Eighteen

THE PROBLEM OF EXPERIMENTAL SCIENCE IN THE MIDDLE AGES

Today, common opinion maintains that leading characteristics of modern science are the role of experiments, inductive method, and mathematical treatment of scientific knowledge. For a long time people thought that this conception of experimental, inductive, and mathematical science arose in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. And, so, this science belonged to modern times as opposed to the dark Middle Ages. While the understanding of science’s history changed in the late nineteenth century, this opinion lingers today. Largely because of a work by William Whewell (History of the Inductive Sciences from the Earliest Times to the Present Time), historians of science recognize (1214–1294) as the precursor of the modern conception of science. Whewell’s work presents Bacon as someone unique in his time because of the importance he attached to experiment and the inductive method.1 Over time historians of science such as Pierre Duhem, L. Thorndike, and R. Carton have shown that Bacon was not a Medieval exception because philosophers such as Robert Grosseteste, William of Auvergne, Peter of Spain, and Albert the Great also emphasized the role of experiments in physical science. Historians have also shown how, in the Hermetic tradition, of which Bacon was a diligent student, and played an important role in the formation of a new conception of science.2 Hermetic writings, especially a mysterious work called Secretum secretorum [Secret of Secrets] strongly influenced Bacon. This work was held in high regard because it was attributed to . Bacon added a commentary to it in the form of a gloss. Aristotle allegedly addressed the Secretum secretorum to . It says that a body of knowledge exists that mainly secrets and mysteries can transmit. In Ancient times God revealed this knowledge to prophets and those he chose, and enlightened their minds. Adam, his son Seth, and Enoch possessed this knowledge. And some writers identified Enoch with Hermes. Ancient Greek mythology celebrated Hermes, also called Hermes Trismegistus, for mystic and divine knowledge. The Hermetic tradition taught that Hermes and Aristotle never died and that Aristotle recognized the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. The hermetic views in the Secretum Secretorum were a syncretic blend of Greek philosophy and Christian religion.3 In this way, Aristotle and Christianity gave credibility to Hermeticism and made Hermeticism easier to become part of Western thought and internally modify the typical Western concepts associated with scientific knowledge. 110 SCIENCE IN CULTURE

1. Utility

In his well-known work Mediaeval Science and the Beginnings of Modern Science, Alistair Cameron Crombie states that thinkers “made their most important and original contributions to the history of European science in the fields of alchemy, magic, and .” Crombie maintains that the reason for these contributions is partly the result of a special way of approaching problems in physics “characteristic of the living tradition of Arab thought.” According to Crombie, most important in this tradition was for a person to come to know nature to dominate it. In this respect, Crombie maintains, traditional Arabic thought differs from the European thinker’s inclination “to seek in nature the facts that best illustrate the moral designs given by God or to seek rational explanations for the facts described in the Bible or those seen every day in the world.” Instead, Arabic “researchers desired to find the elixir of life, the philosophical stone, a talisman, a word of power and the magical properties of plants and minerals.”4 As a result, the role of the Arabs as mediators in the assimilation of Greek science by Medieval Europe caused some practices alien to science, such as magic and alchemy, to creep into science. These elements had been continually present in Eastern culture, which had no knowledge of science as science. Moreover, love for truth or knowledge as such did not dictate the presence of knowledge in Eastern culture. Supposed efficacy for gaining mastery over nature and the world caused its presence in Asia Minor and the Middle East. In this way a new end of scientific investigation, utility, became mixed with magic and alchemy. Bacon was a diligent student of Arab thought. In a letter to the Pope in 1267, he wrote that, while he had studied the sciences since he was young, the last twenty years were especially important. Over those years he had spent over two thousand pounds on occult books, experiments, tables, and so on.5 This period also had an important influence on Bacon’s views about scientific knowledge. He started to appreciate science’s practical ends, and he made these the primary ends. Bacon distinguished different kinds of alchemy according to different degrees of utility. He noted the existence of “another alchemy that is effective and practical and teaches how to produce artificially noble metals, pigments and many other things better in greater quantity than does nature.” And he stressed, most importantly, “that this kind of knowledge is more significant than all that was known before because it provides great benefits.” Bacon continued his lofty praise of this useful alchemy: “Not only can it provide wealth and many other things necessary for the general good, but it also teaches skills such as how to prolong human life beyond the term foreseen by nature.”6 This fragment certainly contains the credo that, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, would become the foundation of the modern conception of science: the most significant knowledge is that which provides the most