du livre , the first two centuries of print culture were almost 
wholly medieval in content . More than ninety per cent of all 
books printed were of medieval origin. And Professor Nef insists 
in Cultural Foundations of Modern Industrialism  (p. 33) that it 
was medieval universalism or faith in the adequacy of intellect 
to the understanding of all created beings that “gave men the 
courage to read anew the book of nature, which almost every 
European assumed had been made by God whom Christ 
revealed. . . . Leonardo da Vinci and Copernicus and Vesalius 
were reading that book anew, but they were not the discoverers 
of the vital new methods of reading it. They belong to what 
was in the main a transition period from the older science to 
the new sciences. Their methods of examining natural 
phenomena were derived mainly from the past.”

     Thus the grandeur of Aquinas is in his explanation of how