Science and Medieval Thought. Allbutt Thomas Clifford
the leisure to carry my investigations to the sources. Yet I may have attained to some maturity of judgment herein by long occupation of my mind since, in 1863, my old friend Mr Thomas Marshall of Leeds, sometime of St John’s College, Oxford, interested me in the life and work of Roger Bacon, the only eminent forerunner of the great naturalists of the seventeenth century.
The art of the Middle Ages and the social and political history of the time have fascinated modern Europe; for medieval thought, though its phrases survive in their mouths, few persons have shown any care: yet to these conflicts we owe what we are. No great battles of mankind have been fought in vain; none of its great captains has deserved oblivion. Yet we shrug our shoulders at their uncouth or outlandish names; we assume that from their chairs there issued naught but rhetoric, casuistries and fallacies, and that their multitudinous disciples were silly moths.
Each period of human achievement has its phases of spring, culmination, and decline; and it is in its decline that the leafless tree comes to judgment. In the unloveliness of decay the Middle Ages are as other ages have been, as our own will be: but in those ages there was more than one outburst of life; more than once the enthusiasm of the youth of the West went out to explore the ways of the realm of ideas; and, if we believe ourselves at last to have found the only thoroughfare, we owe this knowledge to those who before us travelled the uncharted seas. If we have inherited a great commerce and dominion of science it is because their argosies had been on the ocean, and their camels on the desert. “Discipulus est prioris posterior dies”; man cannot know all at once; knowledge must be built up by laborious generations. In all times, as in our own, the advance of knowledge is very largely by elimination and negation; we ascertain what is not true, and we weed it out. To perceive and to respect the limits of the knowable we must have sought to transgress them. We can build our bridge over the chasm of ignorance with stored material in which the thirteenth century was poor indeed, we can fix our bearings where then was no foundation; yet man may be well engaged when he knows not the ends of his work; and the schoolmen in digging for treasure cultivated the field of knowledge, even for Galileo and Harvey, for Newton and Darwin. Their many errors came not of indolence, for they were passionate; not of hatred of light, for they were eager for the light; not of fickleness, for they wrought with unparalleled devotion; nor indeed of ignorance of particular things, for they knew many things: they erred because they did not know, and they could not know, the conditions of the problems which, as they emerged from the cauldron of war and from the wreck of letters and science, they were nevertheless bound to attack, if civil societies worthy of the name were to be constructed. How slow in gestation is the mother of truth we may see by comparing the schoolmen of the second medieval period with those of the first; in the enlargement of their view, the better furniture of their minds, and the deeper meaning of their distinctions: and when we compare with these later schoolmen the naturalists of the seventeenth century, we find not new acquirements only but also a new direction of the pursuit of truth.
It seems hardly comprehensible that great and stable societies have been built up on transcendental schemes of thought, upon conceptions poised as it were in the air. Without a system of morals no civil society could exist; yet if mankind must have waited for civil polity until some such system were built up from below, of scientifically tested materials, social constructions would have been virtually impossible. In morals, as in the arts, the art precedes the science; the intuitions of genius imagine social schemes of provisional validity, and new and lofty standards of fitness. But a social fabric thus born of a vision can bear no rough handling; and even the solid builders who would make a more permanent foundation upon positive conceptions, while seeking more or less deliberately to underpin the fabric, may, and often do, shake it to ruin.
Hence in all guardians of morals the dread of meddling with the reigning vision of truth; hence its sanctity, that no man shall try the stuff of which it is made. And the dangers of heresies from within are more fearful than those of alien attacks; social cohesion, the end of it all, is thereby more exposed to disintegration. Yet nevertheless, as the generations of men change, and as knowledge increases, men see from new points of view; and thus while for some the reigning vision retains its apparent solidity, for others its rays are broken or dissolved. Even John Henry Newman was compelled to teach the relativity of truth, and that a doctrine of development must be accepted. For every provisional synthesis then the time must come when the apparition of truth can no longer command united allegiance, and criterions begin to encroach upon sanctions. Broader and more stable foundations have, it is true, been rising almost insensibly, yet it may be long ere the superstructure rise into the heavenly light; in the lower work many will see no beauty and no hope, others will see safety in its enlargement and solidity. By these indeed the visions of the imagination are apt to be forgotten, or in the pressure of intellectual verification even despised; the mean level of conception may not indeed be lower, it may haply be higher, yet the highest, wherein truth may be revealed by illumination, is not divined in its full force, abundance and life. Great seers are wont to leave to others to find out, or even to care, what bottom they stood upon; yet only through transitory periods of a humbler duty than theirs can the bases be laid and enlarged for times of richer fruition. One of the profoundest of modern sayings was that of Freeman – that the end of modern material progress is to bring large societies up to the level of small ones.
This is the day of a great celebration; that on this anniversary I am worthy to take a place in the succession of your Orators is more than I dare to believe, that you have deemed me worthy is my encouragement. In private duty also I am bound to honour one of the greatest of the sons of the University of Cambridge, and the greatest member of the ancient and honourable house of Gonville and Caius College.
In some respects I am ill equipped for my office; of the history of the practice of Medicine from the time of Galen to the time of Harvey I am almost ignorant, I fear wilfully ignorant. Well indeed may we turn our eyes away from those centuries wherein one of the chief callings of man fell into unexampled and even odious degradation; yet I trust that in me this ignorance and this aversion may be compensated by some familiarity with the history of thought in the Middle Ages, a familiarity acquired during thirty-six years of abiding interest, and occasional study.
The discovery of the circulation of the blood by William Harvey is commonly regarded among scientific discoveries as pre-eminent if not unique. I can quote but two opinions on this matter, both taken beyond our own land. In France, Dr Daremberg exclaims “Voici Harvey! Comme au jour de la création le chaos se débrouille, la lumière se sépare des ténèbres!” In Germany, Dr Baas says that Harvey stands alone in respect of the world of life; that his discovery of the inner working of the microcosm takes a place equal to, if not indeed higher than, those of Copernicus, Kepler and Newton in respect of the macrocosm. It will be my endeavour to show that these judgments are historically justifiable.
To put the discovery of the systemic circulation of the blood in its true light, we must have some notion of the history of philosophy, science and medicine. Medicine, and herein it is in contrast with Theology and Law, had its sources almost wholly in the Greeks. Not only in the doctrine of the four elements of Empedocles, a doctrine which has survived almost to our own day2, and in the physical theories of Heraclitus and Leucippus, did medicine, for good or ill, first find a scheme of thought, but in the schools of Hippocrates and of Alexandria it was based also, and far more soundly, upon natural history and anatomy. The noble figure of Galen, the first experimental physiologist and the last of the great Greek physicians, portrayed for us by Dr Payne in the Harveian Oration of 1896, stood eminent upon the brow of the abyss when, as if by some convulsion of nature, medicine was overwhelmed for fifteen centuries. To the philosophy of medicine, Galen had given more than enough; to its natural history he had contributed in the following of Hippocrates; to its discoveries he had given the greatest of all means of research, individual genius; to its methods he had given, but in vain, that indispensable method, practised first perhaps in history by Archimedes and the Alexandrians, of verification by experiment; a method, after Galen, virtually lost till the time of Gilbert, of Galileo and of Harvey.
In the growth of human societies small civilisations, however exquisite, have been sacrificed to the formation of vaster and vaster congregations of men; thus only, it would seem, is an equilibrium to be reached of sufficient stability for the highest ends of mankind. Greece, beautiful as was her bloom, penetrating as was her spirit, perhaps
The “humoral doctrine” is imperfectly known. The four