The Warfare of Science

by Andrew Dickson White

This missile was hurled against Albert. He was condemned by the authorities of the Dominican order, subjected to suspicion and indignity, and only escaped persecution by yielding to the ecclesiastical spirit of the time, and working mainly in theological channels by scholastic methods. It was a sad loss to the earth; and certainly, of all organizations that have reason to lament the pressure of those ecclesiastical forces which turned Albert the Great from the path of experimental philosophy, foremost of all in regret should be the Christian Church, and especially the Roman branch of it. Had the Church of the thirteenth century been so full of faith as to accept the truths in natural science brought by Albert and his compeers, and to have encouraged their growth, this faith and this encouragement would to this day have formed the greatest argument for proving the Church directly under Divine guidance; they would have been the brightest jewels in her crown. The loss to the Church, by this want of faith and courage, has proved, in the long-run, even greater than the loss to science.

The next great man of that age whom the theological and ecclesiastical forces of the time turn from the right path is Vincent of Beauvais.

Vincent devoted himself to the study of Nature in several of her most interesting fields. To astronomy, mineralogy, botany, and chemistry, he gave much thought; but especially did he devote himself to the preparation of a full account of the universe. Had he taken the path of experimental research, the world would have been enriched with most precious discoveries; but the impulse followed by Albert of Bollstadt, backed as it was by the whole ecclesiastical power of his time, was too strong, and, in all the life-labor of Vincent, nothing appears of any permanent value. He built a structure which careless observation of facts, literal interpretation of Scripture, and theological subtilizing, combined to make one of the most striking monuments of human error. [89]

But the theological ecclesiastical spirit of the thirteenth century gained its greatest victory in the work of the most renowned of all thinkers of his time, St. Thomas Aquinas. In him was the theological spirit of his age incarnate. Although he yielded somewhat, at one period, to love of studies in natural science, it was he who finally made that great treaty or compromise which for ages subjected science entirely to theology. He it was whose thought reared the most enduring barrier against those who, in that age and in succeeding ages, labored to open for science the path by its own legitimate method toward its own noble ends.

Through the earlier systems of philosophy as they were then known, and through the earlier theologic thought, he had gone with great labor and vigor; he had been a pupil of Albert of Bollstadt, and from him had gained inspiration in science. All his mighty powers, thus disciplined and cultured, he brought to bear in making a treaty or truce, giving to theology the supremacy over science. The experimental method had already been practically initiated; Albert of Bollstadt and Roger Bacon had begun their work in accordance with its methods; but St. Thomas Aquinas gave all his thoughts to bringing science again under the sway of the theological bias, metaphysical methods, and ecclesiastical control. He gave to the world a striking example of what his method could be made to produce. In his commentary upon Aristotle's treatise upon "Heaven and Earth" he illustrates all the evils of such a combination of theological reasoning and literal interpretation of the Scriptural with scientific facts as then understood, and it remains to this day a prodigious monument to human genius and human folly. The ecclesiastical power of the time hailed him as a deliverer; it was claimed that striking miracles were vouchsafed, showing that the blessing of Heaven rested upon his labors. Among the legends embodying the Church spirit of that period is that given by the Bollandists and immortalized by a renowned painter. The great philosopher and saint is represented in the habit of his order, with book and pen in hand, kneeling before the image of Christ crucified; and as he kneels the image thus addresses him: "Thomas, thou hast written well concerning me; what price wilt thou receive for thy labor?" To this day the greater ecclesiastical historians of the Roman Church, like the Abbé Rohrbacher, and the minor historians of science, who find it convenient to propitiate the Church, like Pouchet, dilate upon the glories of St. Thomas Aquinas in thus making a treaty of alliance between religious and scientific thought, and laying the foundations for a "sanctified science." But the unprejudiced historian cannot indulge in this enthusiastic view. The results both for the Church and for the progress of science have been most unfortunate. It was a wretched step backward. The first result of this great man's great compromise was to close that new path in science which alone leads to discoveries of value—the experimental method—and to reopen the old path of mixed theology and science, which, as Hallam declares, "after three or four hundred years had not untied a single knot, or added one unequivocal truth to the domain of philosophy;" the path which, as all modern history proves, has ever since led only to delusion and evil. [90]

The path thus unfortunately opened by these strong men became the main path in science for ages, and it led the world farther and farther from any fruitful fact or hopeful method. Roger Bacon's investigations were virtually forgotten; worthless mixtures of literal interpretation of Scripture with imperfectly authenticated physical facts took their place.

Every age since has been full of examples of this, but out of them I will take just one; and it shall be no other than that Francis Bacon, who, more than any other man, led the modern world out of the path opened by Aquinas, and back into the path trod by Roger Bacon. Strange as it may at first seem, Francis Bacon, whose keenness of sight revealed the delusions of the old path and the promises of the new, that man whose boldness in thought did so much to turn the world from the old path into the new, presents, in his own writings, one of the most striking examples of the strength of the evil he did so much to destroy.

The Novum Organum, considering the time when it came from his pen, is doubtless one of the greatest exhibitions of genius in the history of human thought. This treatise it was which showed the modern world the way out of the scholastic method and reverence for dogma into the experimental method and reverence for demonstrated fact. In the course of it occur many passages which show that the great philosopher was fully alive to the danger, both to religion and to science, arising from their mixture. Early in his argument he says: "But the corruption of philosophy from superstition and admixture of theology separates altogether more widely, and introduces the greatest amount of evil, both into whole systems of philosophy and into their parts." And a little later he says: "Some moderns have indulged this vanity with the greatest carelessness, and have endeavored to found a Natural Philosophy on the first of Genesis and the Book of Job, and other sacred Scriptures, so 'seeking the dead among the living.' And by so much the more is this vanity to be restrained and coerced because their expressions form an unwholesome mixture of things human and divine; not merely fantastic philosophy, but heretical religion. And so it is very salutary that, with due sobriety of mind, those things only be rendered to faith which are faith's." [91] Still later, in his treatise, Bacon returns to the charge yet more strongly. He says: "Nor is it to be overlooked, that natural philosophy has in all ages had a troublesome and stubborn adversary in superstition and the blind and immoderate zeal for religion. Thus it has been among the Greeks, that they who first proposed to the yet unprepared ears of men the natural causes of lightning and tempests were condemned, on that head, for impiety toward the gods; nor by some of the old fathers of the Christian religion were those much better received, who laid it down from the most sure demonstrations, such as no one in his senses could nowadays contradict, that the earth is round, and asserted in consequence that there must be antipodes. Furthermore, as things are now, the condition of discourses on Nature is made severe and more rigorous in consequence of the summaries and methods of scholastic theologians, who, while they have, as far as they could, reduced theology to order, and have fashioned it into the form of an art, have besides succeeded in mingling far more than was right of the quarrelsome and thorny philosophy of Aristotle with the body of religion."

"The fictions, too, of those who have not feared to deduce and confirm from the principles and authority of philosophies the true Christian religion, have the same tendency, though in a different way. These celebrated the wedding of faith and sense, as though it were lawful, with much pomp and solemnity, and soothed the minds of men with a grateful variety of things, but, meanwhile, mingled the divine with the human in ill-matched state. And in mixtures like this of theology with natural philosophy, those things only which are now received in philosophy are included; while novelties, though they be changes for the better, are all banished and driven out."