melancholy, mercurial, phlegmatic, predominant, sanguine, saturnine, spirited, temper, temperament, with heart, liver, spleen, and stomach in their psychological sense, most of which retained their original and literal meanings down to the fourteenth century, give us more than a glimpse into the relations between body, soul, and cosmos, as they were felt by the medieval scientist.

"

Thus, the physical body was said to contain four humours (Latin 'humor', 'moisture')—blood, phlegm, bile or choler, and black bile (melancholy)—which last had its seat in the hypochondria. Not only diseases, or distempers, but qualities of character were intimately connected with the proper mixture' (Latin temperamentum ') of these humours, just as modern medical theory sees a connection between the character and the glands. Thus, a man might be good humoured or bad humoured; he might have a good temper or a bad temper; and according to which humour predominated in his temperament or complexion, he was choleric, melancholy, phlegmatic, or sanguine. His character depended on other things as well; for the medieval scientist believed with Hippocrates that the arteries (Greek' aer', 'air') were ducts through which there flowed, not blood, but three different kinds of ether (Greek' aither', 'the upper air ') or spirits (Latin spiritus', 'breath', 'life '), viz. the animal (Latin 'anima', 'soul'), the vital, and the natural. But the stars and the planets were also living bodies; they were composed of that 'fifth essence' or quintessence, which was likewise latent in all terrestrial things, so that the character and the fate of men were determined

• Hence animal spirits. It is interesting to observe how this word, and the phrase, practically reversed their meanings in the seventeenth century.

by the influences (Latin 'influere', 'to flow in ') which came from them. The Earth had its atmosphere (a kind of breath which it exhaled from itself); the Moon, which was regarded as a planet, had a special connection with lunacy, and according as the planet Jupiter, or Saturn, or Mercury was predominant or in the ascendant in the general disposition of stars at a man's birth, he would be jovial, saturnine, or mercurial. Finally, things or persons which were susceptible to the same influences, or which influenced each other in this occult way, were said to be in sympathy or sympathetic.

Test is an alchemist's word, coming from the Latin testa', an earthen pot in which the alchemist made his alloys. The same word was once used as a slang term for 'head', and in its French form, 'tête', still retains that meaning. The phrase hermetically sealedreminds us that alchemy, known as the 'hermetic art', was traced back by its exponents to the mysterious Hermes Trismegistus, who himself took his name from the Greek messenger-god Hermes. Other alchemists' words are amalgam, alcohol, alembic, alkali, arsenic, and tartar. The last five, together with the word alchemy itself, all come to us from Arabic, and are evidence of the fact that the Arabs of the Dark Ages, besides being philosophers, were the fathers of modern chemistry. It was, indeed, they who first joined the study of chemistry to the practice of medicine, and thus initiated a science of drugs. Moreover, that old 'humoral' pathology which has shaped so many of our conceptions of human character-in so far as it was based on ancient authority and tradition-came from Hippocrates to Europe, for the most part not directly, but by way of Baghdad and Spain.

The more intimate and indispensable such concep

tions are, the more effort does it require from the twentieth-century imagination to realize how they have grown up. It is so difficult, even when we are reading contemporary literature, to blot out from our consciousness the different meanings which have since gathered round the words. If, however, we can succeed in doing this, we cannot but be struck by the odd nature of the change which they have all undergone. When we reflect on the history of such notions as humour, influence, melancholy, temper, and the rest, it seems for the moment as though some invisible sorcerer had been conjuring them all inside ourselves-sucking them away from the planets, away from the outside world, away from our own warm flesh and blood, down into the shadowy realm of thoughts and feelings. There they still repose; astrology has changed to astronomy; alchemy to chemistry; to-day the cold stars glitter unapproachable overhead, and with a naïve detachment mind watches matter moving incomprehensibly in the void. At last, after four centuries, thought has shaken herself free.

CHAPTER VIII

EXPERIMENT

Zenith. Law. Investigate. Conceit. Gentleman. Love.

PHIL

Protestant

HILOSOPHY, alchemy, and mathematics were not the only branches of learning in which the Arabs had excelled. The appearance in English of such words as azimuth, nadir, and zenith towards the end of the fourteenth century suggests among other things that the thinking of this Syrian race contributed in no small degree to the rise in Europe of the new astronomy. These three Arabic words (two of them for the first time in English) are to be found in Chaucer's Treatise on the Astrolabe, written in 1391 for the instruction of his little son, "Lowis"; and this interesting document contains many other words also for which the Oxford Dictionary does not give any earlier quotation, such as almanac, ecliptic, equinox, equator, horizon, latitude, longitude, meridian, minute (meaning one-sixtieth of a degree), while zodiac was used by Gower a few years before.

Such words show us that the Europe of the Dark Ages had been experiencing once more what the ancient scientists had known. Its learned men had been marking down recurrences of natural phenomena and orientating themselves on the earth by dividing its face up into imaginary rings and segments. For such purposes they had found Latin and Greek terms

ready to their hand, and the survival of the Greek zodiac reminds us that they had, moreover, adopted the ancient system of mapping out the heavens into twelve signs." When, therefore, we find three Arabic words among these relics of classical wisdom, we need not be surprised to see that they express something which the ancients had, apparently, never felt the need of expressing—that is, an abstracted geometrical way of mapping out the visible heavens. These are conceived of as a vast sphere encircling the earth; the zenith and the nadir are its poles, while the azimuths are meridans of celestial longitude.

It is probable that, with the use of these words, there came for the first time into the consciousness of man the possibility of seeing himself purely as a solid object situated among solid objects. Of course, the Arab astronomer of the Dark and Middle Ages still saw the earth as the centre round which the universe revolved, and he would no more have dreamed of doubting the "astral" quality of the planets than the schoolmaster of to-day who instructs his pupils to write down Let x = 20 oranges" doubts whether oranges have any taste. Nevertheless we may feel pretty sure that those minds which were apparently the first to think of cutting up the sky without reference to the constellations, and which could, moreover, develop so fully the great and novel system of abstraction which they called algebra, did their part in bringing about that extraordinary revolution in astronomical thought which is associated with the name of Copernicus. It is true that the astronomy of Plato's time had been intimately connected with arithmetic and geometry; but Plato's "number" and his geometry do not appear to have been quite the abstract sciences which these things are to-day. What we call their

K