Thomas Aquinas rejected it, and among theologians his authority has prevailed ever since. But among philosophers it has had a better fate. Descartes revived it in a somewhat amended form; Leibniz thought that it could be made valid by the addition of a supplement to prove that God is possible. Kant considered that he had demolished it once for all.

The Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, combined with the subjection of Italy to Spain, put an end to both the good and the bad of the Italian Renaissance.

the planets, according to Newton, were originally hurled by the hand of God.

CHAPTER XXIII Aristotle’s Physics

Medieval theology is derivative from the Greek intellect. The God of the Old Testament is a God of power, the God of the New Testament is also a God of love; but the God of the theologians, from Aristotle to Calvin, is one whose appeal is intellectual: His existence solves certain puzzles which otherwise would create argumentative difficulties in

CHAPTER XIV Plato’s Utopia

Origen, in spite of being recognized as one of the Fathers, was, in later times, condemned as having maintained four heresies: 1. The pre-existence of souls, as taught by Plato; 2. That the human nature of Christ, and not only His divine nature, existed before the Incarnation. 3. That, at the resurrection, our bodies shall be transformed into

So far, I have been speaking of theoretical science, which is an attempt to understand the world. Practical science, which is an attempt to change the world, has been important from the first, and has continually increased in importance, until it has almost ousted theoretical science from men’s thoughts. The practical importance of science was

ALMOST everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attributable to science, which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century.