the world is certainly the last that a free man would choose to live in."[1]
Intellectual apathy, one would naturally suppose, must be the consequence of such sedulous oversight, and intellectual progress impossible. Progress in scientific knowledge was, indeed, quite effectually blocked.
The French astronomer Le Gentil gives an interesting account of the conditions of scientific knowledge at the two Universities in Manila. These institutions seemed to be the last refuge of the scholastic ideas and methods that had been discarded in Europe. A Spanish engineer frankly confessed to him that "in the sciences Spain was a hundred years behind France, and that in Manila they were a hundred years behind Spain." Nothing of electricity was known but the name, and making experiments in it had been forbidden by the Inquisition. Le Gentil also strongly suspected that the professor of Mathematics at the Jesuit College still held to the Ptolemaic system.[2]
But when we keep in mind the small number of ecclesiastics in the islands we must clear them of the charge of intellectual idleness. Their activity, on the other hand, considering the climate was remarkable.[3] An examination of J. T. Medina's monumental work[4] on printing in Manila and of
- ↑ Voyage, ii, p. 350.
- ↑ Voyage, ii, pp. 95, 97.
- ↑ Le Gentil says the lassitude of the body reacts upon the mind. "In this scorching region one can only vegetate. Insanity is commonly the result of hard study and excessive application." Voyage, ii, p. 94.
- ↑ La Imprenta en Manila desde sus origenes hasta 1810, Santiago de Chile, 1896.
