Outlines of the Earths History | Page 9

the body of this people appear to have wandered toward central Asia, where after ages of pastoral life in the high table lands and mountains of their country it sent forth branches to India, Asia Minor and Greece, to Persia, and to western Europe. It seems ever to have been a characteristic of these Aryan peoples that they had an extreme love for Nature; moreover, they clearly perceived the need of accounting for the things that happened in the world about them. In general they inclined to what is called the pantheistic explanation of the universe. They believed a supreme God in many different forms to be embodied in all the things they saw. Even their own minds and bodies they conceived as manifestations of this supreme power. Among the Aryans who came to dwell in Europe and along the eastern Mediterranean this method of explaining Nature was in time changed to one in which humanlike gods were supposed to control the visible and invisible worlds. In that marvellous centre of culture which was developed among the Greeks this conception of humanlike deities was in time replaced by that of natural law, and in their best days the Greeks were men of science essentially like those of to-day, except that they had not learned by experience how important it was to criticise their theories by patiently comparing them with the facts which they sought to explain. The last of the important Greek men of science, Strabo, who was alive when Christ was born, has left us writings which in quality are essentially like many of the able works of to-day. But for the interruption in the development of Greek learning, natural science would probably have been fifteen hundred years ahead of its present stage. This interruption came in two ways. In one, through the conquest of Greece and the destruction of its intellectual life by the Romans, a people who were singularly incapable of appreciating natural science, and who had no other interest in it except now and then a vacant and unprofitable curiosity as to the processes of the natural world. A second destructive influence came through the fact that Christianity, in its energetic protest against the sins of the pagan civilization, absolutely neglected and in a way despised all forms of science.
The early indifference of Christians to natural learning is partly to be explained by the fact that their religion was developed among the Hebrews, a people remarkable for their lack of interest in the scientific aspects of Nature. To them it was a sufficient explanation that one omnipotent God ruled all things at his will, the heavens and the earth alike being held in the hollow of his hand.
Finding the centre of its development among the Romans, Christianity came mainly into the control of a people who, as we have before remarked, had no scientific interest in the natural world. This condition prolonged the separation of our faith from science for fifteen hundred years after its beginning. In this time the records of Greek scientific learning mostly disappeared. The writings of Aristotle were preserved in part for the reason that the Church adopted many of his views concerning questions in moral philosophy and in politics. The rest of Greek learning was, so far as Europe was concerned, quite neglected.
A large part of Greek science which has come down to us owes its preservation to a very singular incident in the history of learning. In the ninth century, after the Arabs had been converted to Mohammedanism, and on the basis of that faith had swiftly organized a great and cultivated empire, the scholars of that folk became deeply interested in the remnants of Greek learning which had survived in the monastic and other libraries about the eastern Mediterranean. So greatly did they prize these records, which were contemned by the Christians, that it was their frequent custom to weigh the old manuscripts in payment against the coin of their realm. In astronomy, mathematics, chemistry, and geology the Arabian students, building on the ancient foundations, made notable and for a time most important advances. In the tenth century of our era they seemed fairly in the way to do for science what western Europe began five centuries later to accomplish. In the fourteenth century the centre of Mohammedan strength was transferred from the Arabians to the Turks, from a people naturally given to learning to a folk of another race, who despised all such culture. Thenceforth in place of the men who had treasured and deciphered with infinite pains all the records of earlier learning, the followers of Mohammed zealously destroyed all the records of the olden days. Some of these records, however, survived among the Arabs of Spain, and others were preserved by the Christian scholars who dwelt