The Making of Humanity |
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Popular passages
Page 272 - Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority.
Page 202 - Science is the most momentous contribution of Arab civilization to the modern world; but its fruits were slow in ripening. Not until long after Moorish culture had sunk back into darkness did the giant to which it had given birth rise in his might.
Page 190 - For although there is not a single aspect of European growth in which the decisive influence of Islamic culture is not traceable, nowhere is it so clear and momentous as in the genesis of that power which constitutes the permanent distinctive force of the modern world, and the supreme source of its victory — natural science and the scientific spirit...
Page 290 - It was almost necessary to the character of a fine gentleman to have something to say about airpumps and telescopes ; and even fine ladies, now and then, thought it becoming to affect a taste for science, went in coaches and six to visit the Gresham curiosities, and broke forth into cries of delight at finding that a magnet really attracted a needle, and that a microscope really made a fly look as large as a sparrow...
Page 187 - He was not ignorant," says Abulpharagius, " that they are the elect of God, his best and most useful servants, whose lives are devoted to the improvement of their rational faculties.
Page 190 - It is highly probable that but for the Arabs modern European civilization would never have arisen at all ; it is absolutely certain that but for them, it would not have assumed that character which has enabled it to transcend all previous phases of evolution.
Page 207 - Even so late as the year 1471, when Louis XI. borrowed the works of Rasis, the Arabian physician, from the faculty of medicine in Paris, he not only deposited in pledge a considerable quantity of plate, but was obliged to procure a nobleman to join with him as surety in a deed, binding himself under a great forfeiture to restore it.
Page 201 - Arabic and Arabic Science. Neither Roger Bacon nor his later namesake has any title to be credited with having introduced the experimental method. Roger Bacon was no more than one of the apostles of Muslim science and method to Christian Europe; and he never wearied of declaring that knowledge of Arabic and Arabic Science was for his contemporaries the only way to true knowledge.
Page 188 - Amirs hurried from their diwans to close themselves in their libraries and observatories; they neglected their affairs of state to attend lectures and converse on mathematical problems with men of science; caravans laden with manuscripts and botanical specimens plied from Bokhara to the Tigris, from Egypt to Andalusia; embassies were sent to Constantinople and to India for the sole purpose of obtaining books and teachers; a collection of Greek authors or distinguished mathematician was eagerly demanded...
Page 191 - The debt of our science to that of the Arabs does not consist in startling discoveries of revolutionary theories ; science owes a great deal more to Arab culture, it owes its existence. The ancient world was, as we saw, pre-scientific. The Astronomy and Mathematics of the Greeks were a foreign importation never thoroughly acclimatized in Greek culture. The Greeks...