Outlines of the Earths History | Page 9

origin and almost all its development among the
peoples belonging to the Aryan race. This body of folk appears to have
taken on its race characteristics, acquired its original language, its
modes of action, and the foundations of its religion in that part of
northern Europe which is about the Baltic Sea. Thence the body of this
people appear to have wandered toward central Asia, where after ages
of pastoral life in the high table lands and mountains of their country it
sent forth branches to India, Asia Minor and Greece, to Persia, and to
western Europe. It seems ever to have been a characteristic of these
Aryan peoples that they had an extreme love for Nature; moreover,
they clearly perceived the need of accounting for the things that
happened in the world about them. In general they inclined to what is
called the pantheistic explanation of the universe. They believed a
supreme God in many different forms to be embodied in all the things
they saw. Even their own minds and bodies they conceived as
manifestations of this supreme power. Among the Aryans who came to
dwell in Europe and along the eastern Mediterranean this method of
explaining Nature was in time changed to one in which humanlike gods
were supposed to control the visible and invisible worlds. In that
marvellous centre of culture which was developed among the Greeks

this conception of humanlike deities was in time replaced by that of
natural law, and in their best days the Greeks were men of science
essentially like those of to-day, except that they had not learned by
experience how important it was to criticise their theories by patiently
comparing them with the facts which they sought to explain. The last of
the important Greek men of science, Strabo, who was alive when Christ
was born, has left us writings which in quality are essentially like many
of the able works of to-day. But for the interruption in the development
of Greek learning, natural science would probably have been fifteen
hundred years ahead of its present stage. This interruption came in two
ways. In one, through the conquest of Greece and the destruction of its
intellectual life by the Romans, a people who were singularly incapable
of appreciating natural science, and who had no other interest in it
except now and then a vacant and unprofitable curiosity as to the
processes of the natural world. A second destructive influence came
through the fact that Christianity, in its energetic protest against the sins
of the pagan civilization, absolutely neglected and in a way despised all
forms of science.
The early indifference of Christians to natural learning is partly to be
explained by the fact that their religion was developed among the
Hebrews, a people remarkable for their lack of interest in the scientific
aspects of Nature. To them it was a sufficient explanation that one
omnipotent God ruled all things at his will, the heavens and the earth
alike being held in the hollow of his hand.
Finding the centre of its development among the Romans, Christianity
came mainly into the control of a people who, as we have before
remarked, had no scientific interest in the natural world. This condition
prolonged the separation of our faith from science for fifteen hundred
years after its beginning. In this time the records of Greek scientific
learning mostly disappeared. The writings of Aristotle were preserved
in part for the reason that the Church adopted many of his views
concerning questions in moral philosophy and in politics. The rest of
Greek learning was, so far as Europe was concerned, quite neglected.
A large part of Greek science which has come down to us owes its

preservation to a very singular incident in the history of learning. In the
ninth century, after the Arabs had been converted to Mohammedanism,
and on the basis of that faith had swiftly organized a great and
cultivated empire, the scholars of that folk became deeply interested in
the remnants of Greek learning which had survived in the monastic and
other libraries about the eastern Mediterranean. So greatly did they
prize these records, which were contemned by the Christians, that it
was their frequent custom to weigh the old manuscripts in payment
against the coin of their realm. In astronomy, mathematics, chemistry,
and geology the Arabian students, building on the ancient foundations,
made notable and for a time most important advances. In the tenth
century of our era they seemed fairly in the way to do for science what
western Europe began five centuries later to accomplish. In the
fourteenth century the centre of Mohammedan strength was transferred
from the Arabians to the Turks, from a people naturally given to
learning to a folk of another race, who despised all such culture.