ilt, intercolonial intercourse ramified, a
distinctly Spanish-American federal State might possibly have been
created, capable of self-defence against Europe, and inviting
cooperation rather than aggression from the neighbor in the North."

If the effort to understand Spanish America now so manifest will only
go to the extent of having our people realize the full truth that
until the nineteenth century English America was far behind Spanish
America in facilities for higher education, in culture and literature,
in the application of the arts to municipal life and, above {499} all,
in interest in science, then the prevalent impression that the Popes
and the Catholic Church are opposed to genuine progress and true
science will disappear. Catholic America was far ahead of Protestant
America in scientific education and research until the untimely break
from Spain left the Spanish-American countries the prey of political
disturbances.

{500}

APPENDIX IX.

THE DANGER OF A LITTLE KNOWLEDGE.

_Professor Draper's "The History of the Conflict between Religion
and Science."_

What I have tried to emphasize in this volume is that the arguments
advanced to show the opposition of the Catholic Church to science are
founded on actual ignorance of the history of science or
misunderstandings of particular incidents of that history. Not only
was there no policy of opposition to science, but on the contrary
encouragement of interest in scientific subjects, patronage of
scientific workers and even definite endowment of scientific research
by the ecclesiastical authorities. The tradition of Church opposition
to science is founded especially on lack of knowledge of what was done
for science in the medieval period and a misunderstanding of the
medieval universities. This tradition owed its origin partly to the
Renaissance, which, having rediscovered Greek, despised whatever
Western Europe had accomplished during the preceding centuries and
spoke of all that was done as Gothic, as if only worthy of barbarous
Gothic ancestors.

Another large factor, however, in the creation of this tradition and
one which meant more for us here in America than the Renaissance, was
the religious revolt of the sixteenth century in Germany which has
been called the Reformation. The reformers made it a point to
minimize, if not actually to misrepresent, what had been accomplished
under the old Church regime, and this Protestant tradition lived on