Books: History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science

J >> John William Draper >> History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science

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This dark doctrine prepared its devotees for the accomplishment
of great things--things such as the Saracens did accomplish. It
converted despair into resignation, and taught men to disdain
hope. There was a proverb among them that "Despair is a freeman,
Hope is a slave."

But many of the incidents of war showed plainly that medicines
may assuage pain, that skill may close wounds, that those who are
incontestably dying may be snatched from the grave. The Jewish
physician became a living, an accepted protest against the
fatalism of the Koran. By degrees the sternness of predestination
was mitigated, and it was admitted that in individual life there
is an effect due to free-will; that by his voluntary acts man may
within certain limits determine his own course. But, so far as
nations are concerned, since they can yield no personal
accountability to God, they are placed under the control of
immutable law.

In this respect the contrast between the Christian and the
Mohammedan nations was very striking: The Christian was convinced
of incessant providential interventions; he believed that there
was no such thing as law in the government of the world. By
prayers and entreaties he might prevail with God to change the
current of affairs, or, if that failed, he might succeed with
Christ, or perhaps with the Virgin Mary, or through the
intercession of the saints, or by the influence of their relics
or bones. If his own supplications were unavailing, he might
obtain his desire through the intervention of his priest, or
through that of the holy men of the Church, and especially if
oblations or gifts of money were added. Christendom believed that
she could change the course of affairs by influencing the conduct
of superior beings. Islam rested in a pious resignation to the
unchangeable will of God. The prayer of the Christian was mainly
an earnest intercession for benefits hoped for, that of the
Saracen a devout expression of gratitude for the past. Both
substituted prayer for the ecstatic meditation of India. To the
Christian the progress of the world was an exhibition of
disconnected impulses, of sudden surprises. To the Mohammedan
that progress presented a very different aspect. Every corporeal
motion was due to some preceding motion; every thought to some
preceding thought; every historical event was the offspring of
some preceding event; every human action was the result of some
foregone and accomplished action. In the long annals of our race,
nothing has ever been abruptly introduced. There has been an
orderly, an inevitable sequence from event to event. There is an
iron chain of destiny, of which the links are facts; each stands
in its preordained place--not one has ever been disturbed, not
one has ever been removed. Every man came into the world without
his own knowledge, he is to depart from it perhaps against his
own wishes. Then let him calmly fold his hands, and expect the
issues of fate.

Coincidently with this change of opinion as to the government of
individual life, there came a change as respects the mechanical
construction of the world. According to the Koran, the earth is a
square plane, edged with vast mountains, which serve the double
purpose of balancing it in its seat, and of sustaining the dome
of the sky. Our devout admiration of the power and wisdom of God
should be excited by the spectacle of this vast crystalline
brittle expanse, which has been safely set in its position
without so much as a crack or any other injury. Above the sky,
and resting on it, is heaven, built in seven stories, the
uppermost being the habitation of God, who, under the form of a
gigantic man, sits on a throne, having on either side winged
bulls, like those in the palaces of old Assyrian kings.

THEY MEASURE THE EARTH. These ideas, which indeed are not
peculiar to Mohammedanism, but are entertained by all men in a
certain stage of their intellectual development as religious
revelations, were very quickly exchanged by the more advanced
Mohammedans for others scientifically correct. Yet, as has been
the case in Christian countries, the advance was not made without
resistance on the part of the defenders of revealed truth. Thus
when Al-Mamun, having become acquainted with the globular form of
the earth, gave orders to his mathematicians and astronomers to
measure a degree of a great circle upon it, Takyuddin, one of the
most celebrated doctors of divinity of that time, denounced the
wicked khalif, declaring that God would assuredly punish him for
presumptuously interrupting the devotions of the faithful by
encouraging and diffusing a false and atheistical philosophy
among them. Al-Mamun, however, persisted. On the shores of the
Red Sea, in the plains of Shinar, by the aid of an astrolabe, the
elevation of the pole above the horizon was determined at two
stations on the same meridian, exactly one degree apart. The
distance between the two stations was then measured, and found to
be two hundred thousand Hashemite cubits; this gave for the
entire circumference of the earth about twenty-four thousand of
our miles, a determination not far from the truth. But, since the
spherical form could not be positively asserted from one such
measurement, the khalif caused another to be made near Cufa in
Mesopotamia. His astronomers divided themselves into two parties,
and, starting from a given point, each party measured an arc of
one degree, the one northward, the other southward. Their result
is given in cubits. If the cubit employed was that known as the
royal cubit, the length of a degree was ascertained within
one-third of a mile of its true value. From these measures the
khalif concluded that the globular form was established.

THEIR PASSION FOR SCIENCE. It is remarkable how quickly the
ferocious fanaticism of the Saracens was transformed into a
passion for intellectual pursuits. At first the Koran was an
obstacle to literature and science. Mohammed had extolled it as
the grandest of all compositions, and had adduced its
unapproachable excellence as a proof of his divine mission. But,
in little more than twenty years after his death, the experience
that had been acquired in Syria, Persia, Asia Minor, Egypt, had
produced a striking effect, and Ali the khalif reigning at that
time, avowedly encouraged all kinds of literary pursuits.
Moawyah, the founder of the Ommiade dynasty, who followed in 661,
revolutionized the government. It had been elective, he made it
hereditary. He removed its seat from Medina to a more central
position at Damascus, and entered on a career of luxury and
magnificence. He broke the bonds of a stern fanaticism, and put
himself forth as a cultivator and patron of letters. Thirty years
had wrought a wonderful change. A Persian satrap who had occasion
to pay homage to Omar, the second khalif, found him asleep among
the beggars on the steps of the Mosque of Medina; but foreign
envoys who had occasion to seek Moawyah, the sixth khalif, were
presented to him in a magnificent palace, decorated with
exquisite arabesques, and adorned with flower-gardens and
fountains.

THEIR LITERATURE. In less than a century after the death of
Mohammed, translations of the chief Greek philosophical authors
had been made into Arabic; poems such as the "Iliad" and the
"Odyssey," being considered to have an irreligious tendency from
their mythological allusions, were rendered into Syriac, to
gratify the curiosity of the learned. Almansor, during his
khalifate (A.D. 753-775), transferred the seat of government to
Bagdad, which he converted into a splendid metropolis; he gave
much of his time to the study and promotion of astronomy, and
established schools of medicine and law. His grandson,
Haroun-al-Raschid (A.D. 786), followed his example, and ordered
that to every mosque in his dominions a school should be
attached. But the Augustan age of Asiatic learning was during the
khalifate of Al-Mamun (A.D. 813-832). He made Bagdad the centre
of science, collected great libraries, and surrounded himself
with learned men.

The elevated taste thus cultivated continued after the division
of the Saracen Empire by internal dissensions into three parts.
The Abasside dynasty in Asia, the Fatimite in Egypt, and the
Ommiade in Spain, became rivals not merely in politics, but also
in letters and science.

THEY ORIGINATE CHEMISTRY. In letters the Saracens embraced every
topic that can amuse or edify the mind. In later times, it was
their boast that they had produced more poets than all other
nations combined. In science their great merit consists in this,
that they cultivated it after the manner of the Alexandrian
Greeks, not after the manner of the European Greeks. They
perceived that it can never be advanced by mere speculation; its
only sure progress is by the practical interrogation of Nature.
The essential characteristics of their method are experiment and
observation. Geometry and the mathematical sciences they looked
upon as instruments of reasoning. In their numerous writings on
mechanics, hydrostatics, optics, it is interesting to remark that
the solution of a problem is always obtained by performing an
experiment, or by an instrumental observation. It was this that
made them the originators of chemistry, that led them to the
invention of all kinds of apparatus for distillation,
sublimation, fusion, filtration, etc.; that in astronomy caused
them to appeal to divided instruments, as quadrants and
astrolabes; in chemistry, to employ the balance, the theory of
which they were perfectly familiar with; to construct tables of
specific gravities and astronomical tables, as those of Bagdad,
Spain, Samarcand; that produced their great improvements in
geometry, trigonometry, the invention of algebra, and the
adoption of the Indian numeration in arithmetic. Such were the
results of their preference of the inductive method of Aristotle,
their declining the reveries of Plato.

THEIR GREAT LIBRARIES. For the establishment and extension of the
public libraries, books were sedulously collected. Thus the
khalif Al-Mamun is reported to have brought into Bagdad hundreds
of camel-loads of manuscripts. In a treaty he made with the Greek
emperor, Michael III., he stipulated that one of the
Constantinople libraries should be given up to him. Among the
treasures he thus acquired was the treatise of Ptolemy on the
mathematical construction of the heavens. He had it forthwith
translated into Arabic, under the title of "Al-magest." The
collections thus acquired sometimes became very large; thus the
Fatimite Library at Cairo contained one hundred thousand volumes,
elegantly transcribed and bound. Among these, there were six
thousand five hundred manuscripts on astronomy and medicine
alone. The rules of this library permitted the lending out of
books to students resident at Cairo. It also contained two
globes, one of massive silver and one of brass; the latter was
said to have been constructed by Ptolemy, the former cost three
thousand golden crowns. The great library of the Spanish khalifs
eventually numbered six hundred thousand volumes; its catalogue
alone occupied forty-four. Besides this, there were seventy
public libraries in Andalusia. The collections in the possession
of individuals were sometimes very extensive. A private doctor
refused the invitation of a Sultan of Bokhara because the
carriage of his books would have required four hundred camels.

There was in every great library a department for the copying or
manufacture of translations. Such manufactures were also often an
affair of private enterprise. Honian, a Nestorian physician, had
an establishment of the kind at Bagdad (A.D. 850). He issued
versions of Aristotle, Plato, Hippocrates, Galen, etc. As to
original works, it was the custom of the authorities of colleges
to require their professors to prepare treatises on prescribed
topics. Every khalif had his own historian. Books of romances and
tales, such as "The Thousand and One Arabian Nights'
Entertainments," bear testimony to the creative fancy of the
Saracens. Besides these, there were works on all kinds of
subjects--history, jurisprudence, politics, philosophy,
biographies not only of illustrious men, but also of celebrated
horses and camels. These were issued without any censorship or
restraint, though, in later times, works on theology required a
license for publication. Books of reference abounded,
geographical, statistical, medical, historical dictionaries, and
even abridgments or condensations of them, as the "Encyclopedic
Dictionary of all the Sciences, by Mohammed Abu Abdallah. Much
pride was taken in the purity and whiteness of the paper, in the
skillful intermixture of variously-colored inks, and in the
illumination of titles by gilding and other adornments.

The Saracen Empire was dotted all over with colleges. They were
established in Mongolia, Tartary, Persia, Mesopotamia, Syria,
Egypt, North Africa, Morocco, Fez, Spain. At one extremity of
this vast region, which far exceeded the Roman Empire in
geographical extent, were the college and astronomical
observatory of Samarcand, at the other the Giralda in Spain.
Gibbon, referring to this patronage of learning, says: "The same
royal prerogative was claimed by the independent emirs of the
provinces, and their emulation diffused the taste and the rewards
of science from Samarcand and Bokhara to Fez and Cordova. The
vizier of a sultan consecrated a sum of two hundred thousand
pieces of gold to the foundation of a college at Bagdad, which he
endowed with an annual revenue of fifteen thousand dinars. The
fruits of instruction were communicated, perhaps, at different
times, to six thousand disciples of every degree, from the son of
the noble to that of the mechanic; a sufficient allowance was
provided for the indigent scholars, and the merit or industry of
the professors was repaid with adequate stipends. In every city
the productions of Arabic literature were copied and collected,
by the curiosity of the studious and the vanity of the rich." The
superintendence of these schools was committed with noble
liberality sometimes to Nestorians, sometimes to Jews. It
mattered not in what country a man was born, nor what were his
religious opinions; his attainment in learning was the only thing
to be considered. The great Khalif Al-Mamun had declared that
"they are the elect of God, his best and most useful servants,
whose lives are devoted to the improvement of their rational
faculties; that the teachers of wisdom are the true luminaries
and legislators of this world, which, without their aid, would
again sink into ignorance and barbarism."

After the example of the medical college of Cairo, other medical
colleges required their students to pass a rigid examination. The
candidate then received authority to enter on the practice of his
profession. The first medical college established in Europe was
that founded by the Saracens at Salerno, in Italy. The first
astronomical observatory was that erected by them at Seville, in
Spain.

THE ARABIAN SCIENTIFIC MOVEMENT. It would far transcend the
limits of this book to give an adequate statement of the results
of this imposing scientific movement. The ancient sciences were
greatly extended--new ones were brought into existence. The
Indian method of arithmetic was introduced, a beautiful
invention, which expresses all numbers by ten characters, giving
them an absolute value, and a value by position, and furnishing
simple rules for the easy performance of all kinds of
calculations. Algebra, or universal arithmetic--the method of
calculating indeterminate quantities, or investigating the
relations that subsist among quantities of all kinds, whether
arithmetical or geometrical--was developed from the germ that
Diophantus had left. Mohammed Ben Musa furnished the solution of
quadratic equations, Omar Ben Ibra him that of cubic equations.
The Saracens also gave to trigonometry its modern form,
substituting sines for chords, which had been previously used;
they elevated it into a separate science. Musa, above mentioned,
was the author of a "Treatise on Spherical Trigonometry."
Al-Baghadadi left one on land-surveying, so excellent, that by
some it has been declared to be a copy of Euclid's lost work on
that subject.

ARABIAN ASTRONOMY. In astronomy, they not only made catalogues,
but maps of the stars visible in their skies, giving to those of
the larger magnitudes the Arabic names they still bear on our
celestial globes. They ascertained, as we have seen, the size of
the earth by the measurement of a degree on her surface,
determined the obliquity of the ecliptic, published corrected
tables of the sun and moon fixed the length of the year, verified
the precession of the equinoxes. The treatise of Albategnius on
"The Science of the Stars" is spoken of by Laplace with respect;
he also draws attention to an important fragment of Ibn-Junis,
the astronomer of Hakem, the Khalif of Egypt, A.D. 1000, as
containing a long series of observations from the time of
Almansor, of eclipses, equinoxes, solstices, conjunctions of
planets, occultations of stars--observations which have cast much
light on the great variations of the system of the world. The
Arabian astronomers also devoted themselves to the construction
and perfection of astronomical instruments, to the measurement of
time by clocks of various kinds, by clepsydras and sun-dials.
They were the first to introduce, for this purpose, the use of
the pendulum.

In the experimental sciences, they originated chemistry; they
discovered some of its most important reagents-- sulphuric acid,
nitric acid, alcohol. They applied that science in the practice
of medicine, being the first to publish pharmacopoeias or
dispensatories, and to include in them mineral preparations. In
mechanics, they had determined the laws of falling bodies, had
ideas, by no means indistinct, of the nature of gravity; they
were familiar with the theory of the mechanical powers. In
hydrostatics they constructed the first tables of the specific
gravities of bodies, and wrote treatises on the flotation and
sinking of bodies in water. In optics, they corrected the Greek
misconception, that a ray proceeds from the eye, and touches the
object seen, introducing the hypothesis that the ray passes from
the object to the eye. They understood the phenomena of the
reflection and refraction of light. Alhazen made the great
discovery of the curvilinear path of a ray of light through the
atmosphere, and proved that we see the sun and moon before they
have risen, and after they have set.

AGRICULTURE AND MANUFACTURE. The effects of this scientific
activity are plainly perceived in the great improvements that
took place in many of the industrial arts. Agriculture shows it
in better methods of irrigation, the skillful employment of
manures, the raising of improved breeds of cattle, the enactment
of wise codes of rural laws, the introduction of the culture of
rice, and that of sugar and coffee. The manufactures show it in
the great extension of the industries of silk, cotton, wool; in
the fabrication of cordova and morocco leather, and paper; in
mining, casting, and various metallurgic operations; in the
making of Toledo blades.

Passionate lovers of poetry and music, they dedicated much of
their leisure time to those elegant pursuits. They taught Europe
the game of chess; they gave it its taste for works of
fiction--romances and novels. In the graver domains of literature
they took delight: they had many admirable compositions on such
subjects as the instability of human greatness; the consequences
of irreligion; the reverses of fortune; the origin, duration, and
end of the world. Sometimes, not without surprise, we meet with
ideas which we flatter ourselves have originated in our own
times. Thus our modern doctrines of evolution and development
were taught in their schools. In fact, they carried them much
farther than we are disposed to do, extending them even to
inorganic or mineral things. The fundamental principle of alchemy
was the natural process of development of metalline bodies. "When
common people," says Al- Khazini, writing in the twelfth century,
"hear from natural philosophers that gold is a body which has
attained to perfection of maturity, to the goal of completeness,
they firmly believe that it is something which has gradually come
to that perfection by passing through the forms of all other
metallic bodies, so that its gold nature was originally lead,
afterward it became tin, then brass, then silver, and finally
reached the development of gold; not knowing that the natural
philosophers mean, in saying this, only something like what they
mean when they speak of man, and attribute to him a completeness
and equilibrium in nature and constitution--not that man was once
a bull, and was changed into an ass, and afterward into a horse,
and after that into an ape, and finally became a man."

CHAPTER V.

CONFLICT RESPECTING THE NATURE OF THE SOUL.-- DOCTRINE OF
EMANATION AND ABSORPTION.

European ideas respecting the soul.--It resembles the form of the
body.

Philosophical views of the Orientals.--The Vedic theology and
Buddhism assert the doctrine of emanation and absorption.--It is
advocated by Aristotle, who is followed by the Alexandrian
school, and subsequently by the Jews and Arabians.--It is found
in the writings of Erigena.

Connection of this doctrine with the theory of conservation and
correlation of force.--Parallel between the origin and destiny of
the body and the soul.--The necessity of founding human on
comparative psychology.

Averroism, which is based on these facts, is brought into
Christendom through Spain and Sicily.

History of the repression of Averroism.--Revolt of Islam against
it.--Antagonism of the Jewish synagogues.--Its destruction
undertaken by the papacy.--Institution of the Inquisition in
Spain.--Frightful persecutions and their results.--Expulsion of
the Jews and Moors.--Overthrow of Averroism in Europe.--Decisive
action of the late Vatican Council.

THE pagan Greeks and Romans believed that the spirit of man
resembles his bodily form, varying its appearance with his
variations, and growing with his growth. Heroes, to whom it had
been permitted to descend into Hades, had therefore without
difficulty recognized their former friends. Not only had the
corporeal aspect been retained, but even the customary raiment.

THE SOUL. The primitive Christians, whose conceptions of a future
life and of heaven and hell, the abodes of the blessed and the
sinful, were far more vivid than those of their pagan
predecessors, accepted and intensified these ancient ideas. They
did not doubt that in the world to come they should meet their
friends, and hold converse with them, as they had done here upon
earth --an expectation that gives consolation to the human heart,
reconciling it to the most sorrowful bereavements, and restoring
to it its dead.

In the uncertainty as to what becomes of the soul in the interval
between its separation from the body and the judgment-day, many
different opinions were held. Some thought that it hovered over
the grave, some that it wandered disconsolate through the air. In
the popular belief, St. Peter sat as a door-keeper at the gate of
heaven. To him it had been given to bind or to loose. He admitted
or excluded the Spirits of men at his pleasure. Many persons,
however, were disposed to deny him this power, since his
decisions would be anticipatory of the judgment-day, which would
thus be rendered needless. After the time of Gregory the Great,
the doctrine of purgatory met with general acceptance. A
resting-place was provided for departed spirits.

That the spirits of the dead occasionally revisit the living, or
haunt their former abodes, has been in all ages, in all European
countries, a fixed belief, not confined to rustics, but
participated in by the intelligent. A pleasing terror gathers
round the winter's-evening fireside at the stories of
apparitions, goblins, ghosts. In the old times the Romans had
their lares, or spirits of those who had led virtuous lives;
their larvae or lemures, the spirits of the wicked; their manes,
the spirits of those of whom the merits were doubtful. If human
testimony on such subjects can be of any value, there is a body
of evidence reaching from the remotest ages to the present time,
as extensive and unimpeachable as is to be found in support of
any thing whatever, that these shades of the dead congregate near
tombstones, or take up their secret abode in the gloomy chambers
of dilapidated castles, or walk by moonlight in moody solitude.

ASIATIC PSYCHOLOGICAL VIEWS. While these opinions have
universally found popular acceptance in Europe, others of a very
different nature have prevailed extensively in Asia, and indeed
very generally in the higher regions of thought. Ecclesiastical
authority succeeded in repressing them in the sixteenth century,
but they never altogether disappeared. In our own times so
silently and extensively have they been diffused in Europe, that
it was found expedient in the papal Syllabus to draw them in a
very conspicuous manner into the open light; and the Vatican
Council, agreeing in that view of their obnoxious tendency and
secret spread, has in an equally prominent and signal manner
among its first canons anathematized all persons who hold them.
"Let him be anathema who says that spiritual things are
emanations of the divine substance, or that the divine essence by
manifestation or development becomes all things." In view of this
authoritative action, it is necessary now to consider the
character and history of these opinions.

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