men and
the policy of the Church. It is not these lesser men, however, who
have been in special honor. No one, for instance, can possibly be
looked upon as representing Church teaching better than Augustine, who
because of the depth of his teaching, yet his wonderful fidelity to
Christian dogma, received the formal title of Father of the Church,
which carried with it the approval of everything that he had written.
There is a well-known quotation from St. Augustine which shows how
much he deprecated the attempt to make Scriptures an authority in
science, and how much he valued observation as compared with
authority, in such matters as are really within the domain of
investigation by experiment and observation.

He says: "It very often happens that there is some question as to the
earth or the sky, or the other elements of this world, respecting
which one who is not a Christian has knowledge derived from most
certain reasoning or observation" (that is, from the ordinary means at
the command of an investigator in natural science), "and it is very
disgraceful and mischievous, and of all things to be carefully
avoided, that a {297} Christian speaking of such matters as being
according to the Christian Scriptures, should be heard by an
unbeliever talking such nonsense that the unbeliever, perceiving him
to be as wide from the mark as east from west, can hardly restrain
himself from laughing." It is the opinions of such men as Augustine
and Albert that must be taken as representing the real attitude of
theologians and churchmen toward science, and not those of lesser men,
whose zeal, as is ever true of the minor adherents of any cause,
always is prone to carry them into unfortunate excesses.

Albert the Great was indeed a thoroughgoing experimentalist in the
best modern sense of the term. He says in the second book of his
treatise On Minerals (De Mineralibus): "The aim of natural science is
not simply to accept the statements of others, that is, what is
narrated by people, but to investigate the causes that are at work in
nature for themselves." When we take this expression in connection
with the other, that "we must endeavor to find out what nature can
naturally bring to pass," the complete foundation of experimentalism
is laid. Albert held this principle not only in theory, but applied it
in practice.

It is often said that the scholastic philosophers, and notably
Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, almost idolatrously w