ph
over the diabolical tortures to which they were subjected, must have
left traces not easily effaced. [Footnote: Described with terrible
vividness in Renan's 'Antichrist.'] They scorned the earth, in view of
that 'building of God, that house not made with hands, eternal in the
heavens.' The Scriptures which ministered to their spiritual needs
were also the measure of their Science. When, for example, the
celebrated question of Antipodes came to be discussed, the Bible was
with many the ultimate court of appeal. Augustine, who flourished
A.D. 400, would not deny the rotundity of the earth; but he would
deny the possible existence of inhabitants at the other side, 'because
no such race is recorded in Scripture among the descendants of Adam.'
Archbishop Boniface was shocked at the assumption of a 'world of human
beings out of the reach of the means of salvation.' Thus reined in,
Science was not likely to make much progress. Later on, the political
and theological strife between the Church and civil governments, so
powerfully depicted by Draper, must have done much to stifle
investigation.

Whewell makes many wise and brave remarks regarding the spirit of the
Middle Ages. It was a menial spirit. The seekers after natural
knowledge had forsaken the fountain of living waters, the direct
appeal to nature by observation and experiment, and given themselves
up to the remanipulation of the notions of their predecessors. It was
a time when thought had become abject, and when the acceptance of mere
authority led, as it always does in science, to intellectual death.
Natural events, instead of being traced to physical, were referred to
moral, causes; while an exercise of the phantasy, almost as degrading
as the spiritualism of the present day, took the place of scientific
speculation. Then came the mysticism of the Middle Ages, Magic,
Alchemy, the Neoplatonic philosophy, with its visionary though sublime
abstractions, which caused men to look with shame upon their own
bodies, as hindrances to the absorption of the creature in the
blessedness of the Creator. Finally came the scholastic philosophy, a
fusion, according to Lange, of the least mature notions of Aristotle
with the Christianity of the West. Intellectual immobility was the
result. As a traveller without a compass in a fog may wander long,
imagining he is making way, and find himself after hours of toil at
his starting-point, so the schoolmen, having 'tied and un