The conscience of the time, acting in obedience to the
highest authorities of the Church, and, as was supposed, in
defence of religion, now brought out a missile which it hurled
against scientific investigators with deadly effect. The
medieval battlefields of thought were strewn with various forms
of it. This missile was the charge of unlawful compact with
Satan, and it was most effective. We find it used against every
great investigator of nature in those times and for ages after.
The list of great men in those centuries charged with magic, as
given by Naude, is astounding; it includes every man of real
mark, and in the midst of them stands one of the most thoughtful
popes, Sylvester II (Gerbert), and the foremost of mediaeval
thinkers on natural science, Albert the Great. It came to be the
accepted idea that, as soon as a man conceived a wish to study
the works of God, his first step must be a league with the devil.
It was entirely natural, then, that in 1163 Pope Alexander III,
in connection with the Council of Tours, forbade the study of
physics to all ecclesiastics, which, of course, in that age
meant prohibition of all such scientific studies to the only
persons likely to make them.
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