Adelard opens the Natural Questions with brief allusion to the pleasant reunion with the friends who greeted him upon his return to England in the reign of Henry I after long absence from his native land for the sake of study. After the usual inquiries had been made concerning one another’s health and that of their friends, Adelard asked about “the morals of our nation,” only to learn that “princes were violent, prelates wine-bibbers, judges mercenary, patrons inconstant, the common men flatterers, promise-makers false, friends envious, and everyone in general ambitious.” Adelard declared that he had no intention of conforming to this wretched state of affairs, and when asked what he did intend to do, since he would not practice and could not prevent such “moral depravity,” replied that he intended to ignore it, “for oblivion is the only remedy for insurmountable ills.” Accordingly that subject was dropped, and presently his nephew suggested and the others joined in urging that he disclose to them “something new from my Arabian studies.”[42] From the sordid practical world back to the pure light and ideals of science and philosophy! Such has been the frequent refrain of our authors from Vitruvius and Galen, from Firmicus and Boethius on. It is further enlarged upon by Adelard in the De eodem et diverso; it has not quite lost its force even today; and parallels to Adelard’s twelfth century lament on England’s going to the dogs may be found in after-the-war letters to The London Times of 1919.

Arabic versus Gallic learning.

The result of the request preferred by Adelard’s friends is the present treatise in the form of a dialogue with his nephew, who proposes by a succession of questions to force his uncle to justify his preference for “the opinions of the Saracens” over those of the Christian “schools of Gaul” where the nephew has pursued his studies. The nephew is described as “interested rather than expert in natural science”[43] in the Natural Questions, while a passage in the De eodem et diverso implies that his training in Gaul had been largely of the usual rhetorical and dialectical character, since Adelard says to him, “Do you keep watch whether I speak aright, observing that modest silence which is your custom amidst the wordy war of sophisms and the affected locutions of rhetoric.”[44] In the Natural Questions the nephew, as befits his now maturer years, has more to say, raising some objections and stating some theories as well as propounding his questions, but Adelard’s answers constitute the bulk of the book. Beginning with earth and plants, the questions range in an ascending scale through the lower animals to human physiology and psychology and then to the grander cosmic phenomena of sea, air, and sky.

“Modern discoveries.”

In agreeing to follow this method of question and answer Adelard explains at the start that on account of the prejudice of the present generation against any modern[45] discoveries he will attribute even his own ideas to someone else, and that, if what he says proves displeasing to less advanced students because unfamiliar, the blame for this should be attached to the Arabs and not to himself. “For I am aware what misfortunes pursue the professors of truth among the common crowd. Therefore it is the cause of the Arabs that I plead, not my own.”[46] This is a very interesting passage in more ways than one. Adelard appears as an exponent of the new scientific school, stimulated by contact with Arabian culture. He is confident that he has valuable new truth, but is less confident as to the reception which it will receive. The hostility, however, in the Latin learned world is not, as one might expect, to Mohammedan learning. The process of taking over Arabic learning has apparently already begun—as indeed we have seen from our previous chapters—and Adelard’s Christian friends are ready enough to hear what he has learned in Mohammedan lands and schools, although of course they may not accept it after they have heard it. But he fears that he “would not get a hearing at all,” if he should put forward new views as his own. Indeed, he himself shows a similar prejudice against other novelties than his own in a passage in the De eodem, where he speaks impatiently and contemptuously of “those who harass our ears with daily novelties” and of “the new Platos and Aristotles to whom each day gives birth, who with unblushing front proclaim alike things which they know and of which they know nothing, and whose supreme trust is in extreme verbosity.”[47] Adelard of course regarded his own new ideas as of more solid worth than these, but the fact remains that he was not after all the only one who was interested in promulgating novelties. Yet his justification for writing the De eodem is the silence of “the science of the moderns” compared with the fluency of the ancients, of whose famous writings he has read “not all, but the greater part.”[48] It is not necessary, of course, to regard this passage and the preceding as inconsistent, but it is well to read the one in the light of the other.

Medieval work wrongly credited to Greek and Arab.

But let us return to the passage from the Natural Questions and Adelard’s insinuation—slightly satirical no doubt, but also in part serious—that he has fathered new scientific notions of his own upon the Arabs. There is reason to think that he was not the only one to do this. Not only were superstitious and comparatively worthless treatises which were composed in the medieval period attributed to Aristotle and other famous authors, but this was also the case with works of real value. Also the number is suspiciously large of works of which the lost originals were supposedly by Greek or Arabian authors but which are extant only in later Latin “translations.”

Illustrated from the history of alchemy.

This point may be specifically illustrated for the moment from the researches of Berthelot among alchemistic manuscripts, which have demonstrated that Latin alchemy of the thirteenth century was less superstitious and more scientific than in previous periods, whether among the ancient Greeks or more recent Arabs. He found but one treatise in Arabic which contained precise and minute details about chemical substances and operations. As a rule the Arabian alchemists wrote “theoretical works full of allegories and declamation.” For a long time several works, important in the history of chemistry as well as of alchemy, were regarded as Latin translations of the Arab, Geber. But Berthelot discovered the Arabic manuscripts of the real Geber, which turned out to be of little value and largely copied from Greek authors. On the other hand, the Latin works which had gone under Geber’s name were produced in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries by men who seem, like Adelard of Bath, to have preferred to ascribe their own ideas to the Arabs. Let us examine for a moment with Berthelot[49] the chief of these Latin treatises. It is a “a systematic work, very well arranged. Its modest method of exposition” differs greatly from “the vague and excessive promises of the real Geber.” Much of the book possesses “a truly scientific character” and “shows the state of chemical knowledge with a precision of thought and expression unknown to previous authors.” As for Adelard’s new ideas, we may not regard them as so novel as they seemed to him, nor estimate them so highly in comparison with ancient Greek science as Berthelot did medieval compared with Greek alchemy—much of Adelard’s thought may be derived by him from those ancient writings in which he claims to have read so widely—but they were probably as new to Adelard’s Latin contemporaries as they were to himself.

Science and religion.