The History Of Education by Ellwood P. Cubberley (epub e reader .txt) 📖

with the old scholastic deductive logic as expressed in the Organon, of Aristotle, and formulated and expressed the methods of inductive reasoning in his Novum Organum, published in 1620. In this he showed the insufficiency of the method of argumentation; analyzed and formulated the inductive method of reasoning, of which his study as to the nature of heat [10] is a good example; and pointed out that knowledge is a process, and not an end in itself; and indicated the immense and fruitful field of science to which the method might be applied. By showing how to learn from nature herself he turned the Renaissance energy into a new direction, and made a revolutionary break with the disputations and deductive logic of the Aristotelian scholastics which had for so long dominated university instruction.

 

In formulating the new method he first pointed out the defects of the learning of his time, which he classified under the head of “distempers,”

three in number, and as follows:

 

1. Fantastic learning: Alchemy, magic, miracles, old-wives, tales, credulities, superstitions, pseudo-science, and impostures of all sorts inherited from an ignorant past, and now conserved as treasures of knowledge.

 

2. Contentious learning: The endless disputations of the Scholastics about questions which had lost their significance, deductive in character, not based on any observation, not aimed primarily to arrive at truth, “fruitful of controversy, and barren of effect.”

 

3. Delicate learning: The new learning of the humanistic Renaissance, verbal and not real, stylish and polished but not socially important, and leading to nothing except a mastery of itself.

 

As an escape from these three types of distempers, which well characterized the three great stages in human progress from the sixth to the fifteenth centuries, Bacon offered the inductive method, by means of which men would be able to distinguish true from false, learn to see straight, create useful knowledge, and fill in the great gaps in the learning of the time by actually working out new knowledge from the unknown. The collecting, organizing, comparing, questioning, and inferring spirit of the humanistic revival he now turned in a new direction by organizing and formulating for the work a new Organum to take the place of the old Organon of Aristotle. In Book 1 he sets forth some of the difficulties (R. 208) with which those who try new experiments or work out new methods of study have to contend from partisans of old ideas.

 

The Novum Organum showed the means of escape from the errors of two thousand years by means of a new method of thinking and work. Bacon did not invent the new method—it had been used since man first began to reason about phenomena, and was the method by means of which Wycliffe, Luther, Magellan, Copernicus, Brahe, and Gilbert had worked—but he was the first to formulate it clearly and to point out the vast field of new and useful knowledge that might be opened up by applying human reason, along inductive lines, to the investigation of the phenomena of nature.

His true service to science lay in the completeness of his analysis of the inductive process, and his declaration that those who wish to arrive at useful discoveries must travel by that road. As Macaulay well says, in his essay on Bacon:

 

He was not the maker of that road; he was not the discoverer of that road; he was not the person who first surveyed and mapped that road.

But he was the person who first called the public attention to an inexhaustible mine of wealth which had been utterly neglected, and which was accessible by that road alone.

 

To stimulate men to the discovery of useful truth, to turn the energies of mankind—even slowly—from assumption and disputation to patient experimentation, [11.] and to give an impress to human thinking which it has retained for centuries, is, as Macaulay well says, “the rare prerogative of a few imperial spirits.” Macaulay’s excellent summary of the importance of Bacon’s work (R. 209) is well worth reading at this point.

 

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 passed 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.

 

[Illustration: 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 attitude 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 Association at Rostock.

1645. The Royal Society of London began to meet; constituted 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 principal 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 attach�s, 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.

 

[Illustration: FIG. 120. REN� 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. Cassini, 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 noble 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 attach� 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 illustrations 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: Attitude 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 attitude 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