Part 3

According to the astronomers of the time, however, the old Ptolemaic system, in the shape in which it was explained by the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, who was acknowledged as the greatest of European astronomers, appeared to give quite a satisfactory explanation of the {35} phenomena observed. The English philosopher, Lord Bacon, more than a decade after Galileo's announcement, considered that there were certain phenomena in nature contrary to the Copernican theory, and so he rejected it altogether. This was within a few years of the condemnation by the Congregation at Rome. As pointed out by Father Heinzle, S.J., in his article on Galileo in the "Catholic World" for 1887, "science was so far from determining the question of the truth or falsity of either the Ptolemaic or the Copernican system that shortly before 1633, the year of Galileo's condemnation, a number of savants, such as Fromond in Louvain, Morin in Paris, Berigard in Pisa, Bartolinus in Copenhagen, and Scheiner in Rome, wrote against Copernicanism."

As we have said, Copernicus's book was not condemned unconditionally by the Roman authorities, but only until it should be corrected. This assured protection to the principal part of the work, and the warning issued by the Roman Congregation in the year 1820 particularizes the details that had to be corrected. It is interesting to note that whenever Copernicus is spoken of in this Monitum it is always in flattering terms as a "noble astrologer"--the word astrologer having at that time no unworthy meaning. The whole work is praised and its scientific quality acknowledged.

The passages requiring correction were not many. In the first book, at the beginning of the {36} fifth chapter, Copernicus made the declaration that "the immobility of the earth was not a decided question, but was still open to discussion." In place of these words it was suggested that the following should be inserted: "In order to explain the apparent motions of the celestial bodies, it is a matter of indifference whether we admit that the earth occupies a place in the middle of the heavens or not."

In the eighth chapter of the first book, Copernicus said: "Why, then, this repugnance to concede to our globe its own movement as natural to it as is its spherical form? Why prefer to make the whole heavens revolve around it, with the great danger of disturbance that would result, instead of explaining all these apparent movements of the heavenly bodies by the real rotation of the earth, according to the words of AEneas, 'We are carried from the port, and the land and the cities recede'?" This passage was to be modified as follows: "Why not, then, admit a certain mobility of the earth corresponding to its form, since the whole universe of which we know the bounds is moved, producing appearances which recall to the mind the well-known saying of AEneas in Virgil, 'The land and the cities recede'?"

Toward the end of the same chapter Copernicus, continuing the same train of thought, says: "I do not fear to add that it is incomparably more unreasonable to make the immense vault of the heavens revolve than to admit the {37} revolution of our little terrestrial globe." This passage was to be modified as follows: "In one case as well as in the other--that is, whether we admit the rotation of the earth or that of the heavenly spheres--we encounter the same difficulties."

The ninth chapter of the first book begins with these words: "There being no difficulty in admitting, then, the mobility of the earth, let us proceed to see whether it has one or a number of movements, and whether, therefore, our earth is a simple planet like the other planets." The following words were to be substituted: "Supposing, then, that the earth does move, it is necessary to examine whether this movement is multiple or not."

Toward the middle of the tenth chapter Copernicus declares: "I do not hesitate to defend the proposition that the earth, accompanied by the moon, moves around the sun;" while the wording of this proposition had to be changed so as to substitute the term "admit" for "defend." The title of the eleventh chapter, "Demonstration of the Triple Movement of the Earth," was modified to read as follows: "The Hypothesis of the Triple Movement of the Earth, and the Reasons Therefor." The title of the twentieth chapter of the fourth book originally read: "On the Size of the Three Stars [_Sidera_], the sun, the moon, and the earth." The word "stars" was removed from this title, the earth not being considered as a star. The concluding words of {38} the tenth chapter of the first book, "So great is the magnificent work of the Omnipotent Artificer," had to be cancelled, because they expressed an assurance of the truth of his system not warranted by knowledge. With these few unimportant changes, any one might read and study Copernicus's work with perfect freedom.

Traditions to the contrary notwithstanding, Galileo, because of the friendship and encouragement of the churchmen in Italy, had been placed in conditions eminently suited for study and investigation. Several popes and a number of prominent ecclesiastics were his constant friends and patrons. The perpetual secretary of the Paris Academy of Sciences, M. Bertrand, himself a great mathematician and historian, declares that the long life of Galileo was one of the most enviable that is recorded in the history of science. "The tale of his misfortunes has confirmed the triumph of the truth for which he suffered. Let us tell the whole truth. This great lesson was learned without any profound sorrow to Galileo; and his long life, considered as a whole, was one of the most serene and enviable in the history of science."

Copernicus, like Galileo, had clerical friends to thank for an environment that proved the greatest possible aid to his scientific work. His position as Canon of the Cathedral of Frauenburg provided him with learned leisure, while his clerical friends took just enough interest in his investigations and the preliminary {39} announcements of his discoveries to make his pursuit of astronomical studies to some definite conclusion a worthy aim in life. It was this assistance that enabled him to publish his book eventually and bring his great theory before the world.

Copernicus, far from having any leanings toward the so-called "reform" movement (as has often been asserted), was evidently a staunch supporter of his friend and patron Bishop Maurice Ferber, of Ermland, who kept his see loyal to Rome at a time when the secularization of the Teutonic order and the falling away of many bishops all around him make his position as a faithful son of the Church and that of his diocese noteworthy in the history of that time and place. It may well be said that under less favorable conditions Copernicus's work might never have been finished. As it was, his book met with great opposition from the Reformers, but remained absolutely acceptable even to the most rigorous churchmen until Galileo's unfortunate insistence on the points of it that were opposed to generally accepted theories.

During all his long life Copernicus remained one of the simplest of men. Genius as he was, he could not have failed to realize how great was the significance of the discoveries he had made in astronomy. In spite of this he continued to exercise during a long career the simple duties of his post as Canon of the Cathedral of Frauenberg, nor did he fail to give such time as was asked of him for the medical treatment of the {40} poor or of his friends, the ecclesiastics of the neighborhood. These duties--as he seems to have considered them--must have taken many precious hours from his studies, but they were given unstintingly. When he came to die, his humility was even more prominent than during life. It was at his own request that there was graven upon his tombstone simply the prayer, "I ask not the grace accorded to Paul, not that given to Peter: give me only the favor Thou didst show to the thief on the cross." There is perhaps no better example in all the world of the simplicity of true genius nor any better example of how sublimely religious may be the soul that has far transcended the bounds of the scientific knowledge of its own day.

The greatness of Copernicus's life-work can best be realized from the extent to which he surpassed even well-known contemporaries in astronomy and from his practical anticipation of the opinions of some of his greatest successors. Even Tycho Brahe, important though he is in the history of astronomical science, taught many years after Copernicus's death the doctrine that the earth is the center of the universe. Newton had in Copernicus a precursor who divined the theory of universal gravitation; and even Kepler's great laws, especially the elliptical form of the orbits of the planets, are at least hinted at in Copernicus's writings. He is certainly one of the most original geniuses of all times; and it is interesting to find that the completeness of his {41} scholarly career, far from being rendered abortive by friction with ecclesiastical superiors, as we might imagine probable from the traditions that hang around his name, was rather made possible by the sympathy and encouragement of clerical friends and Church authorities. Copernicus, the scholar, astronomer, physician, and clergyman, is a type of the eve of the Reformation period, and his life is the best possible refutation of the slanders with regard to the unprogressiveness of the Church and churchmen of that epoch which have unfortunately been only too common in the histories of the time.

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III.

BASIL VALENTINE, FOUNDER OF MODERN CHEMISTRY.

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Let us, then, banish into the world of fiction that affirmation so long repeated by foolish credulity which made monasteries an asylum for indolence and incapacity, for misanthropy and pusillanimity, for feeble and melancholic temperaments, and for men who were no longer fit to serve society in the world. Monasteries were never intended to collect the invalids of the world. It was not the sick souls, but on the contrary the most vigorous and healthful the human race has ever produced, who presented themselves in crowds to fill them.--MONTALEMBERT, _Monks of the West_.

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III.

BASIL VALENTINE, FOUNDER OF MODERN CHEMISTRY.

The Protestant tradition which presumes a priori that no good can possibly have come out of the Nazareth of the times before the Reformation, and especially the immediately preceding century, has served to obscure to an unfortunate degree the history of several hundred years extremely important in every department of education. Strange as it may seem to those unfamiliar with the period, it is in that department which is supposed to be so typically modern the--physical sciences--that this neglect is most serious. Such a hold has this Protestant tradition on even educated minds that it is a source of great surprise to most people to be told that there were in many parts of Europe original observers in the physical sciences all during the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries who were doing ground-breaking work of the highest value, work that was destined to mean much for the development of modern science. Speculations and experiments with regard to the philosopher's stone and the transmutation of metals are supposed to fill up all the interests of the alchemists of those days. As a matter of fact, however, men were making original observations of very {46} profound significance, and these were considered so valuable by their contemporaries that, though printing had not yet been invented, even the immense labor involved in copying large folio volumes by hand did not suffice to deter them from multiplying the writings of these men and thus preserving them for future generations, until the printing-press came to perpetuate them.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, with some of the supposed foundations of modern chemistry crumbling to pieces under the influences of the peculiarly active light thrown upon older chemical theories by the discovery of radium and the radio-active elements generally, there is a reawakening of interest in some of the old-time chemical observers whose work used to be laughed at as so unscientific and whose theory of the transmutation of elements into one another was considered so absurd. The idea that it would be impossible under any circumstances to convert one element into another belongs entirely to the nineteenth century. Even so distinguished a mind as that of Newton, in the preceding century, could not bring itself to acknowledge the modern supposition of the absurdity of metallic transformation, but, on the contrary, believed very firmly in this as a basic chemical principle and confessed that it might be expected to occur at any time. He had seen specimens of gold ores in connexion with metallic copper, and had concluded that this was a manifestation of the natural transformation of one of these yellow metals into the other.

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With the discovery that radium transforms itself into helium, and that indeed all the so-called radio-activities of the very heavy metals are probably due to a natural transmutation process constantly at work, the ideas of the older chemists cease entirely to be a subject for amusement. The physical chemists of the present day are very ready to admit that the old teaching of the absolute independence of something over seventy elements is no longer tenable, except as a working hypothesis. The doctrine of matter and form taught for so many centuries by the scholastic philosophers which proclaimed that all matter is composed of two principles, an underlying material substratum and a dynamic or informing principle, has now more acknowledged verisimilitude, or lies at least closer to the generally accepted ideas of the most progressive scientists, than it has at any time for the last two or three centuries. Not only the great physicists, but also the great chemists, are speculating along lines that suggest the existence of but one form of matter, modified according to the energies that it possesses under a varying physical and chemical environment. This is, after all, only a restatement in modern terms of the teaching of St. Thomas of Aquin in the thirteenth century.

It is not surprising, then, that there should be a reawakening of interest in the lives of some of the men who, dominated by the earlier scholastic ideas and by the tradition of the possibility of finding the philosopher's stone, which would {48} transmute the baser metals into the precious metals, devoted themselves with quite as much zeal as any modern chemist to the observation of chemical phenomena. One of the most interesting of these--indeed he might well be said to be the greatest of the alchemists--is the man whose only name that we know is that which appears on a series of manuscripts written in the High German dialect of the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century. That name is Basil Valentine, and the writer, according to the best historical traditions, was a Benedictine monk. The name Basil Valentine may only have been a pseudonym, for it has been impossible to trace it among the records of the monasteries of the time. That the writer was a monk there seems to be no doubt, for his writings in manuscript and printed form began to have their vogue at a time when there was little likelihood of their being attributed to a monk unless an indubitable tradition connected them with some monastery.

This Basil Valentine (to accept the only name we have), as we can judge very well from his writings, eminently deserves the designation of the last of the alchemists and the first of the chemists. There is practically a universal recognition of the fact now that he deserves also the title of Founder of Modern Chemistry, not only because of the value of the observations contained in his writings, but also because of the fact that they proved so suggestive to certain {49} scientific geniuses during the century succeeding Valentine's life. Almost more than to have added to the precious heritage of knowledge for mankind is it a boon for a scientific observer to have awakened the spirit of observation in others and to be the founder of a new school of thought. This Basil Valentine undoubtedly did.

Besides, his work furnishes evidence that the investigating spirit was abroad just when it is usually supposed not to have been, for the Thuringian monk surely did not do all his investigating alone, but must have received as well as given many a suggestion to his contemporaries.

In the history of education there are two commonplaces that are appealed to oftener than any other as the sources of material with regard to the influence of the Catholic Church on education during the centuries preceding the Reformation. These are the supposed idleness of the monks, and the foolish belief in the transmutation of metals and the search for the philosopher's stone which dominated the minds of so many of the educated men of the time. It is in Germany especially that these two features of the pre-Reformation period are supposed to be best illustrated. In recent years, however, there has come quite a revolution in the feelings even of those outside of the Church with regard to the proper appreciation of the work of the monastic scholars of these earlier centuries. Even though some of them did dream golden dreams over their alembics, the love of knowledge meant {50} more to them, as to the serious students of any age, than anything that might be made by it. As for their scientific beliefs, if there can be a conversion of one element into another, as seems true of radium, then the possibility of the transmutation of metals is not so absurd as, for a century or more, it has seemed; and it is not impossible that at some time even gold may be manufactured out of other metallic materials.

Of course, a still worthier change of mind has come over the attitude of educators because of the growing sense of appreciation for the wonderful work of the monks of the Middle Ages, and even of those centuries that are supposed to show least of the influence of these groups of men who, forgetting material progress, devoted themselves to the preservation and the cultivation of the things of the spirit. The impression that would consider the pre-Reformation monks in Germany as unworthy of their high calling in the great mass is almost entirely without foundation. Obscure though the lives of most of them were, many of them rose above their environment in such a way as to make their work landmarks in the history of progress for all time.

Because their discoveries are buried in the old Latin folios that are contained only in the best libraries, not often consulted by the modern scientist, it is usually thought that the scientific investigators of these centuries before the Reformation did no work that would be worth while considering in our present day. It is only some {51} one who goes into this matter as a labor of love who will consider it worth his while to take the trouble seriously to consult these musty old tomes. Many a scholar, however, has found his labor well rewarded by the discovery of many an anticipation of modern science in these volumes so much neglected and where such treasure-trove is least expected. Professor Clifford Allbutt, the Regius Professor of physics at the University of Cambridge, in his address on "The Historical Relations of Medicine and Surgery Down to the End of the Sixteenth Century," which was delivered at the St. Louis Congress of Arts and Sciences during the Exposition in 1904, has shown how much that is supposed to be distinctly modern in medicine, and above all in surgery, was the subject of discussion at the French and Italian universities of the thirteenth century. William Salicet, for instance, who taught at the University of Bologna, published a large series of case histories, substituted the knife for the Arabic use of the cautery, described the danger of wounds of the neck, investigated the causes of the failure of healing by first intention, and sutured divided nerves. His pupil, Lanfranc, who taught later at the University of Paris, went farther than his master by distinguishing between venous and arterial hemorrhage, requiring digital compression for an hour to stop hemorrhage from the _venae pulsatiles_--the pulsating veins, as they were called--and if this failed because of the size of the vessel, {52} suggesting the application of a ligature. Lanfranc's chapter on injuries to the head still remains a noteworthy book in surgery that establishes beyond a doubt how thoughtfully practical were these teachers in the medieval universities. It must be remembered that at this time all the teachers in universities, even those in the medical schools as well as those occupied with surgery, were clerics. Professor Allbutt calls attention over and over again to this fact, because it emphasizes the thoroughness of educational methods, in spite of the supposed difficulties that would lie in the way of an exclusively clerical teaching staff.

In chemistry the advances made during the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries were even more noteworthy than those in any other department of science. Albertus Magnus, who taught at Paris, wrote no less than sixteen treatises on chemical subjects, and, notwithstanding the fact that he was a theologian as well as a scientist and that his printed works filled sixteen folio volumes, he somehow found the time to make many observations for himself and performed numberless experiments in order to clear up doubts. The larger histories of chemistry accord him his proper place and hail him as a great founder in chemistry and a pioneer in original investigation.

Even St. Thomas of Aquin, much as he was occupied with theology and philosophy, found some time to devote to chemical questions. After {53} all, this is only what might have been expected of the favorite pupil of Albertus Magnus. Three treatises on chemical subjects from Aquinas's pen have been preserved for us, and it is to him that we are said to owe the origin of the word amalgam, which he first used in describing various chemical methods of metallic combination with mercury that were discovered in the search for the genuine transmutation of metals.