Yet, injurious as all this was to the evolution of science,
there was developed something in many respects more destructive;
and this was the influence of mystic theology, penetrating,
permeating, vitiating, sterilizing nearly every branch of
science for hundreds of years. Among the forms taken by this
development in the earlier Middle Ages we find a mixture of
physical science with a pseudo-science obtained from texts of
Scripture. In compounding this mixture, Jews and Christians vied
with each other. In this process the sacred books were used as
a fetich; every word, every letter, being considered to have a
divine and hidden meaning. By combining various scriptural
letters in various abstruse ways, new words of prodigious
significance in magic were obtained, and among them the great
word embracing the seventy-two mystical names of God--the mighty
word "_Schemhamphoras._" Why should men seek knowledge by
observation and experiment in the book of Nature, when the book
of Revelation, interpreted by the Kabbalah, opened such
treasures to the ingenious believer?
So, too, we have ancient mystical theories of number which the
theological spirit had made Christian, usurping an enormous
place in medieval science.
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