VIII. SCIENTIFIC UNIVERSITIES.
In the first edition of this book I called attention to the fact, that science, even in our sense of physical science, was, in spite of impressions to the contrary, a favorite subject for students and teachers in the early universities. What might have been insisted on, however, is that these old universities were scientific universities resembling our own so closely in their devotion to science as to differ from them only in certain unimportant aspects. Because the universities for three centuries before the Nineteenth had been occupied mainly with classical studies, we are prone to think that these were the main subjects of university teaching for all the centuries before. Nothing could well be less true. The undergraduate studies consisted of the seven liberal arts so-called, though these were largely studied from the scientific standpoint. The quotation from Prof. Huxley ( [Appendix III., Education]) makes this very clear. What we would now call the graduate studies consisted of metaphysics, in which considerable physics were studied, astronomy, medicine, above all, mathematics, and then the ethical sciences, under which were studied what we now call ethics, politics and economics. The picture of these medieval universities as I have given them in my lecture on Medieval Scientific Universities, in "Education, How Old the New," makes this very clear. The interests and studies were very like those of our own time, only the names for them being different. Nature-study was a favorite subject, and, as I have pointed out in "The Popes and Science," Dante must be considered as a great nature student, for he was able to draw the most exquisite figures from details of knowledge of living things with which few [{441}] poets are familiar. The books of the professors of the Thirteenth Century which have been preserved, those of Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, Aquinas, Duns Scotus and others, make it very clear that scientific teaching was the main occupation of the university faculties, while the preservation of these huge tomes by the diligent copying of disciples shows how deeply interested were their pupils in the science of the time.