A History of Science, vol 2 | Page 5

natural laws, they paid heed (as, for example,

Thomas Aquinas does in his Summa Theologia) to the "acts of angels,"
the "speaking of angels," the "subordination of angels," the "deeds of
guardian angels," and the like. They disputed such important questions
as, How many angels can stand upon the point of a needle? They
argued pro and con as to whether Christ were coeval with God, or
whether he had been merely created "in the beginning," perhaps ages
before the creation of the world. How could it be expected that science
should flourish when the greatest minds of the age could concern
themselves with problems such as these?
Despite our preconceptions or prejudices, there can be but one answer
to that question. Oriental superstition cast its blight upon the fair field
of science, whatever compensation it may or may not have brought in
other fields. But we must be on our guard lest we overestimate or
incorrectly estimate this influence. Posterity, in glancing backward, is
always prone to stamp any given age of the past with one idea, and to
desire to characterize it with a single phrase; whereas in reality all ages
are diversified, and any generalization regarding an epoch is sure to do
that epoch something less or something more than justice. We may be
sure, then, that the ideal of ecclesiasticism is not solely responsible for
the scientific stasis of the dark age. Indeed, there was another influence
of a totally different character that is too patent to be overlooked--the
influence, namely, of the economic condition of western Europe during
this period. As I have elsewhere pointed out,[2] Italy, the centre of
western civilization, was at this time impoverished, and hence could
not provide the monetary stimulus so essential to artistic and scientific
no less than to material progress. There were no patrons of science and
literature such as the Ptolemies of that elder Alexandrian day. There
were no great libraries; no colleges to supply opportunities and afford
stimuli to the rising generation. Worst of all, it became increasingly
difficult to secure books.
This phase of the subject is often overlooked. Yet a moment's
consideration will show its importance. How should we fare to-day if
no new scientific books were being produced, and if the records of
former generations were destroyed? That is what actually happened in
Europe during the Middle Ages. At an earlier day books were made and
distributed much more abundantly than is sometimes supposed.
Bookmaking had, indeed, been an important profession in Rome, the

actual makers of books being slaves who worked under the direction of
a publisher. It was through the efforts of these workers that the classical
works in Greek and Latin were multiplied and disseminated.
Unfortunately the climate of Europe does not conduce to the indefinite
preservation of a book; hence very few remnants of classical works
have come down to us in the original from a remote period. The rare
exceptions are certain papyrus fragments, found in Egypt, some of
which are Greek manuscripts dating from the third century B.C. Even
from these sources the output is meagre; and the only other repository
of classical books is a single room in the buried city of Herculaneum,
which contained several hundred manuscripts, mostly in a charred
condition, a considerable number of which, however, have been
unrolled and found more or less legible. This library in the buried city
was chiefly made up of philosophical works, some of which were quite
unknown to the modern world until discovered there.
But this find, interesting as it was from an archaeological stand-point,
had no very important bearing on our knowledge of the literature of
antiquity. Our chief dependence for our knowledge of that literature
must still be placed in such copies of books as were made in the
successive generations. Comparatively few of the extant manuscripts
are older than the tenth century of our era. It requires but a momentary
consideration of the conditions under which ancient books were
produced to realize how slow and difficult the process was before the
invention of printing. The taste of the book-buying public demanded a
clearly written text, and in the Middle Ages it became customary to
produce a richly ornamented text as well. The script employed being
the prototype of the modern printed text, it will be obvious that a scribe
could produce but a few pages at best in a day. A large work would
therefore require the labor of a scribe for many months or even for
several years. We may assume, then, that it would be a very flourishing
publisher who could produce a hundred volumes all told per annum;
and probably there were not many publishers at any given time, even in
the period of Rome's greatest glory, who had anything like this