Aristotle had become so indispensable to the life of the European mind that it seemed impossible he could ever be yanked out. However, what the medieval mind gained in certainty, it gave up in terms of curiosity and innovation. The study of nature was reduced to a science of final causes, and the last word on that subject, as on all subjects, was Aristotle, now dead for one thousand years. Imagination and creativity fled. The Aristotelian empirical spirit of Ockham and Roger Bacon was replaced by the dead letter of Aristotle himself. By the end of the Middle Ages, it had hardened into an arid
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