The Age of the Reformation

by Preserved Smith

SECTION 4. SCIENCE

[Sidenote: Inductive method]

The glory of sixteenth-century science is that for the first time, on a large scale, since the ancient Greeks, did men try to look at nature through their own eyes instead of through those of Aristotle and the Physiologus. Bacon and Vives have each been credited with the discovery of the inductive method, but, like so many philosophers, they merely generalized a practice already common at their time. Save for one discovery of the first magnitude, and two or three others of some little importance, the work of the sixteenth century was that of observing, describing and classifying facts. This was no small service in itself, though it does not strike the imagination as do the great new theories.

[Sidenote: Mathematics]

In mathematics the preparatory work for the statement and solution of new problems consisted in the perfection of symbolism. As reasoning in general is dependent on words, as music is dependent on the mechanical invention of instruments, so mathematics cannot progress far save with a simple and adequate symbolism. The introduction of the Arabic as against the Roman numerals, and particularly the introduction of the zero in reckoning, for the first time, in the later Middle Ages, allowed men to perform conveniently the four fundamental processes. The use of the signs + {610} and - for plus and minus (formerly written p. and m.), and of the sign = for equality and of V [square root symbol] for root, were additional conveniences. To this might be added the popularization of decimals by Simon Stevin in 1586, which he called "the art of calculating by whole numbers without fractions." How clumsy are all things at their birth is illustrated by his method of writing decimals by putting them as powers of one-tenth, with circles around the exponents; e.g., the number that we should write 237.578, he wrote 237(to the power 0) 5(to the power 1) 7(to the power 2) 8 (to the power 3). He first declared for decimal systems of coinage, weights and measures.

[Sidenote: Algebra 1494]

Algebraic notation also improved vastly in the period. In a treatise of Lucas Paciolus we find cumbrous signs instead of letters, thus no. (numero) for the known quantity, co. (cosa) for the unknown quantity, ce. (censo) for the square, and cu. (cubo) for the cube of the unknown quantity. As he still used p. and m. for plus and minus, he wrote 3co.p.4ce.m.5cu.p.2ce.ce.m.6no. for the number we should write 3x + 4x(power 2) - 5x(power 3) + 2x(power 4) - 6a. The use of letters in the modern style is due to the mathematicians of the sixteenth century. The solution of cubic and of biquadratic equations, at first only in certain particular forms, but later in all forms, was mastered by Tartaglia and Cardan. The latter even discussed negative roots, whether rational or irrational.

[Sidenote: Geometry]

Geometry at that time, as for long afterwards, was dependent wholly on Euclid, of whose work a Latin translation was first published at Venice. [Sidenote: 1505] Copernicus with his pupil George Joachim, called Rheticus, and Francis Vieta, made some progress in trigonometry. Copernicus gave the first simple demonstration of the fundamental formula of spherical trigonometry; Rheticus made tables of sines, tangents and secants {611} of arcs. Vieta discovered the formula for deriving the sine of a multiple angle.

[Sidenote: Cardan, 1501-76]

As one turns the pages of the numerous works of Jerome Cardan one is astonished to find the number of subjects on which he wrote, including, in mathematics, choice and chance, arithmetic, algebra, the calendar, negative quantities, and the theory of numbers. In the last named branch it was another Italian, Maurolycus, who recognized the general character of mathematics as "symbolic logic." He is indeed credited with understanding the most general principle on which depends all mathematical deduction.[1] Some of the most remarkable anticipations of modern science were made by Cardan. He believed that inorganic matter was animated, and that all nature was a progressive evolution. Thus his statement that all animals were originally worms implies the indefinite variability of species, just as his remark that inferior metals were unsuccessful attempts of nature to produce gold, might seem to foreshadow the idea of the transmutation of metals under the influence of radioactivity. It must be remembered that such guesses had no claim to be scientific demonstrations.

The encyclopaedic character of knowledge was then, perhaps, one of its most striking characteristics. Bacon was not the first man of his century to take all knowledge for his province. In learning and breadth of view few men have ever exceeded Conrad Gesner, [Sidenote: Gesner] called by Cuvier "the German Pliny." His History of Animals (published in many volumes 1551-87) was the basis of zoölogy until the time of Darwin. [Sidenote: Zoölogy] He {612} drew largely on previous writers, Aristotle and Albertus Magnus, but he also took pains to see for himself as much as possible. The excellent illustrations for his book, partly drawn from previous works but mostly new, added greatly to its value. His classification, though superior to any that had preceded it, was in some respects astonishing, as when he put the hippopotamus among aquatic animals with fish, and the bat among birds. Occasionally he describes a purely mythical animal like "the monkey-fox." It is difficult to see what criterion of truth would have been adequate for the scholar at that time. A monkey-fox is no more improbable than a rhinoceros, and Gesner found it necessary to assure his readers that the rhinoceros really existed in nature and was not a creation of fancy.

[Sidenote: Leonardo]

As the master of modern anatomy and of several other branches of science, stands Leonardo da Vinci. It is difficult to appraise his work accurately because it is not yet fully known, and still more because of its extraordinary form. Ho left thousands of pages of notes on everything and hardly one complete treatise on anything. He began a hundred studies and finished none of them. He had a queer twist to his mind that made him, with all his power, seek byways. The monstrous, the uncouth, fascinated him; he saw a Medusa in a spider and the universe in a drop of water. He wrote his notes in mirror-writing, from right to left; he illustrated them with a thousand fragments of exquisite drawing, all unfinished and tantalizing alike to the artist and to the scientist. His mind roamed to flying machines and submarines, but he never made one; the reason given by him in the latter case being his fear that it would be put to piratical use. He had something in him of Faust; in some respects he reminds us of William James, who also started as a {613} painter and ended as an omniverous student of outré things and as a psychologist.

[Sidenote: Anatomy]

If, therefore, the anatomical drawings made by Leonardo from about twenty bodies that he dissected, are marvellous specimens of art, he left it to others to make a really systematic study of the human body. His contemporary, Berengar of Carpi, professor at Bologna, first did this with marked success, classifying the various tissues as fat, membrane, flesh, nerve, fibre and so forth. So far from true is it that it was difficult to get corpses to work upon that he had at least a hundred. Indeed, according to Fallopius, another famous scientist, the Duke of Tuscany would occasionally send live criminals to be vivisected, thus making their punishment redound to the benefit of science. The Inquisitors made the path of science hard by burning books on anatomy as materialistic and indecent.

[Sidenote: Servetus]

Two or three investigators anticipated Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood. Unfortunately, as the matter is of interest, Servetus's treatment of the subject, found in his work on The Trinity, is too long to quote, but it is plain that, along with various fallacious ideas, he had really discovered the truth that the blood all passes through heart and lungs whence it is returned to the other organs.

[Sidenote: Physics]

While hardly anything was done in chemistry, a large number of phenomena in the field of physics were observed now for the first time. Leonardo da Vinci measured the rapidity of falling bodies, by dropping them from towers and having the time of their passage at various stages noted. He thus found, correctly, that their velocity increased. It is also said that he observed that bodies always fell a little to the eastward of the plumb line, and thence concluded that the earth revolved on its axis. He made careful experiments with billiard balls, discovering that the {614} momentum of the impact always was preserved entire in the motion of the balls struck. He measured forces by the weight and speed of the bodies and arrived at an approximation of the ideas of mechanical "work" and energy of position. He thought of energy as a spiritual force transferred from one body to another by touch. This remarkable man further invented a hygrometer, explained sound as a wave-motion in the air, and said that the appearance known to us as "the old moon in the new moon's lap" was due to the reflection of earth-light.

Nicholas Tartaglia first showed that the course of a projectile was a parabola, and that the maximum range of a gun would be at an angle of 45 degrees.

Some good work was done in optics. John Baptist della Porta described, though he did not invent, the camera obscura. Burning glasses were explained. Leonard Digges even anticipated the telescope by the use of double lenses.

Further progress in mechanics was made by Cardan who explained the lever and pulley, and by Simon Stevin who first demonstrated the resolution of forces. He also noticed the difference between stable and unstable equilibrium, and showed that the downward pressure of a liquid is independent of the shape of the vessel it is in and is dependent only on the height. He and other scholars asserted the causation of the tides by the moon.

[Sidenote: Magnetism]

Magnetism was much studied. When compasses were first invented it was thought that they always pointed to the North Star under the influence of some stellar compulsion. But even in the fifteenth century it was noticed independently by Columbus and by German experimenters that the needle did not point true north. As the amount of its declination varies at {615} different places on the earth and at different times, this was one of the most puzzling facts to explain. One man believed that the change depended on climate, another that it was an individual property of each needle. About 1581 Robert Norman discovered the inclination, or dip of the compass. These and other observations were summed up by William Gilbert [Sidenote: Gilbert] in his work on The Magnet, Magnetic Bodies and the Earth as a great Magnet. [Sidenote: 1600] A great deal of his space was taken in that valuable destructive criticism that refutes prevalent errors. His greatest discovery was that the earth itself is a large magnet. He thought of magnetism as "a soul, or like a soul, which is in many things superior to the human soul as long as this is bound by our bodily organs." It was therefore an appetite that compelled the magnet to point north and south. Similar explanations of physical and chemical properties are found in the earliest and in some of the most recent philosophers.

[Sidenote: Geography]

As might be expected, the science of geography, nourished by the discoveries of new lands, grew mightily. Even the size of the earth could only be guessed at until it had been encircled. Columbus believed that its circumference at the equator was 8000 miles. The stories of its size that circulated after Magellan were exaggerated by the people. Thus Sir David Lyndsay in his poem The Dreme [Sidenote: 1528] quotes "the author of the sphere" as saying that the earth was 101,750 miles in circumference, each mile being 5000 feet. The author referred to was the thirteenth century Johannes de Sacro Bosco (John Holywood). Two editions of his work, De Sphaera, that I have seen, one of Venice, 1499, and one of Paris, 1527, give the circumference of the earth as 20,428 miles, but an edition published at Wittenberg in 1550 gives it as 5,400, probably an {616} attempt to reduce the author's English miles to German ones. [Sidenote: 1551] Robert Recorde calculated the earth's circumference at 21,300 miles.[2]

Rough maps of the new lands were drawn by the companions of the discoverers. Martin Waldseemuller [Sidenote: 1507] published a large map of the world in twelve sheets and a small globe about 4 1/2 inches in diameter, in which the new world is for the first time called America. The next great advance was made by the Flemish cartographer Gerard Mercator [Sidenote: Mercator, 1512-94] whose globes and maps—some of them on the projection since called by his name—are extraordinarily accurate for Europe and the coast of Africa, and fairly correct for Asia, though he represented that continent as too narrow. He included, however, in their approximately correct positions, India, the Malay peninsula, Sumatra, Java and Japan. America is very poorly drawn, for though the east coast of North America is fairly correct, the continent is too broad and the rest of the coasts vague. He made two startling anticipations of later discoveries, the first that he separated Asia and America by only a narrow strait at the north, and the second that he assumed the existence of a continent around the south pole. This, however, he made far too large, thinking that the Tierra del Fuego was part of it and drawing it so as to come near the south coast of Africa and of Java. His maps of Europe were based on recent and excellent surveys.

[Sidenote: Astronomy]

Astronomy, the oldest of the sciences, had made much progress in the tabulation of material. The apparent orbits of the sun, moon, planets, and stars had been correctly observed, so that eclipses might be predicted, conjunction of planets calculated, and that {617} gradual movement of the sun through the signs of the zodiac known as the precession of the equinoxes, taken account of. To explain these movements the ancients started on the theory that each heavenly body moved in a perfect circle around the earth; the fixed stars were assigned to one of a group of revolving spheres, the sun, moon and five planets each to one, making eight in all. But it was soon observed that the movements of the planets were too complicated to fall into this system; the number of moving spheres was raised to 27 before Aristotle and to 56 by him. To these concentric spheres later astronomers added eccentric spheres, moving within others, called epicycles, and to them epicycles of the second order; in fact astronomers were compelled:

To build, unbuild, contrive,
To save appearances, to gird the sphere
With centric and eccentric scribbled o'er
Cycle and epicycle, orb in orb.

The complexity of this system, which moved the mirth of Voltaire and, according to Milton, of the Almighty, was such as to make it doubted by some thinkers even in antiquity. Several men thought the earth revolved on its axis, but the hypothesis was rejected by Aristotle and Ptolemy. Heracleides, in the fourth century B. C., said that Mercury and Venus circled around the sun, and in the third century Aristarchus of Samos actually anticipated, though it was a mere guess, the heliocentric theory.

Just before Copernicus various authors seemed to hint at the truth, but in so mystical or brief a way that little can be made of their statements. Thus, Nicholas of Cusa [Sidenote: Nicholas of Cusa, 1400-64] argued that "as the earth cannot be the center of the universe it cannot lack all motion." Leonardo believed that the earth revolved on its axis, and stated that it was a star and would look, to a man on {618} the moon, as the moon does to us. In one place he wrote, "the sun does not move,"—only that enigmatical sentence and nothing more.

[Sidenote: Copernicus, 1473-1543]

Nicholas Copernicus was a native of Thorn in Poland, himself of mixed Polish and Teutonic blood. At the age of eighteen he went to the university of Cracow, where he spent three years. In 1496 he was enabled by an ecclesiastical appointment to go to Italy, where he spent most of the next ten years in study. He worked at the universities of Bologna, Padua and Ferrara, and lectured—though not as a member of the university—at Rome. His studies were comprehensive, including civil law, canon law, medicine, mathematics, and the classics. At Padua, on May 31, 1503, he was made doctor of canon law. He also studied astronomy in Italy, talked with the most famous professors of that science and made observations of the heavens.

Copernicus's uncle was bishop of Ermeland, a spiritual domain and fief of the Teutonic Order, under the supreme suzerainty, at least after 1525, of the king of Poland. Here Copernicus spent the rest of his life; the years 1506-1512 in the bishop's palace at Heilsberg, after 1512, except for two not long stays at Allenstein, as a canon at Frauenburg.

This little town, near but not quite on the Baltic coast, is ornamented by a beautiful cathedral. On the wall surrounding the close is a small tower which the astronomer made his observatory. Here, in the long frosty nights of winter and in the few short hours of summer darkness, he often lay on his back examining the stars. He had no telescope, and his other instruments were such crude things as he put together himself. The most important was what he calls the Instrumentum parallacticum, a wooden isosceles triangle with legs eight feet long divided into 1000 {619} divisions by ink marks, and a hypotenuse divided into 1414 divisions. With this he determined the height of the sun, moon and stars, and their deviation from the vernal point. To this he added a square (quadrum) which told the height of the sun by the shadow thrown by a peg in the middle of the square. A third instrument, also to measure the height of a celestial body, was called the Jacob's staff. His difficulties were increased by the lack of any astronomical tables save those poor ones made by Greeks and Arabs. The faults of these were so great that the fundamental star, i.e., the one he took by which to measure the rest, Spica, was given a longitude nearly 40 degrees out of the true one.

[Sidenote: Copernican hypothesis]

Nevertheless with these poor helps Copernicus arrived, and that very early, at his momentous conclusion. His observations, depending as they did on the weather, were not numerous. His time was spent largely in reading the classic astronomers and in working out the mathematical proofs of his hypothesis. He found hints in quotations from ancient astronomers in Cicero and Plutarch that the earth moved, but he, for the first time, placed the planets in their true position around the sun, and the moon as a satellite of the earth. He retained the old conception of the primum mobile or sphere of fixed stars though he placed it at an infinitely greater distance than did the ancients, to account for the absence of any observed alteration (parallax) in the position of the stars during the year. He also retained the old conception of circular orbits for the planets, though at one time he considered the possibility of their being elliptical, as they are. Unfortunately for his immediate followers the section on this subject found in his own manuscript was cut out of his printed book.

The precise moment at which Copernicus {620} formulated his theory in his own mind cannot be told with certainty, but it was certainly before 1516. He kept back his books for a long time, but his light was not placed under a bushel nevertheless. [Sidenote: 1520] The first rays of it shown forth in a tract by Celio Calcagnini of which only the title, "That the earth moves and the heaven is still," has survived. Some years later Copernicus wrote a short summary of his book, for private circulation only, entitled "A Short commentary on his hypotheses concerning the celestial movements." A fuller account of them was given by his friend and disciple, [Sidenote: Narratio prima, 1540] George Joachim, called Rheticus, who left Wittenberg, where he was teaching, to sit at the master's feet, and who published what was called The First Account.

Finally, Copernicus was persuaded to give his own work to the public. Foreseeing the opposition it was likely to call forth, he tried to forestall criticism by a dedication to the Pope Paul III. Friends at Nuremberg undertook to find a printer, and one of them, the Lutheran pastor Andrew Osiander, with the best intentions, did the great wrong of inserting an anonymous preface stating that the author did not advance his hypotheses as necessarily true, but merely as a means of facilitating astronomical calculations. At last the greatest work of the century, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, [Sidenote: De revolutionibus orbium caelestium, 1543] came from the press; a copy was brought to the author on his death bed.

The first of the six books examines the previous authorities, the second proposes the new theory, the third discusses the precession of the equinoxes, the fourth proves that the moon circles the earth, the fifth and most important proves that the planets, including the earth, move around the sun, and gives correctly the time of the orbits of all the planets then known, from Mercury with eighty-eight days to Saturn with thirty {621} years. The sixth book is on the determination of latitude and longitude from the fixed stars. Copernicus's proofs and reasons are absolutely convincing and valid as far as they go. It remained for Galileo and Newton to give further explanations and some modifications in detail of the new theory.

[Sidenote: Reception of the Copernican theory]

When one remembers the enormous hubbub raised by Darwin's Origin of Species, the reception of Copernicus's no less revolutionary work seems singularly mild. The idea was too far in advance of the age, too great, too paradoxical, to be appreciated at once. Save for a few astronomers like Rheticus and Reinhold, hardly anyone accepted it at first. It would have been miraculous had they done so.

Among the first to take alarm were the Wittenberg theologians, to whose attention the new theory was forcibly brought by their colleague Rheticus. Luther alludes to the subject twice or thrice in his table talk, most clearly on June 4, 1539, when

mention was made of a certain new astronomer, who tried to prove that the earth moved and not the sky, sun and moon, just as, when one was carried along in a boat or wagon, it seemed to himself that he was still and that the trees and landscape moved. "So it goes now," said Luther, "whoever wishes to be clever must not let anything please him that others do, but must do something of his own. Thus he does who wishes to subvert the whole of astronomy: but I believe the Holy Scriptures, which say that Joshua commanded the sun, and not the earth, to stand still."

In his Elements of Physics, written probably in 1545, but not published until 1549, Melanchthon said:

The eyes bear witness that the sky revolves every
twenty-four hours. But some men now, either for love
of novelty, or to display their ingenuity, assert that the
earth moves. . . . But it is hurtful and dishonorable to
{622}
assert such absurdities. . . . The Psalmist says that the
sun moves and the earth stands fast. . . . And the earth,
as the center of the universe, must needs be the
immovable point on which the circle turns.

Apparently, however, Melanchthon either came to adopt the new theory, or to regard it as possible, for he left this passage entirely out of the second edition of the same work. [Sidenote: 1550] Moreover his relations with Rheticus continued warm, and Rheinhold continued to teach the Copernican system at Wittenberg.

The reception of the new work was also surprisingly mild, at first, in Catholic circles. As early as 1533 Albert Widmanstetter had told Clement VII of the Copernican hypothesis and the pope did not, at least, condemn it. Moreover it was a cardinal, Schönberg, who consulted Paul III on the matter [Sidenote: 1536] and then urged Copernicus to publish his book, though in his letter the language is so cautiously guarded against possible heresy that not a word is said about the earth moving around the sun but only about the moon and the bodies near it so doing. [Sidenote: 1579] A Spanish theologian, Didacus a Stunica (Zuñiga) wrote a commentary on Job, which was licensed by the censors, accepting the Copernican astronomy.

But gradually, as the implications of the doctrine became apparent, the church in self-defence took a strong stand against it. [Sidenote: March 5, 1616] The Congregation of the Index issued a decree saying, "Lest opinions of this sort creep in to the destruction of Catholic truth, the book of Nicholas Copernicus and others [defending his hypothesis] are suspended until they be corrected." A little later Galileo was forced, under the threat of torture, to recant this heresy. Only when the system had become universally accepted, did the church, in 1822, first expressly permit the faithful to hold it.

The philosophers were as shy of the new light as {623} the theologians. Bodin in France and Bacon in England both rejected it; the former was conservative at heart and the latter was never able to see good in other men's work, whether that of Aristotle or of Gilbert or of the great Pole. Possibly he was also misled by Osiander's preface and by Tycho Brahe. Giordano Bruno, however, welcomed the new idea with enthusiasm, saying that Copernicus taught more in two chapters than did Aristotle and the Peripatetics in all their works.

Astronomers alone were capable of weighing the evidence scientifically and they, at first, were also divided. Erasmus Reinhold, of Wittenberg, accepted it and made his calculations on the assumption of its truth, as did an Englishman, John Field. [Sidenote: 1556] Tycho Brahe, [Sidenote: Tycho Brahe, 1546-1601] on the other hand, tried to find a compromise between the Copernican and Ptolemaic systems. He argued that the earth could not revolve on its axis as the centrifugal force would hurl it to pieces, and that it could not revolve around the sun as in that case a change in the position of the fixed stars would be observed. Both objections were well taken, of course, considered in themselves alone, but both could be answered by a deeper knowledge. Brahe therefore considered the earth as the center of the orbits of the moon, sun, and stars, and the sun as the center of the orbits of the planets.

The attention to astronomy had two practical corollaries, the improvement of navigation and the reform of the calendar. Several better forms of astrolabe, of "sun-compass" (or dial turnable by a magnet) and an "astronomical ring" for getting the latitude and longitude by observation of sun and star, were introduced.

[Sidenote: Reform of calendar]

The reform of the Julian calendar was needed on account of the imperfect reckoning of the length of the {624} year as exactly 365 1/4 days; thus every four centuries there would be three days too much. It was proposed to remedy this for the present by leaving out ten days, and for the future by omitting leap-year every century not divisible by 400. The bull of Gregory XIII, [Sidenote: February 24, 1582] who resumed the duties of the ancient Pontifex Maximus in regulating time, enjoined Catholic lands to rectify their calendar by allowing the fifteenth of October, 1582, to follow immediately after the fourth. This was done by most of Italy, by Spain, Portugal, Poland, most of Germany, and the Netherlands. Other lands adopted the new calendar later, England not until 1752 and Russia not until 1917.

[1] I.e. the principle thus formulated in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, s.v. "Mathematics": "If s is any class and zero a member of it, also if when x is a cardinal number and a member of s, also x + 1 is a member of s, then the whole class of cardinal numbers is contained in s."

[2] Eratosthenes (276-196 B.C.) had correctly calculated the earth's circumference at 25,000, which Poseidonius (c. 135-50 B.C.) reduced to 18,000, in which he was followed by Ptolemy (2d century A.D.).

SECTION 5. PHILOSOPHY

[Sidenote: Science, religion and philosophy]

The interrelations of science, religion, and philosophy, though complex in their operation, are easily understood in their broad outlines. Science is the examination of the data of experience and their explanation in logical, physical, or mathematical terms. Religion, on the other hand, is an attitude towards unseen powers, involving the belief in the existence of spirits. Philosophy, or the search for the ultimate reality, is necessarily an afterthought. It comes only after man is sophisticated enough to see some difference between the phenomenon and the idea. It draws its premises from both science and religion: some systems, like that of Plato, being primarily religious fancy, some, like that of Aristotle, scientific realism.

The philosophical position taken by the Catholic church was that of Aquinas, Aristotelian realism. [Sidenote: The Reformers] The official commentary on the Summa was written at this time by Cardinal Cajetan. Compared to the steady orientation of the Catholic, the Protestant philosophers wavered, catching often at the latest style in thought, be it monism or pragmatism. Luther was the {625} spiritual child of Occam, and the ancestor of Kant. His individualism stood half-way between the former's nominalism and the latter's transcendentalism and subjectivism. But the Reformers were far less interested in purely metaphysical than they were in dogmatic questions. The main use they made of their philosophy was to bring in a more individual and less mechanical scheme of salvation. Their great change in point of view from Catholicism was the rejection of the sacramental, hierarchical system in favor of justification by faith. This was, in truth, a stupendous change, putting the responsibility for salvation directly on God, and dispensing with the mediation of priest and rite.

[Sidenote: Attitude towards reason]

But it was the only important change, of a speculative nature, made by the Reformers. The violent polemics of that and later times have concealed the fact that in most of his ideas the Protestant is but a variety of the Catholic. Both religions accepted as axiomatic the existence of a personal, ethical God, the immortality of the soul, future rewards and punishments, the mystery of the Trinity, the revelation, incarnation and miracles of Christ, the authority of the Bible and the real presence in the sacrament. Both equally detested reason.

He who is gifted with the heavenly knowledge of faith [says the Catechism of the Council of Trent] is free from an inquisitive curiosity; for when God commands us to believe, he does not propose to have us search into his divine judgments, nor to inquire their reasons and causes, but demands an immutable faith. . . . Faith, therefore, excludes not only all doubt, but even the desire of subjecting its truth to demonstration.

We know that reason is the devil's harlot [says
Luther] and can do nothing but slander and harm all that
God says and does. [And again] If, outside of Christ,
you wish by your own thoughts to know your relation to
{626}
God, you will break your neck. Thunder strikes him
who examines. It is Satan's wisdom to tell what God
is, and by doing so he will draw you into the abyss.
Therefore keep to revelation and don't try to understand.

There are many mysteries in the Bible, Luther acknowledged, that seem absurd to reason, but it is our duty to swallow them whole. Calvin abhorred the free spirit of the humanists as the supreme heresy of free thought. He said that philosophy was only the shadow and revelation the substance. "Nor is it reasonable," said he, "that the divine will should be made the subject of controversy with us." Zwingli, anticipating Descartes's "finitum infiniti capax non est," stated that our small minds could not grasp God's plan. Oecolampadius, dying, said that he wanted no more light than he then had—an instructive contrast to Goethe's last words: "Mehr Licht!" Even Bacon, either from prudence or conviction, said that theological mysteries seeming absurd to reason must be believed.

[Sidenote: Radical sects]

Nor were the radical sects a whit more rational. Those who represented the protest against Protestantism and the dissidence of dissent appealed to the Bible as an authority and abhorred reason as much as did the orthodox churches. The Antitrinitarians were no more deists or free thinkers than were the Lutherans. Campanus and Adam Pastor and Servetus and the Sozinis had no aversion to the supernatural and made no claim to reduce Christianity to a humanitarian deism, as some modern Unitarians would do. Their doubts were simply based on a different exegesis of the biblical texts. Fausto Sozini thought Christ was "a subaltern God to whom at a certain time the Supreme God gave over the government of the world." Servetus defined the Trinity to be "not an illusion of three invisible things, but the manifestation of God {627} in the Word and a communication of the substance of God in the Spirit." This is no new rationalism coming in but a reversion to an obsolete heresy, that of Paul of Samosata. It does not surprise us to find Servetus lecturing on astrology.

[Sidenote: Spiritual Reformers]

Somewhat to the left of the Antitrinitarian sects were a few men, who had hardly any followers, who may be called, for want of a better term, Spiritual Reformers. They sought, quite in the nineteenth century spirit, to make Christianity nothing but an ethical culture. James Acontius, born in Trent [Sidenote: 1565] but naturalized in England, published his Stratagems of Satan in 1565 to reduce the fundamental doctrines of Christianity to the very fewest possible. Sebastian Franck of Ingolstadt [Sidenote: Franck, 1499-1542] found the only authority for each man in his inward, spiritual message. He sought to found no community or church, but to get only readers. These men passed almost unnoticed in their day.

[Sidenote: Italian skeptics]

There was much skepticism throughout the century. Complete Pyrrhonism under a thin veil of lip-conformity, was preached by Peter Pomponazzi, [Sidenote: Pomponazzi,1462-1325] professor of philosophy at Padua, Ferrara and Bologna. His De immortalitate animi [Sidenote: 1516] caused a storm by its plain conclusion that the soul perished with the body. He tried to make the distinction in his favor that a thing might be true in religion and false in philosophy. Thus he denied his belief in demons and spirits as a philosopher, while affirming that he believed in them as a Christian. He was in fact a materialist. He placed Christianity, Mohammedanism and Judaism on the same level, broadly hinting that all were impostures.

Public opinion became so interested in the subject of immortality at this time that when another philosopher, Simon Porzio, tried to lecture on meteorology at Pisa, his audience interrupted him with cries, "Quid de anima?" He, also, maintained that the soul of man {628} was like that of the beasts. But he had few followers who dared to express such an opinion. After the Inquisition had shown its teeth, the life of the Italian nation was like that of its great poet, Tasso, whose youth was spent at the feet of the Jesuits and whose manhood was haunted by fears of having unwittingly done something that might be punished by the stake. It was to counteract the pagan opinion, stated to be rapidly growing, that the Vatican Council forbade all clerics to lecture on the classics for five years. But in vain! A report of Paul III's cardinals charged professors of philosophy with teaching impiety. Indeed, the whole literature of contemporary Italy, from Machiavelli, who treated Christianity as a false and noxious superstition, to Pulci who professed belief in nothing but pleasure, is saturated with free thought. "Vanity makes most humanists skeptics," wrote Ariosto, "why is it that learning and infidelity go hand in hand?"

[Sidenote: German skeptics]

In Germany, too, there was some free thought, the most celebrated case being that of the "godless painters of Nuremberg," Hans Sebald Beham, Bartholomew Beham, and George Penz. The first named expressed some doubts about various Protestant doctrines. Bartholomew went further, asserting that baptism was a human device, that the Scriptures could not be believed and that the preaching he had heard was but idle talk, producing no fruit in the life of the preacher himself; he recognized no superior authority but that of God. George Penz went further still, for while he admitted the existence of God he asserted that his nature was unknowable, and that he could believe neither in Christ nor in the Scriptures nor in the sacraments. The men were banished from the city.

[Sidenote: French skeptics]

In France, as in Italy, the opening of the century saw signs of increasing skepticism in the frequent {629} trials of heretics who denied all Christian doctrines and "all principles save natural ones." But a spirit far more dangerous to religion than any mere denial incarnated itself in Rabelais. He did not philosophize, but he poured forth a torrent of the raw material from which philosophies are made. He did not argue or attack; he rose like a flood or a tide until men found themselves either swimming in the sea of mirth and mockery, or else swept off their feet by it. He studied law, theology and medicine; he travelled in Germany and Italy and he read the classics, the schoolmen, the humanists and the heretics. And he found everywhere that nature and life were good and nothing evil in the world save its deniers. To live according to nature he built, in his story, the abbey of Thélème, a sort of hedonist's or anarchist's Utopia where men and women dwell together under the rule, "Do what thou wilt," and which has over its gates the punning invitation: "Cy entrez, vous, qui le saint evangile en sens agile annoncez, quoy qu'on gronde." For Rabelais there was nothing sacred, or even serious in "revealed religion," and God was "that intellectual sphere the center of which is everywhere and the circumference nowhere."

Rabelais was not the only Frenchman to burlesque the religious quarrels of the day. Bonaventure des Périers, [Sidenote: Des Périers, d. 1544] in a work called Cymbalum Mundi, introduced Luther under the anagram of Rethulus, a Catholic as Tryocan (i.e., Croyant) and a skeptic as Du Glenier (i.e., Incrédule), debating their opinions in a way that redounded much to the advantage of the last named.

Then there was Stephen Dolet [Sidenote: Dolet, 1509-46] the humanist publisher of Lyons, burned to death as an atheist, because, in translating the Axiochos, a dialogue then attributed to Plato, he had written "After death you will be nothing at all" instead of "After death you will be no {630} more," as the original is literally to be construed. The charge was frivolous, but the impression was doubtless correct that he was a rather indifferent skeptic, disdainful of religion. He, too, considered the Reformers only to reject them as too much like their enemies. No Christian church could hold the worshipper of Cicero and of letters, of glory and of humanity. And yet this sad and restless man, who found the taste of life as bitter as Rabelais had found it sweet, died for his faith. He was the martyr of the Renaissance.

[Sidenote: Bodin]

A more systematic examination of religion was made by Jean Bodin in his Colloquy on Secret and Sublime Matters, commonly called the Heptaplomeres. Though not published until long after the author's death, it had a brisk circulation in manuscript and won a reputation for impiety far beyond its deserts. It is simply a conversation between a Jew, a Mohammedan, a Lutheran, a Zwinglian, a Catholic, an Epicurean and a Theist. The striking thing about it is the fairness with which all sides are presented; there is no summing up in favor of one faith rather than another. Nevertheless, the conclusion would force itself upon the reader that among so many religions there was little choice; that there was something true and something false in all; and that the only necessary articles were those on which all agreed. Bodin was half way between a theist and a deist; he believed that the Decalogue was a natural law imprinted in all men's hearts and that Judaism was the nearest to being a natural religion. He admitted, however, that the chain of casuality was broken by miracle and he believed in witchcraft. It cannot be thought that he was wholly without personal faith, like Machiavelli, and yet his strong argument against changing religion even if the new be better than the old, is entirely worldly. With France before his {631} eyes, it is not strange that he drew the general conclusion that any change of religion is dangerous and sure to be followed by war, pestilence, famine and demoniacal possession.

[Sidenote: Montaigne]

After the fiery stimulants, compounded of brimstone and Stygian hatred, offered by Calvin and the Catholics, and after the plethoric gorge of good cheer at Gargantua's table, the mild sedative of Montaigne's conversation comes like a draft of nepenthe or the fruit of the lotus. In him we find no blast and blaze of propaganda, no fulmination of bull and ban; nor any tide of earth-encircling Rabelaisian mirth. His words fall as softly and as thick as snowflakes, and they leave his world a white page, with all vestiges of previous writings erased. He neither asseverates nor denies; he merely, as he puts it himself, "juggles," treating of idle subjects which he believes nothing at all, for he has noticed that as soon one denies the possibility of anything, someone else will say that he has seen it. In short, truth is a near neighbor to falsehood, and the wise man can only repeat, "Que sais-je?" Let us live delicately and quietly, finding the world worth enjoying, but not worth troubling about.

Wide as are the differences between the Greek thinker and the French, there is something Socratic in the way in which Montaigne takes up every subject only to suggest doubts of previously held opinion about it. If he remained outwardly a Catholic, it was because he saw exactly as much to doubt in other religions. Almost all opinions, he urges, are taken on authority, for when men begin to reason they draw diametrically opposite conclusions from the same observed facts. He was in the civil wars esteemed an enemy by all parties, though it was only because he had both Huguenot and Catholic friends. "I have seen in Germany," he wrote, "that Luther hath left as many {632} divisions and altercations concerning the doubt of his opinions, yea, and more, than he himself moveth about the Holy Scriptures." The Reformers, in fact, had done nothing but reform superficial faults and had either left the essential ones untouched, or increased them. How foolish they were to imagine that the people could understand the Bible if they could only read it in their own language!

Montaigne was the first to feel the full significance of the multiplicity of sects. [Sidenote: Multiplicity of sects] "Is there any opinion so fantastical, or conceit so extravagant . . . or opinion so strange," he asked, "that custom hath not established and planted by laws in some region?" Usage sanctions every monstrosity, including incest and parricide in some places, and in others "that unsociable opinion of the mortality of the soul." Indeed, Montaigne comes back to the point, a man's belief does not depend on his reason, but on where he was born and how brought up. "To an atheist all writings make for atheism." "We receive our religion but according to our fashion. . . . Another country, other testimonies, equal promises, like menaces, might sembably imprint a clean contrary religion in us."

Piously hoping that he has set down nothing repugnant to the prescriptions of the Catholic, Apostolic and Roman church, where he was born and out of which he purposes not to die, Montaigne proceeds to demonstrate that God is unknowable. A man cannot grasp more than his hand will hold nor straddle more than his legs' length. Not only all religions, but all scientists give the lie to each other. Copernicus, having recently overthrown the old astronomy, may be later overthrown himself. In like manner the new medical science of Paracelsus contradicts the old and may in turn pass away. The same facts appear differently to different men, and "nothing comes to us but falsified {633} and altered by our senses." Probability is as hard to get as truth, for a man's mind is changed by illness, or even by time, and by his wishes. Even skepticism is uncertain, for "when the Pyrrhonians say, 'I doubt,' you have them fast by the throat to make them avow that at least you are assured and know that they doubt." In short, "nothing is certain but uncertainty," and "nothing seemeth true that may not seem false." Montaigne wrote of pleasure as the chief end of man, and of death as annihilation. The glory of philosophy is to teach men to despise death. One should do so by remembering that it is as great folly to weep because one would not be alive a hundred years hence as it would be to weep because one had not been living a hundred years ago.

[Sidenote: Charron, 1541-1603]

A disciple who dotted the i's and crossed the t's of Montaigne was Peter Charron. He, too, played off the contradictions of the sects against each other. All claim inspiration and who can tell which inspiration is right? Can the same Spirit tell the Catholic that the books of Maccabees are canonical and tell Luther that they are not? The senses are fallible and the soul, located by Charron in a ventricle of the brain, is subject to strange disturbances. Many things almost universally believed, like immortality, cannot be proved. Man is like the lower animals. "We believe, judge, act, live and die on faith," but this faith is poorly supported, for all religions and all authorities are but of human origin.

[Sidenote: English skeptics]

English thought followed rather than led that of Europe throughout the century. At first tolerant and liberal, it became violently religious towards the middle of the period and then underwent a strong reaction in the direction of indifference and atheism. For the first years, before the Reformation, the Utopia may serve as an example. More, under the influence {634} of the Italian Platonists, pictured his ideal people as adherents of a deistic, humanitarian religion, with few priests and holy, tolerant of everything save intolerance. They worshipped one God, believed in immortality and yet thought that "the chief felicity of man" lay in the pursuit of rational pleasure. Whether More depicted this cult simply to fulfil the dramatic probabilities and to show what was natural religion among men before revelation came to them, or whether his own opinions altered in later life, it is certain that he became robustly Catholic. He spent much time in religious controversy and resorted to austerities. In one place he tells of a lewd gallant who asked a friar why he gave himself the pain of walking barefoot. Answered that this pain was less than hell, the gallant replied, "If there be no hell, what a fool are you," and received the retort, "If there be hell, what a fool are you." Sir Thomas evidently believed there was a hell, or preferred to take no chances. In one place he argues at length that many and great miracles daily take place at shrines.

The feverish crisis of the Reformation was followed in the reign of Elizabeth by an epidemic of skepticism. Widely as it was spread there can be found little philosophical thought in it. It was simply the pendulum pulled far to the right swinging back again to the extreme left. The suspicions expressed that the queen herself was an atheist were unfounded, but it is impossible to dismiss as easily the numerous testimonies of infidelity among her subjects. Roger Ascham wrote in his Schoolmaster [Sidenote: 1563] that the "incarnate devils" of Englishmen returned from Italy said "there is no God" and then, "they first lustily condemn God, then scornfully mock his Word . . . counting as fables the holy mysteries of religion. They make Christ and his Gospel only serve civil policies. . . . They boldly laugh {635} to scorn both Protestant and Papist. They confess no Scripture. . . . They mock the pope; they rail on Luther. . . . They are Epicures in living and [Greek] atheoi in doctrine."

[Sidenote: 1569]

In like manner Cecil wrote: "The service of God and the sincere profession of Christianity are much decayed, and in place of it, partly papistry, partly paganism and irreligion have crept in. . . . Baptists, deriders of religion, Epicureans and atheists are everywhere." Ten years later John Lyly wrote that "there never were such sects among the heathens, such schisms among the Turks, such misbelief among infidels as is now among scholars." The same author wrote a dialogue, Euphues and Atheos, to convince skeptics, while from the pulpit the Puritan Henry Smith shot "God's Arrow against atheists." According to Thomas Nash [Sidenote: 1592] (Pierce Penniless's Supplication to the Devil) atheists are now triumphing and rejoicing, scorning the Bible, proving that there were men before Adam and even maintaining "that there are no divells." Marlowe and some of his associates were suspected of atheism. In 1595 John Baldwin, examined before Star Chamber, "questioned whether there were a God; if there were, how he should be known; if by his Word, who wrote the same, if the prophets and the apostles, they were but men and humanum est errare." The next year Robert Fisher maintained before the same court that "Christ was no saviour and that the gospel was a fable."

[Sidenote: Bacon]

That one of the prime causes of all this skepticism was to be found in the religious revolution was the opinion of Francis Bacon. Although Bacon's philosophic thought is excluded from consideration by the chronological limits of this book, it may be permissible to quote his words on this subject. In one place he says that where there are two religions contending for {636} mastery their mutual animosity will add warmth to conviction and rather strengthen the adherents of each in their own opinions, but where there are more than two they will breed doubt. In another place he says:

Heresies and schisms are of all others the greatest scandals, yea more than corruption of manners. . . . So that nothing doth so keep men out of the church and drive men out of the church as breach of unity. . . . The doctor of the gentiles saith, "If an heathen come in and hear you speak with several tongues, will he not say that you are mad?" And certainly it is little better when atheists and profane persons hear of so many discordant and contrary opinions in religion.

But while Bacon saw that when doctors disagree the common man will lose all faith in them, it was not to religion but to science that he looked for the reformation of philosophy. Theology, in Bacon's judgment, was a chief enemy to philosophy, for it seduced men from scientific pursuit of truth to the service of dogma. "You may find all access to any species of philosophy," said Bacon, "however pure, intercepted by the ignorance of divines."

The thought here expressed but sums up the actual trend of the sixteenth century in the direction of separating philosophy and religion. In modern times the philosopher has found his inspiration far more in science than in religion, and the turning-point came about the time of, and largely as a consequence of, the new observation of nature, and particularly the new astronomy.

[Sidenote: Revolt against Aristotle]

The prologue to the drama of the new thought was revolt against Aristotle. "The master of them who know" had become, after the definite acceptance of his works as standard texts in the universities of the thirteenth century, an inspired and infallible authority {637} for all science. With him were associated the schoolmen who debated the question of realism versus nominalism. But as the mind of man grew and advanced, what had been once the brace became a galling bond. All parties united to make common cause against the Stagyrite. The Italian Platonists attacked him in the name of their, and his, master. Luther opined that no one had ever understood Aristotle's meaning, that the ethics of that "damned heathen" directly contradicted Christian virtue, that any potter would know more of natural science than he, and that it would be well if he who had started the debate on realism and nominalism had never been born. Catholics like Usingen protested at the excessive reverence given to Aristotle at the expense of Christ. Finally, the French scientist Peter Ramus [Sidenote: Ramus, c. 1515-72] advanced the thesis at the University of Paris that everything taught by Aristotle was false. No authority, he argued, is superior to reason, for it is reason which creates and determines authority.

[Sidenote: Effect of science on philosophy]

In place of Aristotle men turned to nature. "Whosoever in discussion adduces authority uses not intellect but memory," said Leonardo. Vives urged that experiment was the only road to truth. The discoveries of natural laws led to a new conception of external reality, independent of man's wishes and egocentric theories. It also gave rise to the conception of uniformity of law. Copernicus sought and found a mathematical unity in the heavens. It was, above all else, his astronomy that fought the battle of, and won the victory for, the new principles of research. Its glory was not so much its positive addition to knowledge, great as that was, but its mode of thought. By pure reason a new system was established and triumphed over the testimony of the senses and of all {638} previous authority, even that which purported to be revelation. Man was reduced to a creature of law; God was defined as an expression of law.

How much was man's imagination touched, how was his whole thought and purpose changed by the Copernican discovery! No longer lord of a little, bounded world, man crept as a parasite on a grain of dust spinning eternally through endless space. And with the humiliation came a great exaltation. For this tiny creature could now seal the stars and bind the Pleiades and sound each deep abyss that held a sun. What new sublimity of thought, what greatness of soul was not his! To Copernicus belongs properly the praise lavished by Lucretius on Epicurus, of having burst the flaming bounds of the world and of having made man equal to heaven. The history of the past, the religion of the present, the science of the future—all ideas were transmuted, all values reversed by this new and wonderful hypothesis.

But all this, of course, was but dimly sensed by the contemporaries of Copernicus. What they really felt was the new compulsion of natural law and the necessity of causation. Leonardo was led thus far by his study of mathematics, which he regarded as the key to natural science. He even went so far as to define time as a sort of non-geometrical space.

[Sidenote: Theory of knowledge]

Two things were necessary to a philosophy in harmony with the scientific view; the first was a new theory of knowledge, the second was a new conception of the ultimate reality in the universe. Paracelsus contributed to the first in the direction of modern empiricism, by defending understanding as that which comprehended exactly the thing that the hand touched and the eyes saw. Several immature attempts were made at scientific skepticism. That of Cornelius Agrippa—De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum et {639} artium atque excellentia Verbi Dei declamatio—can hardly be taken seriously, as it was regarded by the author himself rather as a clever paradox. Francis Sanchez, on the other hand, formulated a tenable theory of the impossibility of knowing anything. A riper theory of perception, following Paracelsus and anticipating Leibnitz, was that of Edward Digby, based on the notion of the active correspondence between mind and matter.

[Sidenote: The ultimate reality]

To the thinker of the sixteenth century the solution of the question of the ultimate reality seemed to demand some form of identification of the world-soul with matter. Paracelsus and Gilbert both felt in the direction of hylozoism, or the theory of the animation of all things. If logically carried out, as it was not by them, this would have meant that everything was God. The other alternative, that God was everything, was developed by a remarkable man, who felt for the new science the enthusiasm of a religious convert, Giordano Bruno.

[Sidenote: Bruno, 1548-1600]

Born at Nola near Naples, he entered in his fifteenth year the Dominican friary. This step he soon regretted, and, after being disciplined for disobedience, fled, first to Rome and then to Geneva. Thence he wandered to France, to England, and to Wittenberg [Sidenote: 1569] and Prague, lecturing at several universities, including Oxford. In 1593 he was lured back to Italy, was imprisoned by the Inquisition, and after long years was finally burnt at the stake in Rome. [Sidenote: February 17, 1600]

In religion Bruno was an eclectic, if not a skeptic. At Wittenberg he spoke of Luther as "a second Hercules who bound the three-headed and triply-crowned hound of hell and forced him to vomit forth his poison." But in Italy he wrote that he despised the Reformers as more ignorant than himself. His Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, in the disguise of an {640} attack on the heathen mythology, is in reality an assault on revealed religion. His treatise On the Heroic Passions aims to show that moral virtues are not founded on religion but on reason.

[Sidenote: The new astronomy]

The enthusiasm that Bruno lacked for religion he felt in almost boundless measure for the new astronomy, "by which," as he himself wrote, "we are moved to discover the infinite cause of an infinite effect, and are led to contemplate the deity not as though outside, apart, and distant from us, but in ourselves. For, as deity is situated wholly everywhere, so it is as near us as we can be to ourselves." From Nicholos of Cusa Bruno had learned that God may be found in the smallest as in the greatest things in the world; the smallest being as endless in power as the greatest is infinite in energy, and all being united in the "Monad," or "the One." Now, Bruno's philosophy is nothing but the cosmological implication and the metaphysical justification of the Copernician theory in the conceptual terms of Nicholas of Cusa.

Liberated from the tyranny of dogma and of the senses, dazzled by the whirling maze of worlds without end scattered like blazing sparks throughout space, drunk with the thought of infinity, he poured forth a paean of breathing thoughts and burning words to celebrate his new faith, the religion of science. The universe for him was composed of atoms, tiny "minima" that admit no further division. Each one of these is a "monad," or unity, comprised in some higher unity until finally "the monad of monads" was found in God. But this was no tribal Jehovah, no personal, anthropomorphic deity, but a First Principle; nearly identical with Natural Law.

{641}