Page:Greek Biology and Medicine.djvu/14

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EDITORS' PREFACE

the history of human culture. When the time arrives, we shall have a record of fanatic devotion, of literal and uninspired acceptance, of forgetfulness, of an inspiring rediscovery with a quickening of scientific interest, of direct observation of Nature's phenomena, with a consequent skepticism toward ancient dogma, and of a final great scientific revival which has resulted in a recognition of the true worth of the ancients. Through the mazes of Arabic civilization, over the collapse of the religious medieval period and the pride of the Renaissance, through the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, the great ancients have come to us. It is largely through their inspiration that we have learned our independent pursuit of Nature's mysteries in the courageous Greek spirit of love of truth, reason and freedom. Doubtless in the field of medicine, this has carried with it a certain emancipation, as Gilbert Murray has said, from the dead hand of the past, but it is an emancipation from the errors of the past alone. The twentieth century is gradually approaching a true appraisal of the values of the ancient medicine and biology, so eloquently expressed years ago in Darwin's gracious phrase.

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