Lindberg, final thoughts

With the exception of Ibn Al Haytham and Archimedes, ancient science just doesn't do it for me. Not at all.  But I plowed through to the end.  If I had to take away one thing, it would be this:  Ancient and medieval science might not have left us with many ideas that survive to the present in a robust form, but they laid the intellectual groundwork for having scholarly classes who would devote serious thought to the natural world and the application of logic and mathematics to questions about the world.  That's not something to sneeze at.  To this day, the most fertile grounds for producing scientists are often liberal arts colleges, who recruit students of a certain intellectual bent.