tle and Augustine in medicine and in the natural sciences.
We must concede it as a special subject of praise for Albert, that he
distinguished very strictly between natural and supernatural
phenomena. The former he considered as entirely the object of the
investigation of nature. The latter he handed over to the realm of
metaphysics."

"Albert's efforts" Pagel says, "to set down the limits of natural
science shows already the seeds of a more scientific treatment of
natural phenomena, and a recognition of the necessity to know things
in their causes--_rerum cognoscere causas_--and not to consider
that everything must simply be attributed to the action of
Providence. He must be considered as one of the more rational
thinkers of his time, though the fetters of scholasticism still
bound him quite enough, and his mastery of dialectics, which he had
learned from the strenuous Dominican standpoint, still made him
subordinate the laws of nature to the Church's teaching in ways that
suggested the possibility of his being less free than might
otherwise have been the case. His thoroughgoing piety, his profound
scholarship, his boundless industry; the almost uncontrollable
impulse of his mind after universality of knowledge; his
many-sidedness in literary productivity; and finally the universal
recognition which he received from his contemporaries and succeeding
generations,--stamp him as one of the most imposing characters and
one of the most wonderful phenomena of the Middle Ages."

Perhaps in no department of the history of science {300} has more
nonsense been talked, than with regard to the neglect of experiment
and observation in the Middle Ages. The men who made the series of
experiments necessary to enable them to raise the magnificent Gothic
cathedrals; who built the fine old municipal buildings and abbeys and
castles; who spanned wide rivers with bridges, and yet had the
intelligence and the skill to decorate all of these buildings as
effectively as they did,--cannot be considered either as impractical
or lacking in powers of observation. As I show in the chapter The
Medieval University Man and Science, Dante, the poet and literary man
of the thirteenth century, had his mind stored with quite as much
material information with regard to physical science and nature study,
as any modern educated man. It is true that the men of the Middle Ages
did not make observations on exactly the same