every respect a sign of the end of the unconditional dominion of tradition and infallible authorities.

In Germany, the Humanist movement, powerfully as it had begun, was early and completely absorbed by the theological movement. The very circumstance that here the opposition made the most decided and open break with the hierarchy, perhaps brought with it that the scientific department was partly neglected, partly treated in a more conservative spirit than elsewhere. It was only after the lapse of centuries that the attainment of liberty of thought atoned for this sacrifice.

It was Philip Melanchthon who presented the most decided example for the reform of philosophy on the old foundation of Aristotle. He gave out openly that he intended to introduce into philosophy, by going back to the genuine writings of Aristotle, a reform like that intended for theology by Luther in going back to the Bible.

But this reform of Melanchthon's did not, on the whole, result for the good of Germany. It was, on the one hand, not radical enough; for Melanchthon himself, with all his subtlety of thought, was thoroughly hampered by the fetters of theology, and even of astrology. On the other hand, the immense weight of the reformer and the influence of his academical activity brought about in Germany a return to Scholasticism, which lasted until long after Descartes, and formed the chief hindrance to philosophy in Germany.

It is worth observing, however, that Melanchthon introduced regular lectures upon psychology with his own textbook. His views often border closely enough upon Materialism, but are everywhere restrained within narrow limits by the doctrine of the Church, without any attempt at deeper reconciliation. The soul was explained by Melanchthon, after the false reading. ἐνδελέχεια for ἐντελέxea, as the uninterrupted; a reading upon which chiefly rested the assumption that Aristotle believed in the immortality of the soul. Amerbach, the professor at Wit

tenberg, who wrote a strictly Aristotelian Psychology, was so embroiled with the reformer over this reading, that he left Wittenberg in consequence, and became a Catholic again.

A third treatise on psychology appeared about the same time from the hand of the Spaniard Luis Vives.

Vives must be regarded as the most important philosophical reformer of this period, and as a forerunner of Descartes and of Bacon. His whole life was an uninterrupted and successful struggle against Scholasticism. With regard to Aristotle, his view was that the genuine disciples of his spirit should go beyond him, and interrogate nature herself, as the ancients had done. Not out of blind traditions nor subtle hypotheses is nature to be known, but through direct investigation by the method of experiment. In spite of this unusual clearness as to the true foundations of inquiry, Vives seldom appeals in his Psychology to the facts of life in order to communicate the observations of himself and others. The chapter on the immortality of the soul is written in a thoroughly rhetorical style, and founds what is offered as an irrefutable argument on the slenderest proofs-in what has continued down to our own day to be a favourite fashion. And yet Vives was one of the clearest heads of his century, and his psychology, especially in the doctrine of the emotions, abounds in subtle observations and happy appreciations of character.

The honest naturalist of Zürich, Konrad Gessner, also wrote a Psychology about this time, which is interesting in its contents and treatment. After an extremely concise, almost tabular, statement of all possible views as to the nature of the soul, follows abruptly a detailed doctrine of the senses. Here Gessner feels himself at home, and lingers complacently in physiological expositions, which are in part of a very thorough character. It produces a very curious impression, on the other hand, if we cast a glance at the same time over the fearful chaos of

theories and opinions on the soul in the first part of the work. "Some hold," as Gessner tells us, with imperturbable calm, "the soul to be nothing; some hold it to be a substance." 53

On all sides, then, we see the shaking of the old Aristotelian tradition, the unsettling of opinions, and the exciting of doubts, which probably only exhibit themselves very partially in literature. But very soon psychology, which was treated in such an extraordinary number of works from the end of the sixteenth century, again becomes systematised, and the fermentation of the period of transition makes room for a dogmatic Scholasticism, whose chief object it is to reconcile itself with theology.

But while theology still held full dominion over the sphere of mind, and violent controversies drowned the

voice of calm judgment, rigid inquiry was quietly laying 633

in the province of external nature an impregnable basis for an entirely revolutionised theory of the universe.

In the year 1543 appeared, with a dedication to the Pope, the book on the "Orbits of the Heavenly Bodies," by Nicolaus Copernicus of Thorn. Within the last days of his life the grey-headed inquirer received the first copy of his book, and then in contentment departed from the world.54

What now, after the lapse of three centuries, every school child must learn, that the earth revolves upon its own axis and round the sun, was then a great, and, despite a few forerunners, a new truth, diametrically opposed to the general consciousness. It was, however, a truth which contradicted Aristotle, and with which the Church had not yet reconciled herself. What to some extent sheltered the doctrine of Copernicus against the scorn of the

53 All the psychological treatises of the Reformation period here mentioned appeared printed together in a single volume through Jacob Gessner at Zürich in 1563; the three first named also at Basel. Compare the

articles "Seelenlehre" and "Vives"
in the Encl. des ges. Erzieh. - und
Unterrichtswesens.

54 Comp. Humboldt's Kosmos, ii.
S. 344 (E. T. ed. Otté, ii. 684, and
note), and Anm. 22, S. 497 foll.

conservative masses, against the Scholastic and ecclesiastical fanaticism, was the rigidly scientific form and the superfluity of proof of the work, on which the author had laboured, in the quiet leisure of his prebendal stall at Frauenburg, with admirable patience for three-and-thirty years. There is something really great in the thought that a man who is seized in the period of fiery creativeness by a world-stirring idea, with full consciousness of its range, should retire in order to devote the whole of his future life to the calm working out of this idea. And this explains the enthusiasm of his few earliest disciples, as well as the discomposure of the pedants and the reserve of the Church.

How critical the undertaking appeared in this aspect is shown by the circumstance that Professor Osiander, who carried the book through the press, in the customary preface added by him represented the whole doctrine of Copernicus as a hypothesis. Copernicus himself had no share in this concealment. Kepler, himself animated by haughty freedom of thought, calls him a man of free spirit; and, in fact, only such a man could have completed the gigantic task. 55

55 Humboldt's Kosmos, ii. S. 345 (E. T. ii. 686). “An erroneous opinion unfortunately prevails, even in the present day, that Copernicus, from timidity and from apprehension of priestly persecution, advanced his views regarding the planetary movement of the earth, and the position of the sun in the centre of the planetary system, as mere hypotheses, which fulfilled the object of submitting the orbits of the heavenly bodies more conveniently to calculation, but which need not necessarily be either true, or even probable.' These singular words do certainly occur in the anonymous preface attached to the work of Copernicus, aud inscribed, De hypothesibus hujus operis; but they are quite contrary to the opinions expressed by Copernicus, and in di

rect contradiction with his dedication to Pope Paul III." The author of the preface, according to Gassendi, was Andreas Osiander; not indeed, as Humboldt says, "a mathematician then living at Nuremberg," but the well-known Lutheran theologian. The astronomical revision of the proofs was undoubtedly done by Johannes Schoner, professor of mathematics and astronomy in Nuremberg. To Schoner and Osiander the charge of the printing was assigned by Rhäticus, professor at Wittenberg, and a pupil of Copernicus, because he considered Nuremberg to be a more suitable" place of publication than Wittenberg (Humboldt's Kosmos, Anm. 24 to passage above quoted, ii. S. 498, E. T. at p. 686). These proceedings were, in all proba

66

"The earth moves" became speedily the formula by which belief in science and in the infallibility of the reason was distinguished from blind adherence to tradition. And when, after a struggle of centuries, the victory in this matter had definitively to be yielded to science,