This was as we were sitting down to eat, and Grove became excessively cheerful and pugnacious in his conversation to cover up the embarrassment his colleague had caused.
“Now, sir,” he said, “you must defend yourself. It is not often that we have an advocate of the new learning amongst us. If you are intimate with Lower, I suppose you must be so.”
I replied that I hardly saw myself as an advocate, and certainly not a worthy one.
“It is true, though, that you seek to cast off the knowledge of the ancients, and replace it with your own?”
I said I respected all opinions of worth.
“Aristotle?” he said in a challenging way. “Hippocrates? Galen?”
I said that these were all great men, but could be proven to have been wrong in many particulars. He snorted at my reply.
“What advances? All that you novelists have done is to find out new reasons for ancient practice, and show how a few trifles work in ways other than was supposed.”
“Not so, sir. Not so,” I said. “Think of the barometer, the telescope.”
He waved his hand in scorn. “And the people who use them all come to entirely different conclusions. What discoveries has the telescope made? Such toys will never be a substitute for reason, the play of the mind upon imponderables.”
“But the advances of philosophy, I am convinced, will achieve wonders.”
“I have yet to see a sign of it.”
“You will,” I replied warmly. “I doubt not that posterity will verify many things that are now only rumors. In some age it may be that a voyage to the moon will not be more strange than one to the Americas for us. To speak with someone in the Indies may be as usual as a literary correspondence is now. After all, to talk after death could only have been thought a fiction before the invention of letters, and to sail true by the guide of a mineral would have seemed absurd to the ancients, who knew nothing of the magnet.”
“That is a most extraordinary flourish,” Grove replied tartly. “Yet I find the rhetoric defective in the suiting of the antitheses and the antipodes. For you are wrong, sir. The ancients did know of the magnet. Diodorus Siculus knew it plainly, as any gentleman should be aware. All we have discovered is a new use for the stone. This is what I mean. All knowledge is to be found in ancient texts, if you know how to read them aright. And that is true in alchemy as in phys-ick.”
“I disagree,” I said, thinking I was holding my own quite well. “For example, take cramps of the stomach. What is the usual remedy for those?”
“Arsenic,’’ said another further up the table who was listening. “A few grains in water as a vomit. I took it myself last September.”
“Did it work?”
“I know the pains grew worse first. I must say, I am inclined to believe that letting a little blood was more effective. But its qualities as a purgative are undoubted. I have never passed so many stools so quickly.”
“My master in Padua did some experiments and concluded that the belief in arsenic was a foolish error. The idea came from a book of remedies translated from Arabic and then into Latin by Deusingius. However, the translator made a mistake; the book recommended what it called darsini for the pains, and this was translated as arsenic. But arsenic in Arabic is zarnich.”
“So what should we be taking?”
“Cinnamon, apparently. Now sir, do you defend a long tradition when it can be shown to rest merely on a translator’s error?”
Here this other threw his head back and laughed, sending a shower of half-chewed food in an elegant parabola across the table. “You have justified only the existence of a sound knowledge of classical languages, sir,” he said. “No more.
And use this as an excuse to cast away thousands of years of learning so you may replace them with your own feeble scrabblings.”
“I am all too well aware of the feebleness of my scrabblings,” I replied, still the most civil person there. “But I do not substitute; merely examine before I accept an hypothesis. Did not Aristotle himself say that our ideas must conform to our experience of things as they are?”
I fear I was becoming reddened with anger by this stage, as I was conscious that he was little interested in a discussion in which reason played a part; while Grove was amiable in his argument, this one was unpleasant in tone and in manner.
“And then?”
“What do you mean?”
“And after you have put Aristotle to your proof? And, no doubt, found him wanting. Then what? Will you submit the monarchy to your investigations? The church, perhaps? Will you presume to put Our Savior Himself to your proofs? There lies the danger, sir. Your quest leads to atheism, as it must unless science is held firmly in the hands of those who wish to strengthen the word of God, rather than challenge it.”
He stopped here and looked around to gather support from his colleagues. I was pleased to see that they did not look on with complete enthusiasm, although many were nodding with agreement.
“ ‘Shall the clay say to Him that fashioneth it, What mak-est Thou?”‘ Grove murmured mildly, half to himself.
But his half-spoken quotation roused the young man who had shown me the way to Grove’s room that morning. “Isaiah, 45:9,” he said. “ ‘The price of wisdom is above rubies,’ “ he added quietly, being obviously too young and junior to enter into the contest, but reluctant to let the older man speak unchecked. I had noticed that he had tried to take part in the conversation on several occasions, but each time he opened his mouth, Grove had interrupted and carried on as if he wasn’t there.
“Job, 28:18,” Grove snapped back, irritated by the presumption. “ ‘He that increased! knowledge increaseth sorrow.”
“Ecclesiastes, 1:18,” Thomas Ken countered, also showing signs of becoming heated. I discerned that there was some private squabble here, which had nothing to do with me or experiment. “ ‘Scorners delight in their scorning, and fools hate knowledge.”
“Proverbs, 1:22. ‘Thy wisdom and thy knowledge, it hath perverted thee.”
The final sally defeated poor Ken, who knew that he could not remember the source of the quotation, and his face grew red under the public humiliation as he desperately tried to think of a response.
“Isaiah, 47:10,” Grove said in triumph when Ken’s failure was obvious to all.
Ken threw down his knife with a clatter and, hands shaking, stood up to leave the table. I feared that they might come to blows but, in fact, it was all theater. “Romans, 8:13,” he said. With icy slowness, he withdrew from the table and marched out of the hall, his footsteps echoing as he went. I believe I was the only person who heard this last comment, and to me it meant nothing. I always found the tendency of Protestants to bandy quotations from the Bible a trifle ridiculous, even blasphemous. Anyway, Grove certainly did not hear, but instead looked pleased with himself for having carried the field.
As nobody else wanted to break the silence, I decided (as a foreigner, and knowing little of what was going on) to try to cover over the affair. “I am not a theologian or a priest,” I said, trying to return the argument to rational grounds, “but I have studied the medical arts in my way. And I know that in many cases physick is as likely to kill as to cure. I think it is my duty to find out as much as I can and help my patients the better. It is not impious, I hope, so to do.”