54. It remains to attempt to estimate briefly the value of the contributions to astronomy made by the Greeks and of their method of investigation. It is obviously unreasonable to expect to find a brief formula which will characterise the scientific attitude of a series of astronomers whose lives extend over a period of eight centuries; and it is futile to explain the inferiority of Greek astronomy to our own on some such ground as that they had not discovered the method of induction, that they were not careful enough to obtain facts, or even that their ideas were not clear. In habits of thought and scientific aims the contrast between Pythagoras and Hipparchus is probably greater than that between Hipparchus on the one hand and Coppernicus or even Newton on the other, while it is not unfair to say that the fanciful ideas which pervade the work of even so great a discoverer as Kepler (chapter vii., §§ 144, § 151) place his scientific method in some respects behind that of his great Greek predecessor.
The Greeks inherited from their predecessors a number of observations, many of them executed with considerable accuracy, which were nearly sufficient for the requirements of practical life, but in the matter of astronomical theory and speculation, in which their best thinkers were very much more interested than in the detailed facts, they received virtually a blank sheet on which they had to write (at first with indifferent success) their speculative ideas. A considerable interval of time was obviously necessary to bridge over the gulf separating such data as the eclipse observations of the Chaldaeans from such ideas as the harmonical spheres of Pythagoras; and the necessary theoretical structure could not be erected without the use of mathematical methods which had gradually to be invented. That the Greeks, particularly in early times, paid little attention to making observations, is true enough, but it may fairly be doubted whether the collection of fresh material for observations would really have carried astronomy much beyond the point reached by the Chaldaean observers. When once speculative ideas, made
fuel for the furnaces of the public baths is rejected by Gibbon and others. One good reason for not accepting it is that by this time there were probably very few books left to burn.
