[306] Cean Bermudez, Memorias de Jovellanos, Madrid, 1814, 12mo, cap. x. p. 221.
The Spanish universities, in fact, still taught from the same books they had used in the time of Cardinal Ximenes, and by the same methods. The scholastic philosophy was still regarded as the highest form of merely intellectual culture. Diego de Torres, afterwards distinguished for his knowledge in the physical sciences,--a man born and educated at Salamanca in the first half of the century,--says, that, after he had been five years in one of the schools of the University there, it was by accident he learned the existence of the mathematical sciences.[307] And, fifty years later, Blanco White declares, that, like most of his countrymen, he should have completed his studies in theology at the University of Seville without so much as hearing of elegant literature, if he had not chanced to make the acquaintance of a person who introduced him to a partial knowledge of Spanish poetry.[308]
[307] Vida, Ascendencia, etc., del Doctor Diego de Torres Villaroel, Madrid, 1789, 4to;--an autobiography, written in the worst taste of the time, i. e. about 1743. He says of a treatise on the Sphere, by Padre Clavio: “Creo que fue la primera noticia que habia llegado á mis oidos de que habia ciencias matemáticas en el mundo.” (p. 34.)
Thus far, therefore, the old system of things was triumphant, and the common forms of advancing knowledge were, to an extraordinary and almost incredible degree, kept out of the country. On the other hand, errors, follies, and absurdities sprang up and abounded, just as surely as darkness follows the exclusion of light. Few persons in Spain in the beginning of the eighteenth century were so well informed as not to believe in astrology, and fewer still doubted the disastrous influence of comets and eclipses. The system of Copernicus was not only discouraged, but forbidden to be taught, on the ground that it was contrary to Scripture. The philosophy of Bacon, with all the consequences that had followed it, was unknown. It was not, perhaps, true, that the healing waters of knowledge had been rolled backward to their fountain, but no spirit of power had descended to trouble them, and they had now been kept stagnant till life was no longer in them and life could no longer be supported by them. It seemed as if the faculties of thinking and reasoning, in the better sense of these words, were either about to be entirely lost in Spain, or to be partly preserved only in a few scattered individuals, who, by the civil and ecclesiastical tyranny that oppressed them, would be prevented from diffusing even the imperfect light which they themselves enjoyed.