On the Philosophy of Discovery, Chapters Historical and Critical. William Whewell

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      CHAPTER XII.

       The Revival of Platonism.

       Table of Contents

      1. Causes of Delay in the Advance of Knowledge.—In the insight possessed by learned men into the method by which truth was to be discovered, the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries went backwards, rather than forwards, from the point which had been reached in the thirteenth. Roger Bacon had urged them to have recourse to experiment; but they returned with additional and exclusive zeal to the more favourite employment of reasoning upon their own conceptions. He had called upon them to look at the world without; but their eyes forthwith turned back upon the world within. In the constant oscillation of the human mind between Ideas and Facts, after having for a moment touched the latter, it seemed to swing back more impetuously to the former. Not only was the philosophy of Aristotle firmly established for a considerable period, but when men began to question its authority, they attempted to set up in its place a philosophy still more purely ideal, that of Plato. It was not till the actual progress of experimental knowledge for some centuries had given it a vast accumulation of force, that it was able to break its way fully into the circle of speculative science. The new Platonist schoolmen had to run their course, the practical discoverers had to prove their merit by their works, the Italian innovators had to utter their aspirations for a change, before the second Bacon could truly declare that the time for a fundamental reform was at length arrived.

      It cannot but seem strange, to any one who attempts to trace the general outline of the intellectual progress of man, and who considers him as under the guidance of a Providential sway, that he should thus be permitted to wander so long in a wilderness of intellectual darkness; and even to turn back, by a perverse caprice as it might seem, when on the very border of the brighter and better land which was his destined inheritance. We do not attempt to solve this difficulty: but such a course of things naturally suggests the thought, that a progress in physical science is not the main object of man's career, in the eyes of the Power who directs the fortunes of our race. We can easily conceive that it may have been necessary to man's general welfare that he should continue to turn his eyes inwards upon his own heart and faculties, till Law and Duty, Religion and Government, Faith and Hope, had been fully incorporated with all the past acquisitions of human intellect; rather than that he should have rushed on into a train of discoveries tending to chain him to the objects and operations of the material world. The systematic Law[86] and philosophical Theology which acquired their ascendancy in men's minds at the time of which we speak, kept them engaged in a region of speculations which perhaps prepared the way for a profounder and wider civilization, for a more elevated and spiritual character, than might have been possible without such a preparation. The great Italian poet of the fourteenth century speaks with strong admiration of the founders of the system which prevailed in his time. Thomas, Albert, Gratian, Peter Lombard, occupy distinguished places in the Paradise. The first, who is the poet's instructor, says—

      Io fui degli agni della santa greggia

      Che Domenico mena per cammino

      U' ben s'impingua se non si vaneggia.

      Questo che m'è a destra piu vicino

      Frate e maestro fummi; ed esso Alberto

      E di Cologna, ed io Tomas d'Aquino. …

      Quell' altro fiammeggiar esce del riso

      De Grazian, che l'uno et l'altro foro

      Ajutò si che piace in Paradiso.

      I, then, was of the lambs that Dominic

      Leads, for his saintly flock, along the way

      Where well they thrive not swoln with vanity.

      He nearest on my right-hand brother was

      And master to me; Albert of Cologne

      Is this; and of Aquinum Thomas, I. …

      That next resplendence issues from the smile

      Of Gratian, who to either forum lent

      Such help as favour wins in Paradise.

      It appears probable that neither poetry, nor painting, nor the other arts which require for their perfection a lofty and spiritualized imagination, would have appeared in the noble and beautiful forms which they assumed in the fourteenth and fifteenth century, if men of genius had, at the beginning of that period, made it their main business to discover the laws of nature, and to reduce them to a rigorous scientific form. Yet who can doubt that the absence of these touching and impressive works would have left one of the best and purest parts of man's nature without its due nutriment and development? It may perhaps be a necessary condition in the progress of man, that the Arts which aim at beauty should reach their excellence before the Sciences which seek speculative truth; and if this be so, we inherit, from the middle ages, treasures which may well reconcile us to the delay which took place in their cultivation of experimental science.

      However this may be, it is our business at present to trace the circumstances of this very lingering advance. We have already noticed the contest of the Nominalists and Realists, which was one form, though, with regard to scientific methods, an unprofitable one, of the antithesis of Ideas and Things. Though, therefore, this struggle continued, we need not dwell upon it. The Nominalists denied the real existence of Ideas, which doctrine was to a great extent implied in the prevailing systems; but the controversy СКАЧАТЬ