Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/758

products, with perhaps a little information about minerals, often joined with such observations of weather-signs as enables them to foresee coming changes, and so, apparently, to bring rain or sunshine, there is little to be named as rudimentary science among the medicine-men, or quasi-priests, of savages. Only when there has arisen that settled life which yields facilities for investigation and for transmitting the knowledge gained, can we expect priests to display a character approaching to the scientific. Hence we may pass at once to early civilizations.

Evidence from the books of Ancient India may first be set down. Demonstration is yielded by it that science was originally a part of religion. Both astronomy and medicine, says Weber, "received their first impulse from the exigencies of religious worship." More specific, as well as wider, is the following statement of Dr. Thibaut:—

"The want of some rule by which to fix the right time for the sacrifices gave the first impulse to astronomical observations; urged by this want the priest remained watching night after night the advance of the moon. . . . and day after day the alternate progress of the sun toward the north and the south. The laws of phonetics were investigated because the wrath of the gods followed the wrong pronunciation of a single letter of the sacrificial formulas; grammar and etymology had the task of securing the right understanding of the holy texts."

Further, according to Dutt, "geometry was developed in India from the rules for the construction of altars." A sentence from the same writer implies that there presently arose a differentiation of the learned class from the ceremonial class.

"Astronomy had now come to be regarded as a distinct science, and astronomers by profession were called Nakshatra, Darsa, and Ganaka. . . sacrificial rites were regulated by the position of the moon in reference to these lunar asterisms."

So, too, we have proof that philosophy, originally forming a part of the indefinite body of knowledge possessed by the priesthood, eventually developed independently. Hunter writes:—

"The Bráhmans, therefore, treated philosophy as a branch of religion. . . . Bráhman philosophy exhausted the possible solutions. . . of most of the other great problems which have since perplexed Greek and Roman sage, mediaeval schoolman, and modern man of science." And in this, as in other cases, the speculative and critical activity presently led to rationalism. There came "a time when philosophers and laymen were alike drifting toward agnostic and heterodox opinions."

Concerning the relations of science to theology among the Babylonians and Assyrians, current statements almost suffice for the purpose of the argument. A few facts in illustration must, however, be given. All the astronomical knowledge of the Babylonians had as its ends the regulation of religious worship, the