The ignorance was not a matter of brutal choice; on the contrary, there was a keen and disinterested search after truth and knowledge : and the very fact of the region of discovery being so unknown added the charm of wonder and scientific imagination to the research. Nor should it be forgotten that what to us has become superstition was to them science, and that in all probability our science will be the superstition of future times. It is being 80 acknowledged every day that modern accepted scientific explanations of the “nature of things” are becoming more and more inadequate to the satisfaction of true knowledge. The Ptolemaic theory of astronomy was good enough for the data of its day; and though it has been superseded by the Copernican system, that in its turn is limited as an explanation by the present condition of our knowledge of the universe. Though the world will never go back to Ptolemy’s explanation, it will go forward to something more complete than any yet put forth.
There remains the charge of violence and misery to be dealt with. As to the misery, the result partly of that violence and partly of the deficient grasp of the resources of nature, its manifestations were so much more dramatic than the misery of our time produces, that at this distance they have the effect of overshadowing the everyday life of the period, which in fact was not constantly burdened by them. What misery exists in our own days is not spasmodic and accidental, but chronic and essential to the system under which we live. The 81 well-to-do bourgeois of the nineteenth century may indeed make light of this misery, while he shudders at the horrors of torture, and sack, and massacre of the Middle Ages, because he does not feel the modern misery in his own person: but the proletarian of our commercial age, though he be hardened to bear his lot, is not only degraded by the constant pressure of sordid troubles, but cannot fail to note the contrast which every hour thrusts before his eyes between that lot and the easy life of his masters—the possessing classes. In mediæval times the violence and suffering did not spare one class and fall wholly upon another, the most numerous in the community. Even