Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer. Michael White
go far to account for the neglect of experience and the unprogressiveness of science for nearly 2,000 years after Aristotle?1
In the same vein, the writer and historian Sir William Dampier pointed out that:
Aristotle, while dealing skilfully with the theory of the passage from particular instances to general propositions, in practice often failed lamentably. Taking the available facts, he would rush at once to the wildest generalisations. Naturally he failed. Enough facts were not available, and there was no adequate scientific background into which they could be fitted.2
The modern scientific method involves reasoning and experiment. To give a simple example: early on in a scientific investigation an idea is postulated – often based upon an inspired insight. This is then developed into a tentative hypothesis by means of pure reasoning – a process called the inductive method. The practical consequences of this hypothesis must then be deduced mathematically and the idea is tested experimentally. If there are discrepancies between the hypothesis and the experimental results or observations, the hypothesis must be altered and the experiments be repeated until there is either agreement between reasoning and observation or the original idea is discarded. If the reasoning and the practical verification eventually agree, the hypothesis is promoted to the status of a theory. This can then be used to attempt to explain a more generalised scenario than the original concept and may hold for many years. But, crucially, it is still never considered to be the only theory that could fit the facts, and good science allows for new ideas to be introduced that may destroy the old theory or demand radical changes.*
Aristotle’s dominance left no room for alternative ideas. Democritus, the father of the atomic theory, believed that ‘According to convention there is a sweet and a bitter, a hot and a cold, and according to convention there is colour. In truth there are atoms and void.’ Aristotle dismissed this notion by relying upon syllogisms that were founded upon inadequate knowledge. For example, he claimed that, if the atomic theory were true, matter would be heavy by nature and nothing would be light enough in itself to rise. A large mass of air or fire would then be heavier than a small mass of earth or water, so the earth or water would not sink (or the air and fire rise) and therefore the elements would not find their natural positions. This argument illustrates how Aristotle was not approaching the problem in the way a modern objective scientist would – he was not able to consider questioning his own cherished beliefs even when presented with a strong alternative theory.
Aristotle’s dogma became almost a religion among his followers, and his teachings were passed on to future generations virtually unquestioned, misguiding future thinkers and leading science along a partially blind alley for several hundred years without interruption.
By the time of Aristotle’s death, in 322 BC, the Egyptian city of Alexandria was about to emerge as the intellectual centre of the world. At its heart was the great library which is said to have contained all human knowledge in an estimated 400,000 volumes and scrolls. From Alexandria, learning spread eastward with the conquests of Alexander the Great and west into Europe, where Greek philosophy, science and literature acted as the foundation for Roman culture. This was especially true of science: the Roman era could boast many great intellects – Pliny, who lived during the first century AD and wrote a thirty-seven-volume treatise, Naturalis Historia, and Plutarch, a thinker of the following generation, to name only two. But these men did little original science and concentrated on refining and clarifying Greek teachings passed on to them.
Of the Greek science that survived through to the early Roman era, the work of Aristotle, Plato, Archimedes and Pythagoras was best preserved, although the ideas of Democritus were championed by the Roman philosopher Lucretius in his poem De Natura Rerum. By the time Roman power was melting away and the library at Alexandria was decimated at the hands of the Christian bishop Theophilus around AD 390 (it was later sacked a second time by the Arabs during the seventh century), Aristotle’s work was becoming unfashionable.
The reason for this lies in a shift from pure intellectual inquiry to a distrust of any learning beyond theological exegesis: this plunged most of civilisation into what has become known as the Dark Ages. In this era, as the Roman Empire was in rapid decline, education and learning became dominated by religious fanaticism. The disciples of this new movement, the Stoics, believed in the supreme importance of pure spirit over material existence and therefore shunned learning about the physical world as an end in itself. To them, Aristotle’s work was too mechanistic, too embedded in physical reality.* Instead, the musings of Plato held much greater relevance and were perfectly in tune with the new obsession with religious meaning.
Plato had taught an anthropocentric view of reality in which everything was created and carefully controlled by a supreme being who held the interests of humanity paramount. For Plato, the movements of the planets were there simply to enable the marking of time, and he viewed the cosmos as a living organism with a body, a soul and reason. He also saw numerical relevance and meaning in all natural processes, and because of this he placed great importance upon mathematics. However, he abhorred experimental science, which, according to one historian, he ‘roundly condemned as either impious or a base mechanical art’.3
There is no clear point at which the Dark Ages ended in Europe. Learning in some form had been kept alive in the monasteries, but the interest of the Christian fathers had lain in mysticism and religious relevance rather than practical or theoretical science. The Arabs, who had made great strides in the understanding of alchemy, mathematics and astronomy throughout the period, maintained an interest in pure science, and as this knowledge filtered gradually into Europe the shadow of ignorance lifted. But it was a slow process, taking three or four hundred years.
Sometime between 1200 and 1225, Aristotle’s works, which had been saved in part by the Arabs and amalgamated with their own ideas, were rediscovered by European intellectuals and translated into Latin. From this point on, Aristotle’s science returned to favour and took over from Platonic mysticism, gradually fusing with Christian theology.
Although this development may be viewed as an improvement upon the Dark Age mistrust of science and the Stoics’ preoccupation with spirituality, it created a new obsession – a marriage of Aristotelian natural philosophy with Christian dogma. This meant that any attack upon Aristotle’s science was also seen as an attack upon Christianity. Together, the two doctrines formed a powerful alliance and created a world-view that was taught by rote almost unchallenged in every university in Europe for almost half a millennium, from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century.
These twinned beliefs produced a self-contained picture of the universe: God created the world as described in the Scriptures and guided all actions. All movement was not only set in motion by God but was supervised by divine power. The Church’s doctrine of divine omnipotence thus dovetailed perfectly with Aristotle’s belief in the Unmoved Mover – that no movement was possible unless initiated by an unseen hand. All matter consisted of the four elements and was not divisible into atoms as Democritus had proposed. To Aristotle, every material object was an individual complete entity, created by God and composed of a particular combination of the four elements. Each object possessed certain distinct and observable qualities, such as heaviness, colour, smell, coolness. These were seen as solely intrinsic aspects or properties of the object, and their observed nature had nothing to do with the perception of the observer.
To the thirteenth-century mind, the notion that properties of an object such as smell, taste or texture were partly open to interpretation in the mind of the observer would have been totally alien. Every property of an object was intrinsic and the same for all observers. Furthermore, because Aristotle had rejected atomism, the concept that matter was composed of tiny, indivisible elements would have been equally foreign to most people of the time. And, because Aristotelian ideas were now bound up inextricably with religion, any philosopher who openly challenged any aspect of accepted scientific ideology put his life in danger.
Yet, despite the severe