orshipped at
the shrine of Aristotle, and were ready to accept anything that this
great Greek philosopher had taught. We have already quoted Roger
Bacon's request to the Pope to forbid the study of the Stagirite. It
is interesting to find in this regard, that while Albert declared that
in questions of natural science he would prefer to follow Aristotle to
St. Augustine--a declaration which may seem surprising to many people
{298} who have been prone to think that what the Fathers of the Church
said medieval scholars followed slavishly--he does not hesitate to
point out errors made by the Greek philosopher, nor to criticise his
conclusions very freely. In his Treatise on Physics, [Footnote 34] he
says, "whoever believes that Aristotle was a god must also believe
that he never erred. But if one believe that Aristotle was a man, then
doubtless he was liable to err just as we are." In fact, as is pointed
out by the Catholic Encyclopaedia in its article on Albertus Magnus,
to which we are indebted for the exact reference of the quotations
that we have made, Albert devotes a lengthy chapter in his Summa
Theologiae [Footnote 35] to what he calls the errors of Aristotle. His
appreciation of Aristotle is always critical. He deserves great credit
not only for bringing the scientific teaching of the Stagirite to the
attention of medieval scholars, but also for indicating the method and
the spirit in which that teaching was to be received.

[Footnote 34: Physica, lib. VIII., tr. i., xiv.]

[Footnote 35: Summa Theologiae, Pars II., tr. i., Quaest iv.]

With regard to Albert's devotion to the experimental method and to
observation as the source of knowledge in what concerns natural
phenomena, Julius Pagel, in his History of Medicine in the Middle
Ages, which forms one of the parts of Puschmann's Handbook of the
History of Medicine, has some very interesting remarks that are worth
while quoting here: "Albert," he says, "shared with the naturalists of
the scholastic period the quality of entering deeply and thoroughly
into the objects of nature, and was not content with bare superficial
details concerning them, which many of the writers of the period
penetrated no further than to provide a nomenclature. While Albert was
a churchman and an {299} ardent devotee of Aristotle in matters of
natural phenomena, he was relatively unprejudiced and presented an
open mind. He thought that he must follow Hippocrates and Galen rather
than Aristo