founded upon a knowledge of facts, and facts can only be ascertained through observation and experiment. He illustrates this particularly by a reference to astronomy, “which,” he says, “is based on the observation of astronomical phenomena, and it is the case with every branch of science or art.” It is erroneous and unjust, therefore, to suppose that Aristotle’s philosophy, as he taught it, is opposed to the true methods of science.
A knowledge of Aristotle’s works was transferred by Byzantine writers to Egypt; and, when that land was overrun by the Arabs in the seventh century, they adopted his system, spreading it abroad wherever their conquests extended. In the eighth century they carried it into Spain, where it flourished throughout their occupation of that country. From the ninth to the eleventh century the greater part of Europe was in a state of barbarism. The Moslem caliphate in Spain, under the beneficent rule of Jusuf and Jaküb, alone preserved science from extinction. Cordova, Seville, Grenada, and Toledo were the chief seats of learning in Western Europe; and it was mainly through “the perfect and most glorious physicist,” the Moslem Ibn-Roshd—better known as Averroes—(1126–1198), that Christian scholiasts like Roger Bacon acquired their knowledge of the philosophical system of Aristotle, and mainly
