Kropotkin says: "In 1336 it (Florence) had 8,000 to 10,000 boys and girls in its primary schools, 1,000 to [{346}] 1,200 boys in its seven middle schools, and from 550 to 600 students in its four universities. The thirty communal hospitals contained over 1,000 beds for a population of 90,000 inhabitants. (Capponi, ii. 249 seq.) It has more than once been suggested by authoritative writers, that education stood, as a rule, at a much higher level than is generally supposed. Certainly so in democratic Nüremberg."
The content of this educational system is our main subject of interest at the present moment.
"Seven hundred young men received the higher education. (This in a city of less than 100,000 inhabitants. How do our cities of 100,000 inhabitants compare with it?) The very spirit of the arts was scholastic in Dante's day. You read the story in the oratory of Orsanmichele, in which each art with its masterpiece receives a crown; you read it in the chapters of Santa Maria Novella, in Gaddi's painting of the Trivium and Quadrivium; you read it in Giotto's sculpture of the same subject upon this marvelous campanile. Here was the atmosphere in which Dante's boyhood and early manhood were passed."
We shall not be surprised, then, to find in Dante, the typical product of this form of education, an interest in every form of erudition and in all details of information.
I have preferred to take the evidence for Dante's knowledge of science from others, rather than attempt to supply it entirely by means of quotations from his works. This latter would be the most scholarly way, but Dante is not easy reading even in a good translation, and one needs to be familiar with his modes of expression and to be accustomed to the wonderful compression of his style to appreciate his full significance. There is [{347}] no lack of good authorities, however, who have made deep studies in Dante, to bring out for us the complete import of all the references to the science of his time, which Dante was tempted to make. We have perhaps been prone to think, in English-speaking countries, that no poets have ever kept more thoroughly in touch with the progress of science, or at least have ever used references to scientific details with more accuracy, than some of our own nineteenth century poets. A little study of the first great poet of modern times, in whom Carlyle said "ten silent centuries found a voice," though Dante by no means stands alone in the century, but is the culmination of a series of great poets, will show that he probably must be considered as taking the palm even from our most modern of poets in this respect. If the expressions in text-books of the history of education are to be accepted as evidence of the thoughts of educators with regard to the details of education in Dante's time, even a brief sketch of Dante's scientific knowledge will be a supreme surprise to them.
As will be at once appreciated, Dante was not a specialist in science, but used the knowledge of science current in his day in order to drive home his thoughts by means of figures. It is surprising, however, what a marvelous display of scientific knowledge, entirely without pedantry, which anyone who knows his supreme compression of style will realize to be the fault Dante is least liable to, was thus made by this educated literary man of the thirteenth century. Dr. L. Oscar Kuhns, Professor in Wesleyan University, has in his little book The Treatment of Nature in Dante's Divina Commedia, suggested a comparison between Dante and Goethe. [Footnote 44 ] [{348}] Everyone realizes at once how profound a scientist was Goethe. Professor Kuhns' comparison, then, will bring out the scientific qualities of this great medieval poet, who is the representative scholar of the universities of his time.
[Footnote 44: The Treatment of Nature in Dante's Divina Commedia, by L. Oscar Kuhns, Professor in Wesleyan University, Middletown, U. S. A. Edward Arnold, London and New York. 1897.]
"There is perhaps no innate contradiction between science and poetry, but it is not often that they are found together in the same man. Dante, like Goethe, half a millennium later, was not only drawn by the beauty of nature, but he had likewise an unquenchable intellectual curiosity, and sought diligently to understand the meaning of the universe in which he lived.
"No other poet has ever combined the loftiest poetry with the discussion of such complicated topics in all branches of learning. In one place we find a long discussion of the origin and development of life, which, naive and scholastic as it is, shows some lines of resemblance to the modern doctrines in biology; in another place there is a learned discussion between the poet and Beatrice concerning the cause of the spots in the moon, in which an actual experiment in optics is given."
The first passage to which Professor Kuhns refers, while containing many speculative elements, is a discussion of certain important basic problems in biology that have always appealed to thinking men at every period of the history of science, and never more so than in our own day. They must still be considered undecided, though many volumes have been written on them in the last century. There are thoughts in Dante's exposition of the subject that are startling enough to the modern biologist, and that make it clear how much men's minds run along the same grooves in facing questions that we are prone to think have occurred to men only in the last [{349}] few generations. The other quotation to which Professor Kuhns refers deserves to be quoted entire. It is perhaps even more striking because of its actual description of an experiment in optics, which shows how much this great poetic intelligence of the medieval time, usually supposed to be so abstracted and occupied with things other-worldly and supernal, living his intellectual life quite beyond the domain of sense, still remembered the teachings of his university days, and even recalled the details of demonstrations that he had seen. The passage occurs in the II. canto of the Paradiso, beginning with line 97:
"Take thou three mirrors, two of them remove
From thee an equal distance, and the last
Between the two, and further from thee move;
And turned towards them let a light be cast,
Behind thy back, upon those mirrors three,
So that from all reflected rays are passed.
Then, though the light which furthest stands from thee
May not with them in magnitude compete,
Yet will it shine in brightness equally."