The History of Education Part 39

THE NEW METHOD IN THE HANDS OF SUBSEQUENT WORKERS. By the middle of the seventeenth century many important advances had been made in many different lines of scientific work. In the two centuries between 1450 and 1650, the foundations of modern mathematics and mechanics had been laid.

At the beginning of the period Arabic notation and the early books of Euclid were about all that were taught; at its end the western world had worked out decimals, symbolic algebra, much of plane and spherical trigonometry, mechanics, logarithms (1614) and conic sections (1637), and was soon to add the calculus (1667-87). Mercator had published the map of the world (1569) which has ever since born his name, and the Gregorian calendar had been introduced (1572). The barometer, thermometer, air-pump, pendulum clock, and the telescope had come into use in the period. Alchemy had pa.s.sed over into modern chemistry; and the astrologer was finding less and less to do as the astronomer took his place. The English Hippocrates, Thomas Sydenham (1624-89), during this period laid the foundations of modern medical study, and the microscope was applied to the study of organic forms. Modern ideas as to light and optics and gases, and the theory of gravitation, were about to be set forth. All these advances had been made during the century following the epoch-making labors of Copernicus, the first modern scientific man to make an impression on the thinking of mankind.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 119. THE LOSS AND RECOVERY OF THE SCIENCES Each short horizontal line indicates the life-span of a very distinguished scholar in the science. Mohammedan scientists have not been included. The relative neglect or ignorance of a science has been indicated by the depth of the shading. The great loss to civilization caused by the barbarian inroads and the hostile att.i.tude of the early Church is evident.]

Accompanying this new scientific work there arose, among a few men in each of the western European countries, an interest in scientific studies such as the world had not witnessed since the days of the Alexandrian Greek.

This interest found expression in the organization of scientific societies, wholly outside the universities of the time, for the reporting of methods and results, and for the mingling together in sympathetic companionship of these seekers after new truth. The most important dates connected with the rise of these societies are:

1603. The Lyncean Society at Rome.

1619. Jungius founded the Natural Science a.s.sociation at Rostock.

1645. The Royal Society of London began to meet; const.i.tuted in 1660; chartered in 1662.

1657. The Academia del Cimento at Florence.

1662. The Imperial Academy of Germany.

1666. The Academy of Sciences in France.

1675. The National Observatory at Greenwich established.

After 1650 the advance of science was rapid. The spirit of modern inquiry, which in the sixteenth century had animated but a few minds, by the middle of the seventeenth had extended to all the princ.i.p.al countries of Europe.

The striking results obtained during the seventeenth century revealed the vast field waiting to be explored, and filled many independent modern-type scholars with an enthusiasm for research in the new domain of science. By the close of the eighteenth century the main outlines of most of the modern sciences had been established.

LEADING THINKERS OUTSIDE THE UNIVERSITIES. During the seventeenth century, and largely during the eighteenth as well, the extreme conservatism of the universities, their continued control by their theological faculties, and their continued devotion to theological controversy and the teachings of state orthodoxy rather than the advancement of knowledge, served to make of them such inhospitable places for the new scientific method that practically all the leading workers with it were found outside the universities. This was less true of England than other lands, but was in part true of English universities as well. As civil servants, court attaches, pensioners of royalty, or as private citizens of means they found, as independent scholars reporting to the recently formed scientific societies, a freedom for investigation and a tolerance of ideas then scarcely possible anywhere in the university world.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 120. RENe DESCARTES (1596-1650)]

Tycho Brahe and Kepler were pensioners of the Emperor at Prague. Lord Bacon was a lawyer and political leader, and became a peer of England.

Descartes, the mathematician and founder of modern philosophy, to whom we are indebted for conic sections; Napier, inventor of logarithms; and Ray and Willoughby, who did the first important work in botany and zoology in England, were all independent scholars. The air-pump was invented by the Burgomaster of Madgeburg. Huygens, the astronomer and inventor of the clock was a pensioner of the King of France. Ca.s.sini, who explained the motion of Jupiter's satellites, was Astronomer Royal at Paris. Halley, who demonstrated the motions of the moon and who first predicted the return of a comet, held a similar position at Greenwich. Van Helmont and Boyle, who together laid the foundations of our chemical knowledge, were both men of n.o.ble lineage who preferred the study of the new sciences to a life of ease at court. Harvey was a physician and demonstrator of anatomy in London. Sydenham, the English Hippocrates, was a pensioner of Cromwell and a physician in Westminster. The German mathematical scholar, Leibnitz, who jointly with Newton discovered the calculus, scorned a university professorship and remained an attache of a German court. Newton, though for a time a professor at Cambridge, during most of his mature life held the royal office of Warden of the Mint. These are a few notable ill.u.s.trations of scientific scholars of the first rank who remained outside the universities to obtain advantages and freedom not then to be found within their walls. Much these same conditions continued throughout most of the eighteenth century, during which many remarkable advances in all lines of pure science were made. By the close of this century the universities had been sufficiently modernized that scientific workers began to find in them an atmosphere conducive to scientific teaching and research; during the nineteenth century they became the homes of scientific progress and instruction; to-day they are deeply interested in the promotion of scientific research.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

1. Show that the rise of scientific inquiry was but another manifestation of the same inquiring spirit which had led to the recovery of the ancient literatures and history.

2. What do you understand to be meant by the failure of the Greeks to standardize their observations by instruments?

3. Show that it would be possible largely to determine the character of a civilization, if one knew only the prevailing ideas and conceptions as to scientific and religious matters.

4. Show the two different types of reasoning involved in the deduction of L. Valla (p. 246) and the induction of Copernicus.

5. Of which type was the reasoning of Galileo as to Jupiter's satellites?

6. Show that the three "distempers" described by Bacon characterize the three great stages in human progress from the sixth to the fifteenth centuries.

7. How do you explain the long rejection of the new sciences by the universities?

SELECTED READINGS

In the accompanying _Book of Readings_ the following selections are reproduced:

203. Macaulay: Att.i.tude of the Ancients toward Scientific Inquiry.

204. Franck: The Credulity of Mediaeval People.

205. Copernicus: How he arrived at the theory he set forth.

206. Brewster: Galileo's Discovery of the Satellites of Jupiter.

207. Inquisition: The Abjuration of Galileo.

208. Bacon: On Scientific Progress.

209. Macaulay: The Importance of Bacon's Work.

QUESTIONS ON THE READINGS

1. How do you explain the att.i.tude of the ancients toward scientific inquiry?

2. State the ancient purpose in pursuing scientific studies.

3. Contrast Bacon and Plato as to aims.

4. Show that the thinking of Copernicus as to the motions of the heavenly bodies was an excellent example of deductive thinking.

5. Show that the discovery and reasoning of Galileo was an example of the common method of reasoning of to-day.

6. Were the difficulties that surrounded scientific inquiry and progress, as described by Bacon, easily removed?

7. Explain the readiness with which the clergy have so commonly opposed scientific inquiry for fear that the results might upset preconceived theological ideas.

SUPPLEMENTARY REFERENCES

Ball, W. R. R. _History of Mathematics at Cambridge_.

* Libby, Walter. _An Introduction to the History of Science_.

Ornstein, Martha. _Role of the Scientific Societies in the Seventeenth Century_.

* Routledge, Robert. _A Popular History of Science_.

* Sedgwick, W. T. and Tyler, H. W. _A Short History of Science_.

* White, A. D. _History of the Warfare of Science with Theology_, 2 vols. Wordsworth Christopher. _Scholae Academicae; Studies at the English Universities in the Eighteenth Century_.

CHAPTER XVII

THE NEW SCIENTIFIC METHOD AND THE SCHOOLS

THE RISE OF REALISM IN EDUCATION. As will be remembered from our study of the educational results of the Revival of Learning (chapter XI), the new schools established in the reaction against medievalism, to teach pure Latin and Greek, in time became formal and lifeless (p. 283), and their aim came to be almost entirely that of imparting a mastery of the Ciceronian style, both in writing and in speech. This idea, first clearly inaugurated by Sturm at Stra.s.sburg (R. 137), had now become fixed, and in its extreme is ill.u.s.trated by the teachings of the Jesuit Campion at Prague (R. 146). As a reaction against this extreme position of the humanistic scholars there arose, during the sixteenth century, and as a further expression of the new critical spirit awakened by the Revival of Learning, a demand for a type of education which would make truth rather than beauty, and the realities of the life of the time rather than the beauties of a life of Roman days, the aim and purpose of education. This new spirit became known as Realism, was contemporaneous with the rise of scientific inquiry, and was an expression of a similar dissatisfaction with the learning of the time. As applied to education this new spirit may be said to have manifested itself in three different stages, as follows:

1. Humanistic realism.

2. Social realism.

3. Sense realism.

We will explain each of these, briefly, in order.