pp. 106, 107. For careful appreciation of Becher's position
in the history of chemistry, see Kopp, Ansichten uber die Aufgabe der
Chemie, etc., von Geber bis Stahl, Braunschweig, 1875, pp. 201 et seq.
For the text proving the existence of the philosopher's stone from the
book of Revelation, see Figuier, p. 22.

Of the general reasoning enforced by theology regarding physical
science, every age has shown examples; yet out of them all I will select
but two, and these are given because they show how this mixture
of theological with scientific ideas took hold upon the strongest
supporters of better reasoning even after the power of medieval theology
seemed broken.

The first of these examples is Melanchthon. He was the scholar of the
Reformation, and justly won the title "Preceptor of Germany." His mind
was singularly open, his sympathies broad, and his usual freedom from
bigotry drew down upon him that wrath of Protestant heresy-hunters
which embittered the last years of his life and tortured him upon his
deathbed. During his career at the University of Wittenberg he gave a
course of lectures on physics, and in these he dwelt upon scriptural
texts as affording scientific proofs, accepted the interference of the
devil in physical phenomena as in other things, and applied the medieval
method throughout his whole work.(278)

(278) For Melanchthon's ideas on physics, see his Initia Doctrinae
Physicae, Wittenberg, 1557, especially pp. 243 and 274; also in vol.
xiii of Bretschneider's edition of the collected works, and especially
pp. 339-343.

Yet far more remarkable was the example, a century later, of the man who
more than any other led the world out of the path opened by Aquinas,
and into that through which modern thought has advanced to its greatest
conquests. Strange as it may at first seem, Francis Bacon, whose
keenness of sight revealed the delusions of the old path and the
promises of the new, and whose boldness did so much to turn the world
from the old path into the new, presents in his own writings one of the
most striking examples of the evil he did so much to destroy.

The Novum Organon, considering the time when it came from his pen, is
doubtless one of the greatest exhibitions of genius in the history of
human thought. It showed the modern world the way out of the scholastic
method and reverence for dogma into the experimental method and
reverence for fact. In it occur many passages which show tha