[42] For example, one man, fixing his eyes on a sublime ideal of holiness, confesses on his knees that he is a miserable sinner; another, surveying men about him, repudiates this imputation: it is a matter of parallax.
[43] Boyle, Essays, 2nd Ed. 1669, p. 119. In his Edition of 1661 Boyle speaks of the discovery of Harvey “our English Democritus” (published 1628) as commonly accepted. Whereby, he says, other “very plausible and radicated opinions” (the old schemes of the circulation) ... “are generally grown out of request.”
[44] Haeser says (vol. ii. p. 433): “Einen sehr bedeutenden Aufschwung nahm die Chirurgie im Zeitalter Harvey’s bei den Engländern, unter denen bis dahin kein Wundarzt ersten Ranges aufgetreten war. Nach kurzer Zeit erlangten die englischen Chirurgen durch allgemeine Bildung, gründliche Kenntniss der Anatomie, und praktische Gelegenheit ein entschiedenes Uebergewicht über die bis dahin herrschende französische Schule.” Cf. also Daremberg, Hist. et Doct. vol. i. p. 281 et seq.
[45] In the Medical Magazine (May, June, July, August, and Sept. 1899) is an interesting essay by Mr D’Arcy Power, “How Surgery became a profession in London.” Mr Power tells us that a scheme for the unity of the medical profession in London was set on foot in 1423, when the surgeons were the more highly organised body. A “Rector of Medicine” was indeed elected (Master Gilbert Kymer). It is not known how long the conjoint faculty of medicine and surgery lasted in London; but unhappily for our profession it seems to have been dissolved in a very few years.
[46] This relation was somewhat one-sided: the philosophers forged doctrines and presented them to the Church; whereupon the Church consecrated them to eternity, and the philosophers were not allowed thereafter to improve or to restore their own creations. “La théologie n’est quelque chose qu'à condition d'être tout.”
[47] As Erigena and Rabanus knew some Greek, Ireland, like Edessa and Bagdad, seems to have shared the honour of preserving original texts; we may infer from the doctrines of Erigena that in Ireland the Timæus was the chief of them.
[48] See Baas, Geschichtliche Entwickelung des ärztlichen Standes, 1896, p. 128. Charlemagne journeyed in Italy where some schools still existed, and where Priscian, Donatus, Boëtius, Cassiodorus, Augustine, even Virgil and Cicero were read; thence he called teachers to his palace schools; and to Lyons, Orleans or Tours. How Paris became the centre of enlightenment in the Western world is not clear. The “palace school” probably was of no place, but of the royal retinue; that the School of Paris was made up of those of St Geneviève, St Germain des Près and the Cathedral school seems not to be a very probable conjecture.
[49] The “Arabs” were a mixed throng of orientals; some of them were Aryans, as the Persians and Nestorians; some were Arabs, Syrians, or Hebrews. The Nestorians were eminent as physicians, and it is interesting to this College to know that one of the best translators of Aristotle into Arabic was Johannitius, a Nestorian physician. The Eastern peoples, as the Western, owed all to the Greeks except a double measure of dialectical ingenuity, which was their own, and is their own to-day. By the incisive methods of Aristotle the Christian neo-platonists had been variously carved into heretics—such as the Monophysites; and these when driven eastwards carried Greek to Edessa and Bagdad: from these centres it was, and from Nisibur in Persia and elsewhere, that the “Saracens” drew their culture. Aristotle was first translated into Arabic in the reign of Al Mansur, the son of Harûn al Raschid (813-833); Avicenna carried the Aristotelian encyclopedia to its culmination; and Cordova in the tenth century was as full of fervid disciples as was Paris in the thirteenth. The Arabian medicine was Aristotle and Galen. The Arabian philosophy was originally built upon the Alexandrian emanations and hypostases (the soul of the universe, intelligence the first of creatures, nature and mutability, and so forth). Essences and forms were produced, as the “intelligibilia” of “real” knowledge, till, as some one has wittily put it, “universals became almost palpable.” Avicenna indeed approached understanding from the senses, and Averroes accepted this right position; but he taught the permanent subsistence of intelligence, as a sphere in a hierarchy of spiritual principles independent of matter and persons. In no long time this was turned into the unity, as opposed to the individuality, of the soul; the universal soul dipping as it were into the individual, and at his death returning into the universal; a virtual denial of personal immortality. Hence the bitter defiance of Albert and St Thomas. The Averroistic doctrines were enthusiastically propagated on the other hand by that “malleus Ecclesiae Romanae” Frederick the Second (1212-1250). The Arabian science consisted in medicine, mathematics, astronomy, and alchemy. Averroes it was who first asserted the independence of the spheres of science and religion; a division popular at the present day, and one which lent itself to many a convenient subterfuge, in Padua.
[50] Dante, Inf. (xx. 115). Michael Scot translated Averroes from Arabian to Latin; also the De cælo and De anima of Aristotle, which reached Roger Bacon about 1230. Thus we may regard Michael as the founder of Paduan Averroism. All persons who busied themselves with natural experiment in the Middle Ages were accused of magic; even Albert did not escape the suspicion or the credit of sorcery.
[51] Renan, Averroès. And to like effect M. Hauréau says, “Le péripatéticisme d’Averroès ne diffère pas moins de l’antique doctrine du Lycée que l’Alhambra du Parthenon”; and he compares “le péripatéticisme d’Albert et d’Aquinas” to the “monuments fiers et bizarres du Gothique du xiiime siècle.”