wonders that more of them did not imitate poor
Paracelsus, who, unable to get a hearing for his coarse common sense,
took--vain and sensual--to drinking the laudanum which he himself had
discovered, and vaunted as a priceless boon to men; and died as the fool
dieth, in spite of all his wisdom. For the "Romani nominis umbra," the
shadow of the mighty race whom they had conquered, lay heavy on our
forefathers for centuries. And their dread of the great heathens was
really a dread of Nature, and of the powers thereof. For when the
authority of great names has reigned unquestioned for many centuries,
those names become, to the human mind, integral and necessary parts of
Nature itself. They are, as it were, absorbed into it; they become its
laws, its canons, its demiurges, and guardian spirits; their words become
regarded as actual facts; in one word, they become a superstition, and
are feared as parts of the vast unknown; and to deny what they have said
is, in the minds of the many, not merely to fly in the face of reverent
wisdom, but to fly in the face of facts. During a great part of the
middle ages, for instance, it was impossible for an educated man to think
of Nature itself, without thinking first of what Aristotle had said of
her. Aristotle's dicta were Nature; and when Benedetti, at Venice,
opposed in 1585 Aristotle's opinions on violent and natural motion, there
were hundreds, perhaps, in the universities of Europe--as there certainly
were in the days of the immortal 'Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum'--who were
ready, in spite of all Benedetti's professed reverence for Aristotle, to
accuse him of outraging not only the father of philosophy, but Nature
itself and its palpable and notorious facts. For the restoration of
letters in the fifteenth century had not at first mended matters, so
strong was the dread of Nature in the minds of the masses. The minds of
men had sported forth, not toward any sound investigation of facts, but
toward an eclectic resuscitation of Neoplatonism; which endured, not
without a certain beauty and use--as let Spenser's 'Faery Queen' bear
witness--till the latter half of the seventeenth century.

After that time a rapid change began. It is marked by--it has been
notably assisted by--the foundation of our own Royal Society. Its causes
I will not enter into; they are so inextricably mixed, I hold, with
theological questions, that they cannot be discussed here. I will only
point out to