and Proculiani. The sacred book, the Canon is, scientifically as in other respects, Arabian — the scientific canon of Ptolemy (Almagest), the medical of Ibn Sina (Avicenna), and the philosophical corpus designated "Aristotle," but so largely spurious — so also the (mostly unwritten) laws and methods of quotation:[1] the Commentary as the form of thought-development; the universities as cloisters (Medrashim) which provided teachers and students with cell, food, and clothing; and tendencies in scholarship taking form as brotherhoods. The learned world of the West possesses unmistakably the form of the Catholic Church, and more particularly so in Protestant regions. The connecting link between the learned orders of the Gothic period and the order-like schools of the nineteenth century — the schools of Hegel, of Kant, of historical jurisprudence, and not a few of the English university colleges — is formed by the Maurists and Bollandists[2] of France, who from 1650 on mastered and largely created the ancillary "science" of history. In all the specialist sciences (medicine and lecture-room philosophy included) there are fully developed hierarchies leading up to school-popes, grades, and dignities (the doctor's degree as an ordination), sacraments and councils. The uninitiate is rigorously treated as the "layman," and the idea of a generalized priesthood residing in the believers themselves, which is manifested in "popular" science — for example, Darwinism — is passionately combated. The language of learning was originally Latin, but to-day all sorts of special languages have formed themselves which (in the domain of radioactivity, for example, or that of the law of contract) are unintelligible save to those who have received the higher initiation. There are founders of sects, such as many of Kant's and Hegel's disciples were; there are missionaries to the unbelievers, like the Monists. There are heretics, like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, there is the weapon of the ban, and there is the Index in the form of the Conspiracy of Silence. There are ethical truths (for example, in Law the division of the objects into persons and things) and dogmas (like that of energy and mass, or the theory of inheritance), a ritual in the citation of orthodox writings, and even a scientific sort of beatification.[3]
More, the savant-type of the West (which in the nineteenth century reached its zenith, corresponding to the nadir of true priesthood) has brought to high perfection the study as the cell of a profane monachism that has its unconscious vows — of Poverty, in the shape of honourable disdain for fat living and wealth, and unfeigned contempt for the commercial professional and for all exploitation of scientific results for gain; of Chastity, which has evolved a veritable celibacy of science, with Kant as exemplar and culmination; and of Obedience, even to the point of sacrificing oneself to the standpoint of the
- ↑ See p. 248.
- ↑ See these headings in Ency. Brit., XI. ed. — Tr.
- ↑ After death the teachers of error are excluded from the eternal bliss of the text-book and cast into the purgatorial fires of foot-notes, whence, purged by the intercession of the believer, they ascend into the paradise of the paragraphs.
