Until the seventeenth century, when the authority. of Aristotle was questioned, “his disciples could always point with scorn at the endeavours which had as yet been made to supplant it, they could ask whether the wisdom so long reverenced was to be set aside for the fanatical reveries of Paracelsus, the unintelligible ideas of Bruno, or the arbitrary hypotheses of Telesio.”[1] But in the seventeenth century modern philosophy took a new and splendid start in Bacon and Descartes, while modern science commenced its glorious career with Galileo, Kepler, and Newton. Bacon, with his rich scientific imagination and his stately language, was a fitting herald of the new era. He sometimes reflects the spirit of Ramus or Patricius, and applies to Aristotle harsh terms which were rather merited by the scholastic pedants who had been Aristotelians only in the letter. Could the Stagirite himself have returned to the earth at this moment, he would doubtless have declared for Galileo and Bacon against the Peripatetics. Aristotelianism was not refuted in Europe, but its long day was now past; it was superseded and quietly put aside when other and fresher subjects of interest came to fill men’s minds. Bacon contributed to this result, not by railing at the “categories” and the “syllogism,” but by exciting people’s fancy with suggestions of the extension of human power to be gained by researches into nature—suggestions which subsequent results have verified a hundred-fold.
From henceforth it became impossible for an educated man to be an Aristotelian, because however much he
- ↑ Hallam’s Introduction. Part III., chap. iii.
