The main purpose of this book has not been accomplished unless it has been shown that the Church, the Popes, and ecclesiastics generally during the Middle Ages, and especially during the three centuries before the reformation so-called, far from opposing scientific advance or investigation, were constantly in the position of encouraging and fostering science, even if the meaning of that term be limited, as it has come to be in modern times, to the physical or natural sciences. The Popes and the great ecclesiastics were patrons of learning of every kind, and that they not only encouraged, but aided very materially the institutions of learning in which the problems of science with which we are now engaged, were discussed in very much the same way as we discuss them at the present time, is evident from the story of the foundation of the universities. It will be a source of wonder to many people how, with all this as a matter of simple educational history, the traditions with regard to the supposed opposition of the Church and the Popes to science have grown up. This is not so difficult to understand, however, as might be thought, {391} and a few words of explanation will serve to show that there was opposition to science, but that this was not due to religious intolerance in any proper sense of the term. Those who give the religious element a prominent place in this, forget how much natural opposition to the introduction of new ideas there is in men's minds, quite apart from their religious convictions. Nearly two centuries ago Dean Swift said, in his own bitter frame of mind of course, but still with an approach to truth that has made the expression one of the oft-quoted passages from his works: "When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign--that all the asses are in confederacy against him." I suppose the Dean himself would have been the first to insist that some of his colleagues in the ministry eminently deserved the opprobrious substantive epithet he employed. It would be too much to expect that there should not be as many foolish ones among the clergy of the olden times as in any other of the professions. Occasionally one of these foolish clergymen rose up in opposition to science. Whenever he did, especially if he belonged to the class mentioned by Dean Swift, then he surely made his religion the principal reason for his opposition. That gave an added prestige in his mind and in the minds of those who accepted his teachings, to whatever he had to say on the subject. This no more involved the Church itself, nor ecclesiastics generally, in the condemnation of the particular scientific doctrine, than does the frequent opposition of peculiar members of medical societies to real progress in medicine, involve the organization to which they belong in the old-fogyism which would prevent advance.