The rise of the experimental method in Oxford : being the ninth Robert Boyle lecture delivered before the Oxford University Junior Scientific Club on May 13, 1902 / by Clifford Allbutt.

  • Allbutt, T. Clifford (Thomas Clifford), 1836-1925.
Date:
1902
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The rise of the experimental method in Oxford : being the ninth Robert Boyle lecture delivered before the Oxford University Junior Scientific Club on May 13, 1902 / by Clifford Allbutt. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

    8/59 (page 5)
    and that the Accademia del Cimento, the Lincei, the Royal Society, and the Academy of Sciences in Paris took possession of the debated territory, and converted the hierarchical ferocity of the sixteenth century into the culture and humanity of the seventeenth. ' Till a man is sure that he is infallible it is not fit for him to be unalterable,’ said Boyle; and well may we wonder to see the weight of the }^oke, not of the Aristotle of Melanchthon, but of the scholastic Aristotle, imposed for three centuries on the faithful as the final form of infinite truth. Herein even Calvin was docile, and favoured the inculcation of academic peripateticism. I say we may wonder; for we have but to carry our memories back to Philip Augustus to see, in 1209, that the ‘ Civitas Philosophorum,’ as St. Thomas called Paris, was engaged in burning all works imputed to the Stagyrite. The Metaphysics of Aristotle appeared in Paris about the beginning of the thirteenth century (Launoy, De var. Arist. fortun.) ] in August, 1215, the teaching of the Metaphysics, and of the Physics also, was forbidden in Paris under pain of excommunication h This, and other outrages, chiefly by the masterful hand of Blanche of Castile, on the ‘ Lehrfreiheit ’ of Paris—then the university not of a fragment of modern France, but of Western Europe—at the time when the culture of the first renascence was streaming into Europe from the Arabian sources, drove its scholars abroad; and, begging their way from gate to gate, long flights of them came to the comparatively unknown * In the library at Douai (Cousin,/, des Savants, August, 1848) is a MS. of Roger Bacon on Aristotle’s Physics and Meiaphvsics in heavily corrected writing of the fourteenth century, and entitled ‘Rogerius Bacon, ordinis Minorum, de rebus physicis, monasterii Sancti Petri Corbigensis,’ a curious sidelight on Bacon’s troubles in Paris.