from
the New Testament Scriptures was, that the end of the world was at
hand; that the last judgment was approaching; that all existing physical
nature was soon to be destroyed: hence, the greatest thinkers in the
Church generally poured contempt upon all investigators into a science
of Nature, and insisted that everything except the saving of souls was
folly.

This belief appears frequently through the entire period of the Middle
Ages; but during the first thousand years it is clearly dominant. From
Lactantius and Eusebius, in the third century, pouring contempt, as
we have seen, over studies in astronomy, to Peter Damian, the noted
chancellor of Pope Gregory VII, in the eleventh century, declaring all
worldly sciences to be "absurdities" and "fooleries," it becomes a very
important element in the atmosphere of thought.(268)

(268) For the view of Peter Damian and others through the Middle Ages
as to the futility of scientific investigation, see citations in Eicken,
Geschichte und System der mittelalterlichen Weltanschauung, chap. vi.

Then, too, there was established a standard to which all science which
did struggle up through this atmosphere must be made to conform--a
standard which favoured magic rather than science, for it was a standard
of rigid dogmatism obtained from literal readings in the Jewish and
Christian Scriptures. The most careful inductions from ascertained facts
were regarded as wretchedly fallible when compared with any view of
nature whatever given or even hinted at in any poem, chronicle, code,
apologue, myth, legend, allegory, letter, or discourse of any sort which
had happened to be preserved in the literature which had come to be held
as sacred.

For twelve centuries, then, the physical sciences were thus discouraged
or perverted by the dominant orthodoxy. Whoever studied nature studied
it either openly to find illustrations of the sacred text, useful in the
"saving of souls," or secretly to gain the aid of occult powers, useful
in securing personal advantage. Great men like Bede, Isidore of Seville,
and Rabanus Maurus, accepted the scriptural standard of science and used
it as a means of Christian edification. The views of Bede and Isidore on
kindred subjects have been shown in former chapters; and typical of the
view taken by Rabanus is the fact that in his great work on the Universe
there are only two chapters which seem directly or indirectly to
recognise even the beginnings o