This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1906 edition. Excerpt: ... as the conquerors were utterly untouched either by the ancient culture of Asia or by anything they might have learned from their new subjects. To some extent their savage state was doubtless softened by the Christian religion, which they gradually adopted; but most of their teachers were unfortunately devoid of sympathy for anything that emanated from the heathen Greek and Roman world; and it was left to the dying Neo-Platonic school and to pagan commentators like Macrobius and Simplicius and the encyclopsedic writer Martianus Capella to keep alive for a while the traditions of the past. But even before the days when enemies from outside had begun to assail the Roman Empire, a fierce onslaught had commenced on the results of Greek thought. A narrow-minded literal interpretation of every syllable in the Scriptures was insisted on by the leaders of the Church, and anything which could not be reconciled therewith was rejected with horror and scorn. In this way some of the Fathers of the Church lent a hand to the barbarians who wrenched back the hand of time about a thousand years, and centuries were to elapse before their work was to some extent undone and human thought began to free itself from the fetters imposed on it in the days when the ancient world was crumbling to decay. In no branch of knowledge was the desire to sweep away all the results of Greek learning as conspicuous as with regard to the figure of the earth and the motion of the planets. When we turn over the pages of some of these Fathers, we might imagine that we were reading the opinions of some Babylonian priest written down some thousands of years before the Christian era; the ideas are exactly the same, the only difference being that the old Babylonian priest had no way of...