The Coming Age.

The Open Court, Dec 1919

By Alexander Del Mar, Published on 10/01/19

A PDF file should load here. If you do not see its contents the file may be temporarily unavailable at the journal website or you do not have a PDF plug-in installed and enabled in your browser.

Alternatively, you can download the file locally and open with any standalone PDF reader:

https://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3398&context=ocj

The Coming Age.

THE COMING AGE. BY ALEXANDER DEL !vrAR. democratic progress. When we democratize education and freedom of speech and press, and so become unafraid of the democratization of labor and welfare, no sane man can be persuaded that revolution by violence can serve him any purpose. - THREE or four thousand years ago the prevailing religion of the world was the worship of the sun, moon, and stars, as personified by Sol, Luna, Saturn, Jupiter, \>nus. Mercury, Mars, all of which heavenly bodies were believed to circulate about the earth, as the center of the entire system ; while their personifications governed the aftairs of man. This geocentric religion received an admonitory shock when the opening of Phoenician commerce with the Orient, about the fifteenth century B. C, led to a vague suggestion of the heliocentric theory and to a second and more forcible shock when the Indian conquests of Darius and the voyage of Scylax brought to the West further proofs against the prevailing cosmogonal belief. These evidences, when echoed more or less publicly by Pythagoras, Thales, Anaximander, and Qlnopides, though suppressed by the temples and, in the case of Pythagoras, followed by the assassination of the philosopher, were nevertheless not extinguished. Between the Indian expeditions of Darius and Alexander there were not a few philosophers who ventured to question the geocentric theory, upon which the religions of Greece were founded. Among them were Philolaus, Plato, Archytas, Heraclides of Pontus, Nicetas, and Aristarchus. But the information that Alexander acquired and Megasthenes brought from India was overwhelming, and the disquisitions of Aristotle, Dicsearchus, Seleucus, Timceus of Locris, Archimedes, and numerous other philosophers, though more or less cautiously disseminated, proved sufficient to efifectually destroy the bulwarks of an erroneous astronomy and the fantastic creeds which grew out of or were sustained by it. The immediate cause of their fall was, however, not due to scientific revolution, but to the degrading worship of Alexander, the Ptolemies, the Seleucidse. and Demetrius Poliorcetes. It was revolt from this lowest form of anthropomorphism which swept THE OPEN COURT. away all that remained of the ancient Greek schools and oi)ened the way to the conquest of the heliocentric theory. \o enlarged survey of religious evolution during the past three thousand years will fail to afford similar lessons ; the ever-increasing j^Tound-swell of scientific advance and the top-wave of some immediate cause, something that aroused popular interest in public affairs after science or discovery had furnished the basis of progress. The con(iucst of luiro])e. Asia Minor, and Xorthern Africa by I'omjiey. Gcsar and Augustus, brought to one focus of comparison the astronomical and geographical information of the principal civilized regions of the earth and resulted in that Augustan age of learning which afforded a point of departure for all scientific knowledge in the West. Later on, it was the disgust occasioned, not so much by the worship of Augustus, as of that of his imperial successors, whicii furnished the impetus for Christianity. It was the deadening influence of the conflict of the political and religious systems tliat followed, which is responsible for the Dark Ages. .\s usual, the first heralds of returning light came from the East ex oricntc lux. Tn A. D. 530, Aryabhatta, a Hindu astronomer, revi\'ed and taught tlie heliocentric theory, and in one magnificent essay brushed aside the entire mass of false science and idiotic fables which were based upon the astrology of the Hindu temples. The knowledge of Aryabhatta's essay and of the obser\ations ui)on which it was founded, was brought into Europe by tlie .Arabians in the ninth century, the same in which the Norsemen coasted the continent of America. Tn A. D. 1020 Alberuni. an Arabian astronomer, in a work which became widely known in luiroi)e. taught the heliocentric theory and accompanied it with a mass of scientific observations sufificient to afiford food for cogitation to several generations of doubters. During six or seven centuries of darkness the .Arabians alone held aloft the torch of science and when it shone in Spain it lit a new and memorable light in the mind of a certain Galician navigator. There is little risk in assigning the Protestant Reformation to the voyages of "Columbus." They smashed to pieces at once and forever the theory of a flat earth and the thousand and one delusions based tipon it, in which the schools had previously indulged. They undermined the authority of the "fathers." of the saints, and of their pretended miracles. Yet the immediate cause of the Reformation was not the proofs of sphericity (for it was believed by most peo])le that "Columbus" had landed upon the coast of India), nor the aberration of the compass, nor the art of high-sea navigation. (...truncated)


This is a preview of a remote PDF: https://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3398&context=ocj

Alexander Del Mar. The Coming Age., The Open Court, 1919, Volume 1919, Issue 10,