106 THE PRE-RENAISSANCE PERIOD
science of the Middle Ages may be strikingly witnessed in the Inferno of the pious Dante where Hippocrates and Galen are joined to the shades of Avicenna and even to that of the hated Averrhoes. (Canto IV l., 144.) There is a curious observation to be made casually in reading Kassel's excerpts from Averrhoes which gives one a hint of the mental vigor of the Arabian, who excited the execration of the churchman and earned a warm place in the Inferno of Dante for himself by his skepticism.
Speaking of the five senses, he declares that animals differ from men in the fact that some of them can smell without possessing the organ for that sense, this being the case with bloodless organisms. In other words, this free thinker, Averrhoes, accepted the testimony of observation even though it went against the (Talenic and Hippocratic acceptation that for voice production we must have an instrumentum vocis, for smelling an "instrumentum odoratum." This is the essence of scientific thought, this is the spark that made the conflagration in Christendom later. It has taken nearly a thousand years to make it a familiar thing to scientific men that bloodless things, like some spiders, can smell with their whole bodies even though they have no nose, but Averrhoes stands alone in the Arabian civilization. If it had lasted longer he might have had associates. It is gratifying to be able to pick out even in our subject this live thing in the dead mentality of medieval thought, one of the things that earned Averrhoes a place in Hell.1
Influence of the Church. — Neverthless, as Guizot says, it is difficult to imagine what would have happened after the downfall of the Roman Empire in Europe if the Christian Church had not been organized. It stepped in first as the handmaid and then as the mistress of the civil power, and thus, by furnishing some sort of authority, having its real foundation deep in the souls and superstitions of men, brought order out of chaos. It was Gregory the Great who was active in the destruction of learning in Italy, but who nevertheless was a great power of cohesion where all things tended to disruption. Gregory VII was the great Hildebrand who, when elected pope, substituted ecclesiastical for imperial tyranny, and in 1077 King Henry of Germany waded barefooted through the snow of the Alps to humble himself at the feet of the pope at Canossa. Again, the civil power gained the ascendancy under that liberal man of genius, Frederick II (1194-1250), king of the two Sicilies, who had imbibed much learning and freedom from superstition by his Arabian education and affiliations. He rendered the greatest service possible to the art of medicine by his decree ordering the dissection of the human body.
1 For an account of Averrliocs and his works by a sympathetic critic, see Rénan; Averroes et l'Averroisme.
