Chapter Summary
Much of the seventeenth-century European experience was characterized by inflation, wars of religion and religious persecution, civil wars, and foreign invasions. The century was also marked by the appearance of a new species of philosopherthe philosophe, or natural philosopher. These natural philosophers, or scientists, of the seventeenth century had an immense task at hand. Their task was to redefine established notions of how the cosmos operated; their new worldview would be based on their direct observations of the natural world. This would result in nothing less than the creation of "new" knowledge. Their observations were justified by mathematical proof, and all of this within a world which God had created but left to man to discover. A new worldview emerged from this agemechanistic and materialistica scientific worldview that shapes our view of the universe today.
This Scientific Revolution, as it has been called, did not take place in a vacuum. Building on centuries of scientific endeavor, the new scientific revolutionariesmen like Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Boyle, and Newtonknew they were "standing on the shoulders of giants." They also understood the ramifications of their discoveries. Indeed, one of the hallmarks of this revolution in science was the increasing speed of both scientific discovery and its practical application. The essence of modern technology was born in the spirit of the seventeenth-century natural philosopher.
The Church found the New Science at odds with its theology, and in the early seventeenth century, Galileo was brought to trial for teaching Copernican theory. He was tried and convicted of heresy. At his trial he recanted all of his opinions in a display that emphasized the "infallibility" of the Church and the errors of the New Science. The revolution in science had to find a new home; it did so in northern Europe, especially England, the Low Countries, Germany, and France. There, it seemed, the spirit of philosophical and scientific enquiry was less restricted and more favorable to its growth. And there we find Leibniz, Descartes, Bacon, and Newton.
Few of us today would doubt the revolutionary essence of modern sciencefew of us question that something like a scientific revolution took place between Copernicus's De Revolutionibus (1543) and Newton's Principia (1687). But did all Europeans read these treatises at the time? No, they did not. Then how could the work of Copernicus and Newton have been so revolutionary? The answer, simply stated, is this: if Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, and others could use Human Reason to unlock the mysteries of heavenly bodies, then it was a very short step indeed to apply that same Human Reason to the problems of man and society. And from that great realization, came the program and "faith" of the philosophe of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment.