Still another gift from them was
greatest of all, for they gave scientific freedom. They laid no
interdict upon new paths; they interposed no barriers to the
extension of knowledge; they threatened no doom in this life or
in the next against investigators on new lines; they left the
world free to seek any new methods and to follow any new paths
which thinking men could find.
This legacy of belief in science, of respect for scientific
pursuits, and of freedom in scientific research, was especially
received by the school of Alexandria, and above all by
Archimedes, who began, just before the Christian era, to open
new paths through the great field of the inductive sciences by
observation, comparison, and experiment.[375]
The establishment of Christianity, beginning a new evolution of
theology, arrested the normal development of the physical
sciences for over fifteen hundred years. The cause of this
arrest was twofold: First, there was created an atmosphere in
which the germs of physical science could hardly grow--an
atmosphere in which all seeking in Nature for truth as truth was
regarded as futile.
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