ATHANASIUS KIRCHER
V.
FATHER KIRCHER, S.J.: SCIENTIST, ORIENTALIST, AND COLLECTOR.
Except in the minds of the unconquerably intolerant, the Galileo controversy has in recent years settled down to occupy something of its proper place in the history of the supposed conflict between religion and science. In touching the subject in the life of Copernicus we suggested that it has come to be generally recognized, as M. Bertrand, the perpetual Secretary of the Paris Academy of Sciences, himself a distinguished mathematician and historian, declares, that "the great lesson for those who would wish to oppose reason with violence was clearly to be read in Galileo's story, and the scandal of his condemnation was learned without any profound sorrow to Galileo himself; and his long life, considered as a whole, was the most serene and enviable in the history of science." Somehow, notwithstanding the directness of this declaration, there is still left in the minds of many an impression rather difficult to eradicate that there was definite, persistent opposition to everything associated with scientific progress among the churchmen of the time of Galileo.
Perhaps no better answer to this unfortunate, because absolutely untrue, impression could be in [{112}] formulated than is to be found in a sketch of the career of Father Athanasius Kircher, the distinguished Jesuit who for so many years occupied himself with nearly every branch of science in Rome, under the fostering care of the Church. He had been Professor of Physics, Mathematics, and Oriental Languages at Würzburg, but was driven from there by the disturbances incident to the Thirty Years' War, in 1631. He continued his scientific investigation at Avignon. From here, within two years after Galileo's trial in 1635, he was, through the influence of Cardinal Barberini, summoned to Rome, where he devoted himself to mathematics at first, and then to every branch of science, as well as the Oriental languages, not only with the approval, but also with the most liberal pecuniary aid from the ecclesiastical authorities of the papal court and city.
Some idea of the breadth of Father Kircher's scientific sympathy and his genius for scientific observation and discovery, which amounted almost to intuition, may be gathered from the fact that to him we owe the first definite statement of the germ theory of disease; and he seems to have been the first to recognize the presence of what are now called microbes. At the same time his works on magnetism contained not only all the knowledge of his own time, but also some wonderful suggestions as to the possibilities of the development of this science. His studies with regard to light are almost as epochal as those with regard to magnetism. Besides these, he [{113}] was the first to find any clue to the Egyptian hieroglyphics, and yet found time to write a geographical work on Latium, the country surrounding Rome, and to make collections for his museum which rendered it in its time the best scientific collection in the world. It may very well indeed be said that visitors to Rome with scientific tendencies found as much that was suggestive in Father Kircher's museum--the "Kircherianum," as it came to be called--as artists and sculptors and architects found in the Vatican collections of the papal city.
All of this work was accomplished within the half century after Galileo's trial, for Father Kircher died in 1680, at the age of seventy-eight, having lived, as so many of the great scientists have done, a long life in the midst of the most persistent activity. Kircher, more than perhaps any other, can be said to be the founder of modern natural science. Before any one else, in a practical way, he realized the necessity for the collection of an immense amount of data, if science was to be founded on the broad, firm foundation of observed truth. The principle which had been announced by Bacon in the "Novum Organon"--"to take all that comes rather than to choose, and to heap up rather than to register"--was never carried out as fully as by Father Kircher. As Edmund Gosse said in the June number of Harper's, 1904, "Bacon had started a great idea, but he had not carried it out. He is not the founder, he is the prophet [{114}] of modern physical science. To be in direct touch with nature, to adventure in the unexplored fields of knowledge, and to do this by carrying out an endless course of slow and sure experiments, this was the counsel of the 'Novum Organon.'" Bacon died in 1626, and scarcely more than a decade had passed before Kircher was carrying out the work thus outlined by the English philosopher in a way that was surprisingly successful, even looked at from the standpoint of our modern science. Needless to say, however, it was not because of Bacon's suggestion that he did so, for it is more than doubtful whether he knew of Bacon's writings until long after the lines of his life-work had been traced by his own inquiring spirit. The fulness of time had come. The inductive philosophy was in the air. Bacon's formulae, which the English philosopher never practically applied, and Father Kircher's assiduous collection of data, were but expressions of the spirit of the times. How faithfully the work of the first modern inductive scientist was accomplished we shall see.
It may be easily imagined that a certain interest in Father Kircher, apart from his scientific attainments and the desire to show how much and how successful was the attention given to natural science by churchmen about the time of the Galileo controversy, might influence this judgment of the distinguished Jesuit's scientific accomplishments. With regard to his discoveries in medicine especially, and above all his [{115}] announcement of the microbic origin of contagious disease, it may be thought that this was a mere chance expression and not at all the result of serious scientific conclusions. Tyndall, however, the distinguished English physicist, would not be the one to give credit for scientific discoveries, and to a clergyman in a distant century, unless there was definite evidence of the discovery. It is not generally known that to the great English physicist we owe the almost absolute demonstration of the impossibility of spontaneous generation, together with a series of studies showing the existence everywhere in the atmosphere of minute forms of life to which fermentative changes and also the infectious diseases--though at that time this was only a probability--are to be attributed. When Tyndall was reviewing, in the midst of the controversy over spontaneous generation, the question of the microbic origin of disease, he said: "Side by side with many other theories has run the germ theory of epidemic disease. The notion was expressed by Kircher and favored by Linnaeus, that epidemic diseases may be due to germs which enter the body and produce disturbance by the development within the body of parasitic forms of life."
How much attention Father Kircher's book on the pest or plague, in which his theory of the micro-organismal origin of disease is put forward, attracted from the medical profession can be understood from the fact that it was submitted to three of the most distinguished physicians in [{116}] Rome before being printed, and that their testimony to its value as a contribution to medicine prefaced the first edition. They are not sparing in their praise of it. Dr. Joseph Benedict Sinibaldus, who was the Professor of the Practice of Medicine in the Roman University at the time, says that "Father Kircher's book not only contains an excellent resume of all that is known about the pest or plague, but also as many valuable hints and suggestions on the origin and spread of the disease, which had never before been made." He considers it a very wonderful thing that a non-medical man should have been able to place himself so thoroughly in touch with the present state of medicine in respect to this disease and then point out the conditions of future progress.