there was a time (12th century——my favorite) when Avicenna was translated into Latin (in Toledo,) a moment when our cultures in east and west corresponded to the same type, a moment when the concept of science was inseparable from its spiritual context. ——> think of the alchemists for whom the operation undertaken in the laboratory only attained its end if it was accompanied by an interior transmutation of the man——that is to say only if it effected the interior birth (of spiritual man)
(for Corbin) Modern / Western venture = application of the intelligence to the scientific investigation of a nature that has been desacralized, which must be violated in order to find out its laws (and to subject its forces to the human will)
Alcemist’s chemistry
Nicolas Oresme’s geometry
[out of history]
Descartes’ geometry is also out of history, discontinious