On the other hand, when it comes to the question of the principles of experimental science and the value they placed on them, these men of the medieval universities, when sympathetically studied, prove to have been quite as sensible as the scientists of our own time. The idea that Francis Bacon in any way laid the foundation of the experimental sciences, or indeed did anything more than give a literary statement of the philosophy of the experimental science, though he himself proved utterly unable to apply the principles that he discussed to the scientific discoveries of his own time, is one of the inexplicable absurdities of history that somehow get in and {301} cannot be got out. The great thinkers of the medieval period had not only reached the same conclusions as he did, but actually applied them three centuries before; and the great medieval universities were occupied with problems, even in physical science, not very different from those which have given food for thought for subsequent generations. We shall see in the next chapter how successfully they applied these great principles of the experimental method, and how much they anticipated many phases of science that we are apt to think of as distinctly modern. {302} CHURCHMEN AND PHYSICAL SCIENCE AT THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITIES. There can be no doubt at all in the minds of those who know anything about the early history of the universities, but that the Popes were entirely favorable to the great educational movement represented by these institutions. It is ordinarily supposed, however, that the medieval universities limited their attention to philosophy and theology, and that even these subjects were studied from such narrow religious standpoints, as to make them of very little value for the development of human knowledge or the evolution of the human mind. Any such supposition is the result of ignorance on the part of those who entertain it, as to the actual curriculum of studies at the early universities, though it is not surprising that it should be very common, because, unfortunately, it has been fostered by many writers on educational subjects, especially in English. Scholasticism is often said to have been the very acme of absurdity in teaching, and its real import is entirely missed. Students and professors are supposed to have been limited in their interests to dialectics and metaphysics in the narrowest sense of these terms, and much time was, according to even presumably good authorities, frittered away in idle speculations with regard to things that are absolutely unknowable. [Footnote 36]