excerpted from An Intellectual History of Modern Europe by Marvin Perry 

The Scientific Revolution: A New Cosmology and Methodology

 

                The Scientific Revolution destroyed the medieval world picture and established the scientific method- rigorous and systematic observation and experimentation- as the essential means of unlocking nature’s secrets. Western thinkers emphasized the importance of mathematics, which had grown more sophisticated with the discovery of the calculus. They understood nature as a  mechanical system governed by laws that could be expressed mathematically. Science displaced theology as the queen of knowledge and gave rise to the Enlightenment.

                Medieval thinkers, influenced by Aristotle, conceived of a qualitative cosmos, a divine hierarchy with the earth at the center but lower in kind than the heavens. This geocentric model of the division of the universe into higher and lower worlds accorded with passages of Scripture that the scholastic philosophers had cited to harmonize Aristotle and Ptolemy with Christian theology.

                Human beings, at the center of the universe and in the center of the great ladder of creation, were the masters of Earth. Earthly objects were composed of the four elements: earth, air, fire and water; celestial objects were composed by the ether. The planets, according to Ptolemy, moved in perfect circular orbits and at uniform speeds around the earth. Since the planets do not move in circles, but ellipses, Ptolemy had invented devices: epicycles, equants, retrograde motions, to save the appearance of circular motion.

                The Renaissance had contributed to the Scientific Revolution in various ways. Revived interest in the classics had led to the rediscovery of important ancient texts on science. (Archimedes’ mechanics and Galens’ anatomy). Artists’ representations of the human body had linked exact proportions to a principle of beauty. Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472)  formulated the mathematical theory of perspective in his depiction of space, establishing a precise mathematical relation between the object and the observer. The natural world could be analyzed and depicted with scientific precision.

                The revival of ancient Pythagorean and neo-Platonic ideas led to a new stress on mathematics as the key to the comprehension of reality. The Pythagoreans had been fascinated by the mathematical harmonies  found in music. They extended this idea to the universe at large, expressing the idea that all forms could be expressed numerically. They believed that knowledge of this cosmic harmony could purify the soul. Plato had maintained that beyond the world of everyday objects lay a higher reality, the world of Forms, which contains a mathematical reality apprehensible only by thought. Renaissance science blended science with mysticism and magic in the tradition of Hermes Trismegistus, thought to be an Egyptian priest and contemporary of Moses. The Hermetic writings mixed astrology, alchemy, Jewish creation accounts, and mystical yearnings with Platonism and Pythagoreanism.

 

Nicholas Copernicus (1473-1543)

 

This astronomer and mathematician proclaimed that the earth is a planet that orbits a centrally located sun together with the other planets. The heliocentric theory  became the kernel of a wholly new vision of the universe. Copernicus’ sense of order and symmetry had been offended by the cumbersomeness of Ptolemy’s model of the universe. His theory was published in 1543, but his ideas had become current earlier than that.

                In 1539 Martin Luther condemned Copernicus, but his astronomical theories did not inspire passionate rejection until the religious wars of the early seventeenth century.  In 1616 the Catholic Church banned Copernicus, fearing another propaganda weapon for Protestants. They also were fearful of the theological and social implications of Copernicus’ reordering of the cosmos in opposition to the qualitative divisions of the divine hierarchy.

                This new vision of the universe inspired some religious thinkers. Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) was burned at the stake for heresy because he had embraced Copernican heliocentricity and combined it with mystic Hermeticism to produce an ecstatic vision of the earth as a living being in an infinite space which must contain innumerable inhabitable worlds. To Bruno, nature was God, worthy of worship and investigation. He believed this new religion of rapturous worship, glorification and contemplation of nature should replace the teachings of organized churches.

                Contemplation of the new cosmology could also produce despair. Instead of a secure universe created for man, Copernican astronomy dethroned the earth, expelled human beings from their central position and implied an infinite universe. This concept would prove as traumatic for modern thinkers as Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden had for medieval thinkers.

 

 

Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)

 

                Indebted to the Platonic tradition of mathematics and Archimedes’ mechanics, Galileo exploited the recent invention of the telescope to scientifically prove Copernicus’ theories and advance a new understanding of physics. His observations of the craters and mountains on the moon and of sunspots proved that the celestial bodies were not perfect and immutable. This demonstration showed that all of nature was a homogeneous system, not hierarchical. His observations of the moons of Jupiter demonstrated that a celestial body could indeed move around a center other than earth. In dealing with problems of motion, Galileo dispensed with Aristotle’s ‘common sense’  conclusions and insisted on the application of mathematics to experiments. Instead of concluding that rocks fell to earth because they were striving to reach their proper place in the universe, Galileo insisted that motion is a mathematical relationship of bodies to time and distance.

                Galileo’s experiments and discoveries attacked the authority of the Scriptures in  scientific matters. He tried to separate science from faith. He argued that the purpose of Scripture was the salvation of the soul, not the instruction of people in the operations of nature. 

                In 1633 Galileo, under the threat of the Inquisition, was forced to recant and condemn the theories of Copernicus. One of the consequences of the Church’s stand was the impetus it gave to the study of science in the Protestant areas of Europe.

  

Johannes Kepler (1571-1630)

 

                This German mathematician and astronomer was deeply influenced by  the teaching of  Renaissance Pythagoreans  and neo-Platonists. He tried to harmonize mathematics with a deep commitment to Lutheran Christianity. He believed that God had prescribed a geometric harmony to creation which humans could understand. He was also a believer in astrology. He yearned to understand the ‘music of the spheres’ and thus achieve a supreme insight into God’s mind. Even so, he did not allow the inspiration of his mystical beliefs to obscure his disciplined dedication to empirical research.

                Using data collected by a Dutch astronomer, Tycho Brahe, Kepler discovered the three basic laws of planetary motion: first, planets move in an elliptical orbit with the sun at one focus of the ellipse; second, the planets do not move at a uniform speed; instead he argued that they accelerate as they approach the sun. A planet’s speed is determinable at any point since its arc will sweep out an equal area of space in equal areas of time if a line is drawn from the planet to the sun; third, there is a mathematical relationship between the time it takes a planet to complete its orbit of the sun and its average distance from the sun: time squared is proportionate to distance cubed.

 

Isaac Newton (1642-1727)

 

                Isaac Newton provided the celestial mechanics that linked the astronomy of Copernicus and Kepler with the physics of Galileo and accounted for the behavior of the planets. His publication of The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy  in 1687 climaxed the scientific revolution. His three laws of motion  joined all celestial and terrestrial objects into a vast mechanical system which functioned in perfect harmony and whose connections could be expressed in mathematical terms. He offered mathematical proof of the heliocentric system.

                The Laws of Motion: Newton’s first law is the principle of inertia: a body at rest remains at rest unless acted on by a force, and a body in rectilinear motion moves in a straight line at the same velocity unless a force acts on it. Motion is as natural a condition as rest. The second law states that a given force produces a measurable change in a body’s velocity, the change in velocity proportional to the force acting on it. The third law holds that for every action or force there is an equal and opposite reaction or force. The sun pulls the earth with the same force that the earth pulls the sun.

                Newton proved that the same laws of motion and gravitation that operate in the celestial world also govern the movement of earthly bodies. There is no cosmic division. The universe is an integrated, harmonious mechanical system held together by the force of gravity. His laws demonstrated the inherent mathematical order of the universe, thus realizing the ancient Pythagorean and Platonic visions of the cosmos.

                To Newton’s contemporaries, it seemed that he had unraveled all of nature’s mysteries. For Newton, God was the grand architect whose wisdom and skill accounted for nature’s magnificent design. He believed that God could intervene in this clockwork universe and perform miracles. Later, the deists would reject miracle as incompatible with a universe governed by impersonal mechanical principles.

                Newton  helped formulate the scientific method: the process of inquiry into the properties of phenomena on earth and establishing those properties by experiment, only then proceeding to hypotheses for explanations of the phenomena themselves.

 

Francis Bacon (1561-1626)

 

                Sir Francis Bacon, an English statesman and philosopher, was an important advocate of the scientific method. In his New Organon (1620), Bacon repudiated scholasticism’s effort to blend theories of nature to the requirements of Scripture. He denounced scholasticism’s slavish attachment to Aristotelian doctrines thus preventing independent thinking. He also complained about the arid, pure verbal ingeniousness of the scholastic’s elaborate argumentation which had little or nothing to do with the empirical world. Bacon argued that humans needed to actively resist their tendency to color their observations of nature with prejudices from their experience, their desire for profit or their attachment to any philosophical dogma. Instead, Bacon advocated inductive reasoning as the way to truth and knowledge. By careful observation of nature and the systematic accumulation of data, general laws could be discovered from the knowledge of particulars. These laws should be constantly tested and verified by experimentation. Bacon became a founder of the empirical tradition in modern philosophy. He attacked astrology, magic, and alchemy. He advocated cooperative and methodical scientific research that could be publicly criticized. Bacon appreciated science’s potential value for human life. The function of thought was not to contemplate the purpose that God gave each object in nature and explain how everything fit into this divine design; rather, knowledge should help us utilize nature for our own advantage, improving the quality of life.

 

Rene Descartes (1596-1650)

 

                Descartes, a French mathematician and philosopher, developed the other approach to knowledge, complementing empirical, inductive reasoning, which underlay the scientific method: the rational, deductive approach. Whereas Bacon regarded sense data as the foundation of knowledge, Descartes believed that truth derived in successive steps from first principles, indubitable axioms. In his Discourse on Method (1637), Descartes rejected all authority for knowledge except that which he might find within himself or nature. He searched for one incontrovertible truth which could serve as the first principle of knowledge. He rejected the idea of the Greek skeptics that maintained that we are incapable of achieving certainty, yet he accepted their argument that knowledge achieved through the senses was often deceptive. But he found one truth to be certain and unshakeable: he was doing the doubting and thinking: “I think therefore I am.” Here was the starting point of knowledge. By overthrowing all authority for thought except the individual’s inviolable autonomy and importance, Descartes founded modern philosophy. Human beings became fully aware of their capacity to comprehend the world with their own mental powers.

                Descartes believed that mathematical reasoning could be applied to philosophical problems, thus providing a geometry applicable to the moral order. Once his central axiom was accepted, other truths could be deduced using logical reasoning. Proceeding step by step from the fact of his own existence, Descartes was able to deduce the existence of the physical world and of the existence of God. Descartes argued that because humans could conceive of the idea of a perfect being, God must exist. The idea of perfection had been implanted in us. Perfection presupposes the existence of God. God had ordered the universe in such a way that it functioned in harmony with the human mind, and He had given humans the capacity to understand the world. The structures of the natural world correspond to the form of the ideas of the mind. Logic is inherent in the human mind and independent of human existence. The mind arrives at truth when it understands the logical necessity of its own ideas. He divided reality into two fundamentally different substances: the mind with its principle attributes of consciousness and thought, and matter which is characterized by spatial extension. A basic question of modern philosophy has been to attempt to discover where the mind and matter connect.

                Although Descartes believed in God, he thought that once God had set the universe in motion, he served no further significant function. His support of reason and his faith in the ability of humans to think for themselves undermined dogma and helped form the skeptical outlook of the Enlightenment.

 

 

 

 

Benedict Spinoza (1632-1677)

 

                Spinoza was a descendant of Spanish Jews who fled to the Netherlands to escape the Inquisition. He studied traditional Jewish religious and philosophical works, medieval scholasticism and the new science and philosophy of Descartes. He disputed rabbinical interpretation of the Scripture, was accused of heresy and subsequently excommunicated by Jewish religious authorities. He lived simply as a lens grinder and devoted his life to philosophy.

                Spinoza conceived of nature as mathematical. He took the same approach to ethics. Like Descartes, he contended that reality was intelligible only through reason. Applying the logic of Euclidian geometry to philosophy, he began with what seemed to be universally valid premises and deduced other truths using logic.

                Spinoza held that the highest form of knowledge was the knowledge of God, but his conception of God marked a radical break with traditional thinking. To Spinoza,  God was not a transcendent creature, some superhuman father possessed of intellect and will. Inspired by the new science, Spinoza identified God with the order of nature: a single, all inclusive system of unchanging, universal laws in which all things have a determinate place. Since this unified system is open to reason, divine revelation is unnecessary. Spinoza called for a critical reading of the Bible as an ancient, human text which should be analyzed using linguistic and historical techniques. He rejected miracles and the efficacy of prayer as superstitions and dedicated himself to scientific objectivity. He pleaded for freedom of thought, religious toleration and a constitutional government. Spinoza’s thinking was a hallmark of the emerging modern mind.