tion. In these towns the earliest popular schools were founded. The impulse to diffuse the lore of antiquity, by means of schools, was as strong amongst the learned as was the wish for instruction in the productive class. Both circumstances combined to stimulate the desire for books; the difficulty of satisfying it through copyists gave occasion to the invention of printing, in the middle of the fifteenth century. A century earlier, the invention would have had no influence on intellectual progress. From the time of its actual occurrence, dates a new period in the history of culture. A survey of literature, at the end of a century after the printing of the first book with movable type, awakens our astonishment at the extent and importance of the achievements in the physical sciences and medicine, and at the extraordinary mass of facts and experiences, which the middle ages had acquired and transmitted, in astronomy, technics, engineering, and in the trades, and which were now collected by the intelligent scholars of the learned schools, who stood nearest to the producing classes, namely the physicians. In the sixteenth century the physicians were the founders of the modern natural sciences, they participated in the diffusion and extension of Greek learning, and intervened in the intellectual education of the people. Another century and a half elapsed, however, before the knowledge, accumulated by them, was arranged and rendered comprehensive and complete enough to be employed in university instruction. Hitherto the foreign language, in which that knowledge was communicated-a language universally current amongst the learned of Europe-had had the inestimable advantage of uniting all the European thinkers devoted to the sciences, in the solution of their high problems. Without the common Latin language, this fruitful conjunction of labors had been impossible. It was not until near the end of the eighteenth century, that, with the exclusion of Latin in schools and literature, the last barrier between the intellectual and producing classes fell. Both again spoke, as in old Greece, the same language, and understood each other; for science, school, and poetry acted conjointly in diffusing an equally high grade of intellectual discipline amongst all ranks. With the extinction of the slavery of the ancient world, and the union of all the conditions for the evolution of the human mind, a progress in civilization and culture is thenceforth assured, indestructible, imperishable. In the natural course of physical inquiry a change has taken place. Most of the facts from which the investigator elaborated empirical ideas, he had long received from the metallurgists, the engineers, the apothecaries, briefly, from the industrials, and had resolved their inventions into conceptions, which the producing classes received back in the form of explications and applied to their own practical ends. The industrials thence abandoned their dislike of theory; the craftsman, technist (Techniker), agriculturist, physician, as formerly in Greece, ask counsel of the learned theorist. A new change began when the learned physical investigator, the teacher of medicine, had acquired the technical dexterity of the practical classes, and when these had appropriated the laws and scientific principles established by the learned. In the pursuit of his ends, the scientific, inquirer has thus become independent and an inventor; the craftsman, agriculturist, etc., have gained independence of inquiry, intellectual freedom. The future discloses to our view an animated picture of an endless activity, fertile in results. The past appears to us now in a different light. We see that the warfare against physical inquiry, waged by the scholasticism and theology of the middle ages, was of no import whatsoever. The ground of it was an inability, at the time, to distinguish a dogma from a fact. The spiritual and temporal powers united could not have prevented the invention of the telescope and mariner's compass and the discovery of oxygen, nor have repressed the effect of them on the minds of men. A book can be burned, but not a fact. With the proof that this earth is a small planet circulating about the sun, the early representation of "Heaven" became meaningless, as did the representation of "Hell" with the explanation of fire. Upon the discovery of atmospheric pressure, the belief in witchcraft and magic had no further support, for, along with her "horror vacui," Nature lost her "willing," her love and her hate. With these discoveries, mankind began to feel their strength and position in the universe. As to the scholasticism of the middle ages, had Aristotle and Plato risen from their graves, to become teachers in its schools, they could not have furthered intellectual progress, because of the lack of advanced empirical conceptions. The logic of those ages, and the intellectual gymnastics resting upon it, best corresponded to that time. and the future. The hostility against the later physical inquiry was without effect. Physical science would not have advanced one step further than it has done, nor have developed itself earlier or otherwise, even had the entire spiritual and political power been in league with it. A computation, were it made, of the effect produced by 370 DEVELOPMENT OF SCIENTIFIC IDEAS. Luther upon our day and our stand-point, with the great discoveries in nature then extant, and of the effect these would have produced without Luther, would lead to a correct result. We now know that ideas develop themselves organically according to determinate laws of nature and of the human mind, and we see the tree of knowledge which the Greeks planted expand uninterruptedly on the soil of civilization and with the due culture of it, and blossom and bear fruit, under the sunshine of freedom, at the proper time. We have learned that its branches can indeed be bent by external force, but not broken, and that its fine and innumerable roots lie hidden so deep, that their silent activity is wholly withdrawn from the will of men. The history of nations informs us of the fruitless efforts of political and theological powers to perpetuate slavery, corporeal and intellectual: future history will describe the victories of freedom which men achieved through investigation of the ground of things and of truth-victories won with bloodless weapons, and in a struggle wherein morals and religion participated only as feeble allies. |