recklessly committing themselves to measures at once
violent and indefensible. They did make the attempt to institute an
opposite policy; it proved not only a failure, but mischievous. They
were then driven to check the spread of knowledge--driven by the
necessities of their position. The fault was none of theirs; it dated
back to the time of Constantine the Great; and the impossibility of
either correcting or neutralizing it is only an example, as has been
said, of the manner in which a general principle, once introduced, will
overbear the best exertions of those attempting to struggle against it.
We can appreciate the false position into which those statesmen were
thrown when we compare their personal with their public relations. Often
the most eminent persons lived in intimacy and friendship with Jewish
physicians, who, in the eye of the law, were enemies of society; often
those who were foremost in the cultivation of knowledge--who, indeed,
suffered excommunication for its sake--maintained amicable relations of
a private kind with those who in public were the leaders of their
persecutors. The systems were in antagonism, not the men. Arnold de
Villa Nova, though excommunicated, was the physician of one pope; Roger
Bacon, though harshly imprisoned, was the friend and correspondent of
another. These incidents are not to be mistaken for that compassion
which the truly great are ever ready to show to erring genius. They are
examples of what we often see in our own day, when men engaged in the
movements of a great political party loyally carry out its declared
principles to their consequences, though individually they may find in
those consequences many things to which they could mentally object.
Their private objection they thus yield for the sake of what appears to
them, in a general way, a practical good.

Such was the state of affairs when the Arab element, having pervaded
France and Italy, made its formal intellectual attack. It might almost
have been foreseen in what manner that attack would be made, and the
shape it would be likely to assume. Of the sciences, astronomy was the
oldest and most advanced. [Sidenote: The intellectual impulse makes its
attack through astronomy,] Its beginning dates earlier than the historic
period, and both in India and in Egypt it had long reached correctness,
so far as its general principles were concerned. The Saracens had been
assiduous cultivators of it in both its branches, observ