for the work of these great thinkers. It is easy to appreciate, then, what Professor Saintsbury said in a recent volume on the thirteenth century:
And there have even been in these latter days some graceless ones who have asked whether the science of the nineteenth century after an equal interval will be of any more positive value--whether it will not have even less comparative interest than that which appertains to the scholasticism of the thirteenth.
Three men were the great teachers in the medieval universities at their prime. They have been read and studied with interest ever since. They wrote huge tomes, but men have pored over them in every generation. They were Albertus Magnus, the teacher of the other two, Thomas Aquinas and Roger Bacon. All three of them were together at the University of Paris shortly after the middle of the thirteenth century. Anyone who wants to know anything about the att.i.tude of mind of the medieval universities, their professors and students, and of all the intellectual world of the time towards science and observation and experiment, should read the books of these men. Any other mode of getting at any knowledge of the real significance of the science of this time is mere pretence. These const.i.tute the doc.u.ments behind any scientific history of the development of science at this time.
It is extremely interesting to see the att.i.tude of these men with regard to authority. In Albert"s tenth book (of his "Summa"), in which he catalogues and describes all the trees, plants, and herbs known in his time, he observes: "All that is here set down is the result of our own experience, or has been borrowed from authors whom we know to have written what their personal experience has confirmed; for in these matters experience alone can be of certainty." In his impressive Latin phrase "_experimentum solum certificat in talibus_." With regard to the study of nature in general he was quite as emphatic. He was a theologian as well as a scientist, yet in his treatise on "The Heavens and the Earth" he declared that "in studying nature we have not to inquire how G.o.d the Creator may, as He freely wills, use His creatures to work miracles and thereby show forth His power. We have rather to inquire what nature with its immanent causes can naturally bring to pa.s.s."[37]
Just as striking quotations on this subject might be made from Roger Bacon. Indeed, Bacon was quite impatient with the scholars around him who talked over-much, did not observe enough, depended to excess on authority, and in general did as mediocre scholars always do, made much fuss on second-hand information--plus some filmy speculations of their own. Friar Bacon, however, had one great pupil whose work he thoroughly appreciated because it exhibited the opposite qualities. This was Petrus--we have come to know him as Peregrinus--whose observations on magnetism have excited so much attention in recent years with the republications of his epistle on the subject. It is really a monograph on magnetism written in the thirteenth century. Roger Bacon"s opinion of it and of its author furnishes us the best possible index of his att.i.tude of mind towards observation and experiment in science.
I know of only one person who deserves praise for his work in experimental philosophy for he does not care for the discourses of men and their wordy warfare, but quietly and diligently pursues the works of wisdom. Therefore what others grope after blindly, as bats in the evening twilight, this man contemplates in their brilliancy _because he is a master of experiment_. Hence, he knows all of natural science whether pertaining to medicine and alchemy, or to matters celestial or terrestrial. He has worked diligently in the smelting of ores as also in the working of minerals; he is thoroughly acquainted with all sorts of arms and implements used in military service and in hunting, besides which he is skilled in agriculture and in the measurement of lands. It is impossible to write a useful or correct treatise in experimental philosophy without mentioning this man"s name.
Moreover, he pursues knowledge for its own sake; for if he wished to obtain royal favor, he could easily find sovereigns who would honor and enrich him.
Similar expressions might readily be quoted from Thomas Aquinas, but his works are so easy to secure and his whole att.i.tude of mind so well known, that it scarcely seems worth while taking s.p.a.ce to do so. Aquinas is still studied very faithfully in many universities, and within the last few years one of his great text-books of philosophy has been replaced in the curriculum of Oxford University, in which it occupied a prominent position in the long ago, as a work that may be offered for examination in the department of philosophy. It is with regard to him particularly that there has been the greatest revulsion of feeling in recent years and a recognition of the fact that here was a great thinker familiar with all that was known in the physical sciences, and who had this knowledge constantly in his mind when he drew his conclusions with regard to philosophical and theological questions.
It used to be the fashion to make little of the medieval scholars for the high estimation in which they held Aristotle. Occasionally even yet one hears narrowly educated men, I am sorry to say much more frequently scientific specialists than others, talk deprecatingly of this ardent devotion to Aristotle. No one who knows anything about Aristotle ever indulges in such an exhibition of ignorance of the realities of the history of philosophy and science. To know Aristotle well is to think of him as probably possessed of the greatest human mind that ever existed.
We do not need to go back to the Middle Ages to be confirmed in that opinion. Modern scientists who know their science well, but who also know Aristotle well, and who are ardent worshippers at his shrine, are not hard to find. Romanes, the great English biologist of the end of the nineteenth century, said: "It appears to me that there can be no question that Aristotle stands forth not only as the greatest figure in antiquity but as the greatest intellect that has ever appeared upon this earth."