From the former of these two great men came into Christian theology many germs of medieval magic, and from the latter sundry modes of reasoning which aided in the evolution of these; yet the impulse to human thought given by these great masters was of inestimable value to our race, and one legacy from them was especially precious--the idea that a science of Nature is possible, and that the highest occupation of man is the discovery of its laws.

Still another gift from them was greatest of all, for they gave scientific freedom.

They laid no interdict upon new paths; they interposed no barriers to the extension of knowledge; they threatened no doom in this life or in the next against investigators on new lines; they left the world free to seek any new methods and to follow any new paths which thinking men could find.
This legacy of belief in science, of respect for scientific pursuits, and of freedom in scientific research, was especially received by the school of Alexandria, and above all by Archimedes, who began, just before the Christian era, to open new paths through the great field of the inductive sciences by observation, comparison, and experiment.( 267) (267) As to the beginnings of physical science in Greece, and of the theological opposition to physical science, also Socrates's view regarding certain branches as interdicted to human study, see Grote's History of Greece, vol.i, pp.

495 and 504, 505; also Jowett's introduction to his translation of the Timaeus, and Whewell's History of the Inductive Sciences.

For examples showing the incompatibility of Plato's methods in physical science with that pursued in modern times, see Zeller, Plato and the Older Academy, English translation by Alleyne and Goodwin, pp.