From GREEK SCIENCE
ITS MEANING FOR US by BENJAMIN FARRINGTON, PENGUIN
BOOKS 1953
In the
foregoing pages we have given a representative selection from the scientific
writings of the Alexandrian and Graeco-Roman
periods.... With astonishment we find ourselves on the threshold of modern
science. Nor should it be supposed that by some trick of translation the
extracts have been given a delusive air of modernity. Far
from it. The vocabulary of these writings and their style are the source
from which our own vocabulary and style have been derived. There is no illusion
here. With the science of Alexandria and of Rome we are in very truth on the
threshold of the modern world. When modern science began in the sixteenth
century it took up where the Greeks left off. Copernicus, Vesalius,
and Galileo are the continuators of Ptolemy, Galen, and Archimedes.
But, if our
first impression is favourable, it is quickly
succeeded by a strange doubt. The Greeks and Romans stood on the threshold of
the modern world. Why did they not push open the door? The situation is
paradoxical in the extreme. We have here surveyed a period of some five hundred
years, from the death of Aristotle in 322 B.C.to the
death of Galen in A.D.199. But long before the end of this period the essential
work had been done. Before the end of the third century B.C.Theophrastus,
Strato, Herophilus and Erasistratus, Ctesibius and
Archimedes had done their work. In the Lyceum and the Museum the prosecution of
research had reached a high degree of efficiency. The capacity to organize
knowledge logically was great. The range of positive information was
impressive, the rate of its acquisition more impressive still. The theory of
experiment had been grasped. Applications of science to various ingenious
mechanisms were not lacking. It was not, then, only
with Ptolemy and Galen that the ancients stood on the threshold of the modern
world. By that late date they had already been loitering on the threshold for
four hundred years. They had indeed demonstrated conclusively their inability
to cross it.
Here, then, we
have evidence of a real paralysis of science. During four hundred years there
had been, as we have seen, many extensions of knowledge, much reorganization of
the body of knowledge, fresh acquisitions of skill in exposition. But there was
no great forward drive, no general application of science to life. Science had
ceased to be, or had failed to become, a real force in the life of society.
Instead there had arisen a conception of science as a cycle of liberal studies
for a privileged minority. Science had become a relaxation, an adornment, a
subject of contemplation. It had ceased to be a means of transforming the
conditions of life. Even such established arts as were adapted to keeping
society in repair - professions like those of the architect and the medical
doctor - were on the edge of respectability. They approached it only to the
extent to which the practitioner could be regarded as the possessor of purely
theoretical knowledge by which he directed the labour of others.
When we look
for the causes of this paralysis it is obvious that it is not due to any
failure of the individual. The endeavour to explain
great social movements by the psychology of individuals is one of the crippling
errors of our time. No, while science as a whole became a prey to creeping
paralysis, there was no lack of individual talent, no lack of individual
genius, as these pages abundantly show. The failure was a social one and the
remedy lay in public policies that were beyond the grasp of the age. The
ancients rigorously organized the logical aspects of science, lifted them out
of the body of technical activity in which they had grown or in which they
should have found their application, and set them apart from the world of
practice and above it. This mischievous separation of the logic from the
practice of science was the result of the universal cleavage of society into
freeman and slave. This was not good either for practice or for theory. As
Francis Bacon put it, surveying according to the knowledge of his day the same
facts that we have here surveyed, if you make a vestal virgin of science you
must not expect her to bear fruit. The fruits of a general improvement in the
material conditions of life and of a general emancipation of society from superstition
were not such as could be produced by such a reverend maid as ancient science
became in its decline.
With us to-day
the concept of science carries with it the idea of a transforming power over the
conditions of life. While we properly defend the ideal of science as involving
a disinterested devotion to truth - indeed this ideal is itself a product of
social history and has never shone more brightly than among those of our
contemporaries who recognize and acknowledge the social responsibilities of
scientific power - we recognize at the same time that from the well-head of
pure science flow fertilizing streams which serve industry. We are nearly all Baconian enough to regard science as not only knowledge of
nature but as power over nature. The complementary truth, that industry
promotes science as much as science promotes industry, is also part of our
usual view. The mutual action of science upon life and life upon science is a
basic element in our consciousness. It was not so when antiquity was in its
decline. Science was for the study and the few. Power over nature was
increased, so long as this proved possible, by increasing the number of slaves.
ACHIEVEMENT AND LIMITATIONS OF ANCIENT SCIENCE
The failure of
ancient science was in the use that was made of it. It failed in its social
function. Even when the acquisition of slaves became more and more difficult
the ancients still did not turn to a systematic application of science to
production. It is not claimed that such applications never occurred…. But the
general truth remains that ancient society had set in a mould which precluded
the possibility of an effective search for power other than the muscles of
slaves. The dependence of society on the slave is everywhere reflected in the
consciousness of the age. For Plato and Aristotle in the fourth century B.C.i t was axiomatic that civilization could not exist
without slaves. …
… (Medieval)
civilization, arising out of the grave of slave society, soon flowered in a
series of new inventions which transformed the economic basis of life.
IX
century - The modern harness of the saddle-horse, with saddle, stirrups, bit,
and nailed iron shoes.
X century -
The modern harness of the draft-animal, with shoulder-collar, shafts,
disposition in file and nailed shoes.
XII century -
Watermill, windmill, mechanical saw, forge with tilt-hammer, bellows with stiff
boards and valve, window-glass and glazed windows, the domestic chimney, candle
and taper, paved roads, the wheel-barrow.
XIII
century - Spectacles, wheeled-plough with mould-board, rudder.
XIV
century - Lock-gates on canals, gunpowder, grandfatherclock,
plane.
XV century -
Printing.
… The chief
glory of the later Middle Ages was not its cathedrals or its epics or its
scholasticism: it was the building for the first time in history of a complex
civilization which rested not on the backs of sweating slaves or coolies but
primarily on non-human power.'
It has been
naively taught, and is still sometimes naively believed, that the science of
the Renaissance arose because Greek books from Constantinople arrived in western Europe. If this were the whole truth of the matter,
we might well ask why the modern world was not born in Alexandria, or in Rome,
or in Constantinople, where the old books survived. There is another aspect of
the truth to be considered. Graeco-Roman science was
good seed, but it could not grow on the stony ground of ancient slave society.
The technical revolution of the Middle Ages was
necessary to prepare the soil of western Europe to receive the seed, and the
technical device of printing was necessary to multiply and broadcast the seed
before the ancient wisdom could raise a wholesome crop.
… The peoples
of western Europe had the advantage of living in a
region where three of the important natural resources for the simpler forms of
power were more abundant than in the lands of the older civilizations. The
climate gave them more continuous vegetation, and thus allowed them to have
more work-animals; it also gave them wind enough at all seasons to drive the
ships on their seas and simple windmills on land; and the abundance of rain,
combined with the absence of a dry season, enabled them to have widespread
small-scale water-power on their streams. Thus, when they had learned how to
make use of these resources, they built up a society in which humans were freed
from a large part of the necessary drudgery. These technical advances led to
social changes; for the chattel slave and the galley slave were no longer
needed, and those crude forms of compulsory labour slowly disappeared. They
were replaced partly by serfdom and partly by the organizations of
craftsmen; both of which merged later into the wage system of modern
capitalistic democracy.
THE DEBT OF MODERN TO ANCIENT SCIENCE
The creators
of modern science in the sixteenth century, working again in an age of
technical advance in which ancient social abuses were being swept away,
recapture the humanitarian as well as the scientific zeal of old Ionia. Reading
their pages we seem to breathe a purer and freer air.
… Perhaps the
most decisive defeat of the scientific spirit in antiquity had been the loss of
the sense of history. History is the most fundamental science, for there is no
human knowledge which cannot lose its scientific character when men forget the
conditions under which it originated, the questions which it answered, and the
function it was created to serve. A great part of the mysticism and
superstition of educated men consists of knowledge which has broken loose from
its historical moorings. It is for this reason that we have stressed the
sketches of civilization given by Democritus and Lucretius
and characterized them as the most important achievement of ancient science.
The process by
which the knowledge of one generation can be transformed into the superstition
of the next can conveniently be studied by passing from the De Rerum Natura of Lucretius
to the Aeneid of Virgil, though Virgil's motive in stringing oracles, omens,
portents, and miracles so thick on his epic thread is no doubt a complicated
one …. It can also be studied in what the learning of Alexandria made of the
Hebrew scriptures when they were translated into
Greek. It might have been expected that the addition to Greek literature of the
historical record of a strange people would deepen their historical sense. In
fact the historical interpretation of the Hebrew scriptures
is a product of recent times. The classical world had turned its own history
into myth before it acquired a knowledge of the Old
Testament and it treated it unhistorically from the
first. It would hardly be possible to be more learned than Origen
(A.D.186-254), who applied all the resources of Alexandrian scholarship to the
work of biblical criticism. But in the absence of any historical sense it is
admitted that his interpretations are entirely arbitrary. What history lost
theology gained, and human history dwindled to the proportions of a small act
in a cosmic drama….
The greatest
achievement of modern science has been the rebirth of the historical sense.
This is a subject on which we cannot enter here, but a
brief allusion to it will form the appropriate conclusion to our book. We have
mentioned the names of some of the great founders of modern science,- Copernicus, Vesalius, Galileo, Stevin, and others. The man who gave supreme expression to
the spirit of this age was the Englishman, Francis Bacon (1561-1626). He turned
on the whole question of the revival of science an acute historical sense,
remarkable for his day and little understood by his successors.The
body of the Baconian writings constitutes one great
comment on human history, the sense of which is that the real history of
humanity can only be written in terms of man's conquest over his environment.
His subject was, in his own words, The Interpretation of Nature and Man's
Dominion over it. He penetrated behind the veil of politics to the economic
reality and judged man's past achievement and future prospects in terms of his
mastery over nature, not denying other aspects of his culture but relating them
to this basic fact.
The
sense of the reality of time, the reality of historical change, and the
influence exercised by man over his own destiny, were contributions to the
profound philosophy of Vico (1668-1744), who, in the
light of his intuition that Man makes his own History, was justified in his
claim to have made of history The New Science. Bacon glimpsed the truth that
man makes his mental history in the process of conquering his world. Vico saw more clearly than Bacon that this is not an
achievement of individual man but of society. In the fundamental institutions
of human society he saw the instruments whereby man, who began as a brute, has
transformed himself into a civilized being.
From
GREEK SCIENCE AFTER ARISTOTLE by G.
E. R. LLOYD, W.W.NORTON & COMPANY.INC.
In one sense
Greek science may be considered a failure. The conditions needed to insure the
continuous growth of science did not exist, and were never created, in the
ancient world. There were certainly doctors, architects and engineers who
recognized the practical importance of some aspects of their theoretical
inquiries. Yet their efforts were uncoordinated, and no systematic attempt to
explore the practical applications of science was made. Of the possible raisons
d'etre of
science, the idea that it could be of practical use, while not totally absent,
took second place to the idea that the study of nature contributed to knowledge
and understanding-which are valuable for their own sakes. A large part of
ancient natural science never fully emancipated itself from philosophy: but to
put it that way is to speak from a modern, not an ancient, standpoint. To the
ancients, philosophy generally included physics or the inquiry concerning
nature as one of its three main branches, and the chief motive for that inquiry
was the philosophical one in the literal sense of the 'love of wisdom'. So we
find some of the doctors and architects assimilating their studies to
philosophy, and if this was in part because of the superior social position and
prestige of philosophy, it also reflects the belief that their principal goal
was knowledge. Science was less a means to an end, than an end in itself. The
life devoted to study or 'contemplation' is the supremely happy life. Knowledge
is its own reward and correspondingly less attention was paid to the idea of
the benefits that might accrue from its application to practical purposes, The
tendency to value material below moral and intellectual goods is common in the
writings of ancient moral philosophers, and although one may doubt how far
their opinions were typical of ancient society as a whole, the lack of any
sustained attempt to justify scientific inquiry in terms of the increased
material prosperity to which it might lead is one of the most striking
differences between the ancient view and that of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. But it is not merely the case that ancient science reflects ancient
values. Science itself was, in at least three ways, not morally neutral. First
Plato's idea (Timaeus
47 bc), that
contemplation of the orderly movements of the heavenly bodies helps us to
regularize the disorderly movements of our own soul, is repeated in a rather
simpler form by later writers. Ptolemy, for instance, believed that astronomy
improves men's characters. Secondly, there were writers who, without
necessarily claiming that science makes men better, maintained that nature is
orderly, beautiful and good (whether or not they also postulated an intelligent
and benevolent deity responsible for its design). Thirdly, even among those who
rejected in the strongest possible terms the idea that the world is the product
of design, there were some who justified the study of nature on what are,
broadly speaking, ethical grounds. Thus the Epicureans shared the view of their
opponents, the Stoics, that some knowledge of natural phenomena is necessary to
insure the peace of mind without which a man cannot be truly happy.
But if the study
of nature is often linked to, or even part of, moral philosophy, this
generalization, like so many others, needs qualification…. Physics, mathematics
and biology were often conceived as parts of a comprehensive philosophy, Yet they could be, and often were, studied as independent
disciplines with no commitment on the part of the researcher to any overall
cosmological or ethical theses….
Moreover there
were those who deliberately dissociated themselves from the philosophers,
though not on ethical grounds, so much as on epistemological or methodological
ones. Already in the period before Aristotle there had been doctors who
rejected the philosophers' methods of inquiry as mere speculation and later
medical theorists, particularly among the Empiricists, sometimes did the same.
Criticism of the philosophers for placing too much reliance on abstract
argument is part of the continuing debate on the roles of reason and sensation,
argument and experience, which runs through the work of many ancient scientists….
The social and
intellectual framework within which ancient scientists worked differed in
certain fundamental respects from that of their modern counterparts. There was
no acknowledged place in ancient thought, or in ancient society, for science,
or for the scientist, as such. The investigators performed different social
roles as doctors or architects or teachers. Disagreements concerning the
'inquiry about nature' were not merely a matter of the differing motives and
philosophical allegiances of the individuals concerned, but directly concerned
the types of question to be investigated. For some nature was
everywhere purposeful, but others questioned teleology and final causes or
rejected them outright, while still seeking order and regularities expressible
as general laws.
But despite
many important differences, the relevance of the work of the ancients to what
we mean by science remains. This is true in one obvious way in that in such
fields as optics, statics, astronomy and anatomy, the
ancients achieved certain positive results (admittedly in the elementary parts
of those disciplines) which provided a basis on which later scientists could
build directly. But even more important was the creation, elaboration and
exemplification of models of the inquiry concerning nature itself. Two key
methodological principles, the application of mathematics to the investigation
of natural phenomena, and the notion of deliberate empirical research, go back
to the earlier period that culminates in Aristotle. What the later period we
have considered in this study provides is, above all, examples of the
application of these principles in practice.
The criticism is often made that the fatal shortcoming of Greek science was the failure to appreciate the importance of experimentation. But that is an oversimplification. It is true that the use of the experimental method is confined to certain problems and to certain individuals, but the same may also be said of the idea of the mathematization of physics. Here too the principle was known, and it is not hard to identify, with the benefit of hindsight, the opportunities for its application that were missed. In neither case is there a fundamental difference in kind, however great the differences in degree, between the methods of ancient and modern science. But both these shortcomings in ancient science reflect, and were aggravated by, the more basic organizational weakness to which I have alluded, the fact that the conditions needed to insure the continuous growth of science never existed in the ancient world. The relative isolation of those who engaged in scientific investigation acted as an obstacle to the systematic application of methodological ideas and was a constant threat to the continuity of inquiry in most fields of science. Thus we know of no significant contribution to the study of dynamics between Hipparchus, in the second century B.C., and Philoponus and Simplicius in the sixth century A.D.-although both these later writers generally provide full information concerning the work of their predecessors. Optics, botany and embryology too suffered from long periods of stagnation (in several cases the work done in the fourth or third century B.C. was never surpassed) and the same can be said of most other branches of investigation with the exception of elementary mathematics, astronomy and medicine. Moreover, even within the same generation the lack of communication between men who were interested in different aspects of the inquiry concerning nature can be illustrated by comparing the statements that Epicurus made on problems in astronomy with the theories of some of his own contemporaries. Given the conditions under which scientists worked, it is hardly surprising that some of the most important theories, discoveries and methods of ancient science were sometimes ignored or not followed up with any vigour. Yet the neglect that some of the most important ideas produced by the ancients suffered from in antiquity does not diminish the value of those ideas in themselves. The weakness of the social and ideological basis of ancient science, becomes more obvious in the decline we have outlined in this chapter. But when scientific investigation was revived in the West, it was a genuine rebirth, not merely in that the work of the great ancient scientists was rediscovered, but also and more particularly in that there was a return to the spirit of inquiry of ancient science and to the models of method that it provided.