The fundamentally new conception of the universe contained in the cosmological revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries inevitably had an impact on the Western view of humankind. Nowhere is this more evident than in the work of René Descartes (ruh-NAY day-KART) (1596-1650), an extremely important figure in Western history. Descartes began by reflecting the doubt and uncertainty that seemed pervasive in the confusion of the seventeenth century and ended with a philosophy that dominated Western thought until the twentieth century.
Descartes was born into a family of the French lower nobility. After a Jesuit education, he studied law at Poitiers but traveled to Paris to study by himself. In 1618, at the beginning of the Thirty Years’ War, Descartes volunteered for service in the army of Maurice of Nassau, but he seems to have been interested less in military action than in traveling and finding leisure time to think. On the night of November 10, 1619, Descartes underwent what one historian has called an experience comparable to the “ecstatic illumination of the mystic.” Having perceived in one night the outlines of a new rational-mathematical system, with a sense of divine approval he made a new commitment to mind, mathematics, and a mechanical universe. For the rest of his life, Descartes worked out the details of his vision.
The starting point for Descartes’s new system was doubt, as he explained at the beginning of his most famous work, the Discourse on Method, written in 1637:
From my childhood I have been familiar with letters; and as I was given to believe that by their means a clear and assured knowledge can be acquired of all that is useful in life, I was extremely eager for instruction in them. As soon, however, as I had completed the course of study, at the close of which it is customary to be admitted into the order of the learned, I entirely changed my opinion. For I found myself entangled in so many doubts and errors that, as it seemed to me, the endeavor to instruct myself had served only to disclose to me more and more of my ignorance.
Descartes decided to set aside all that he had learned and begin again. One fact seemed beyond doubt - his own existence:
But I immediately became aware that while I was thus disposed to think that all was false, it was absolutely necessary that I who thus thought should be something; and noting that this truth, I think, therefore I am, was so steadfast and so assured that the suppositions of the skeptics, to whatever extreme they might all be carried, could not avail to shake it, I concluded that I might without scruple accept it as being the first principle of the philosophy I was seeking.
With this emphasis on the mind, Descartes asserted that he would accept only those things that his reason said were true.
From his first postulate, Descartes deduced an additional principle, the separation of mind and matter. Descartes argued that since “the mind cannot be doubted but the body and material world can, the two must be radically different. “ From this came an absolute duality between mind and body that has been called Cartesian dualism. Using mind or human reason, the path to certain knowledge, and its best instrument, mathematics, humans can understand the material world because it is pure mechanism, a machine that is governed by its own physical laws because it was created by God, the great geometrician.
Descartes’s conclusions about the nature of the universe and human beings had important implications. His separation of mind and matter allowed scientists to view matter as dead or inert, as something that was totally separate from themselves and could be investigated independently by reason. The split between mind and body led Westerners to equate their identity with mind and reason rather than with the whole organism. Descartes has rightly been called the father of modern rationalism (see the box on p. 494). His books were placed on the papal Index of Forbidden Books and condemned by many Protestant theologians. The radical Cartesian split between mind and matter, and between mind and body, had devastating implications not only for traditional religious views of the universe but also for how Westerners viewed themselves.
During the seventeenth century, scientific learning and investigation began to increase dramatically. Major universities in Europe established new chairs of science, especially in medicine. Royal and princely patronage of individual scientists became an international phenomenon.
Of great importance to the work of science was establishing the proper means to examine and understand the physical realm. This development of a scientific method was crucial to the evolution of science in the modern world.
FRANCIS BACON Curiously enough, it was an Englishman with few scientific credentials who attempted to put forth a new method of acquiring knowledge that made an impact on English scientists in the seventeenth century and other European scientists in the eighteenth century. Francis Bacon (1561-1626), a lawyer and lord chancellor, rejected Copernicus and Kepler and misunderstood Galileo. And yet in his unfinished work, The Great Instauration, he called for his contemporaries “to commence a total reconstruction of sciences, arts, and all human knowledge, raised upon the proper foundations. “ Bacon did not doubt humans’ ability to know the natural world, but he believed that they had proceeded incorrectly: “The entire fabric of human reason which we employ in the inquisition of nature is badly put together and built up, and like some magnificent structure without foundation.”
Bacon’s new foundation - a correct scientific method - was to be built on inductive principles. Rather than beginning with assumed first principles from which logical conclusions could be deduced, he urged scientists to proceed from the particular to the general. From carefully organized experiments and thorough, systematic observations, correct generalizations could be developed.
Bacon was clear about what he believed his method could accomplish. His concern was for practical results rather than for pure science. He stated that “the true and lawful goal of the sciences is none other than this: that human life be endowed with new discoveries and power.” He wanted science to contribute to the “mechanical arts” by creating devices that would benefit industry, agriculture, and trade. Bacon was prophetic when he said that he was “laboring to lay the foundation, not of any sect or doctrine, but of human utility and power.” And how would this “human power” be used? To “conquer nature in action.” The control and domination of nature became a central proposition of modern science and the technology that accompanied it. Only in the twentieth century did some scientists begin to ask whether this assumption might not be at the heart of the earth’s ecological crisis.
DESCARTES Descartes proposed a different approach to scientific methodology by emphasizing deduction and mathematical logic. As Descartes explained in the Discourse on Method, each step in an argument should be as sharp and well founded as a mathematical proof:
Those long chains of reasonings, each step Simple and easy, which geometers are wont to employ in arriving even at the most difficult of their demonstrations, have led me to surmise that all the things we human beings are competent to know are interconnected in the same manner, and that none are so remote as to be beyond our reach or so hidden that we cannot discover them – that is, provided we abstain from accepting as true what is not thus related, i.e., keep always to the order required for their deduction one from another.
Descartes believed, then, that one could start with self-evident truths, comparable to geometric axioms, and deduce more complex conclusions. His emphasis on deduction and mathematical order complemented Bacon’s stress on experiment and induction. It was Sir Isaac Newton who synthesized them into a single scientific methodology by uniting Bacon’s empiricism with Descartes’s rationalism. This scientific method began with systematic observations and experiments, which were used to arrive at general concepts. New deductions derived from these general concepts could then be tested and verified by precise experiments.
The scientific method, of course, was valuable in answering the question of how something works, and its success in doing this gave others much confidence in the method. It did not attempt to deal with the question of why something happens or the purpose and meaning behind the world of nature. This allowed religion to retain its central importance in the seventeenth century (see “Science and Religion” later in this chapter).
Also important to the work of science was the emergence of new learned societies and journals that enabled the new scientists to communicate their ideas to each other and to disseminate them to a wider, literate public.
THE SCIENTIFIC SOCIETIES The first of these scientific societies appeared in Italy, but those of England and France were ultimately of greater significance. The English Royal Society evolved out of informal gatherings of scientists at London and Oxford in the 1640s, although it did not receive a formal charter from King Charles II until 1662. The French Royal Academy of Sciences also arose out of informal scientific meetings in Paris during the 1650s. In 1666, Louis XIV formally recognized the group. The French Academy received abundant state support and remained under government control; its members were appointed and paid salaries by the state. In contrast, the Royal Society of England received little government encouragement, and its fellows simply co-opted new members.
Early on, both the English and the French scientific societies formally emphasized the practical value of scientific research. The Royal Society created a committee to investigate technological improvements for industry; the French Academy collected tools and machines. This concern with the practical benefits of science proved short-lived, however, as both societies came to focus their primary interest on theoretical work in mechanics and astronomy. The construction of observatories at Paris in 1667 and at Greenwich, England, in 1675 greatly facilitated research in astronomy by both groups. Although both the English and the French societies made useful contributions to scientific knowledge in the second half of the seventeenth century, their true Significance was that they demonstrated the benefits of science proceeding as a cooperative venture.
Scientific journals furthered this concept of cooperation. The French Journal des Savants (zhoor-NAHL day sah-VAHNH), published weekly beginning in 1665, printed results of experiments as well as general scientific knowledge. Its format appealed to both scientists and the educated public interested in the new science. In contrast, the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, also initiated in 1665, published papers of its members and learned correspondence and was aimed at practicing scientists. It became a prototype for the scholarly journals of later learned and academic societies and a crucial instrument for circulating news of scientific and academic activities.
SCIENCE AND SOCIETY The importance of science in the history of modern Western civilization is usually taken for granted. No doubt the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century provided tangible proof of the effectiveness of science and ensured its victory over Western minds. But how did science become such an integral part of Western culture in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries? Recent research has stressed that one cannot simply assert that people perceived that science was a rationally superior system. Several factors, however, might explain the relatively rapid acceptance of the new science.
It has been argued that the literate mercantile and propertied elites of Europe were attracted to the new science because it offered new ways to exploit resources for profit. Some of the early scientists made it easier for these groups to accept the new ideas by showing how they could be applied directly to specific industrial and technological needs. Galileo, for example, consciously sought an alliance between science and the material interests of the educated elite when he assured his listeners that the science of mechanics would be quite useful “when it becomes necessary to build bridges or other structures over water, something occurring mainly in affairs of great importance.” At the same time, Galileo stressed that science was fit for the “minds of the wise” and not for “the shallow minds of the common people.” This made science part of the high culture of Europe’s wealthy elites at a time when that culture was being increasingly separated from the popular culture of the lower classes (see Chapter 17).
It has also been argued that political interests used the new scientific conception of the natural world to bolster social stability. One scholar has argued that “no single event in the history of early modern Europe more profoundly shaped the integration of the new science into Western culture than did the English Revolution (1640-1660).” Fed by their millenarian expectations that the end of the world would come and usher in a thousand-year reign of the saints, Puritan reformers felt it was important to reform and renew their society. They seized on the new science as a socially useful instrument to accomplish this goal. The Puritan Revolution’s role in the acceptance of science, however, stemmed even more from the reaction to the radicalism spawned by the revolutionary ferment. The upheavals of the Puritan Revolution gave rise to groups, such as the Levellers, Diggers, and Ranters, who advocated not only radical political ideas but also a new radical science based on Paracelsus and the natural magic associated with the Hermetic tradition. The propertied and educated elites responded vigorously to these challenges to the established order by supporting the new mechanistic science and appealing to the material benefits of science. Hence, the founders of the Royal Society were men who wanted to pursue an experimental science that would remain detached from radical reforms of church and state. Although willing to make changes, they now viewed those changes in terms of an increase in food production and commerce.
At the same time, princes and kings who were providing patronage for scientists were doing so not only for prestige but also for practical reasons, especially the military applications of the mathematical sciences. The use of gunpowder, for example, gave new importance to ballistics and metallurgy. Rulers, especially absolute ones, were also concerned about matters of belief in their realms and recognized the need to control and manage the scientific body of knowledge, as we have seen in the French Academy. In appointing its members and paying their salaries, Louis XIV was also ensuring that the members and their work would be under his control.
In Galileo’s struggle with the inquisitorial Holy Office of the Catholic Church, we see the beginning of the conflict between science and religion that has marked the history of modern Western civilization. Since time immemorial, theology had seemed to be the queen of the sciences. It was natural that the churches would continue to believe that religion was the final measure of all things. The emerging scientists, however, tried to draw lines between the knowledge of religion and the knowledge of “natural philosophy” or nature. Galileo had clearly felt that it was unnecessary to pit science against religion when he wrote:
In discussions of physical problems we ought to begin not from the authority of scriptural passages, but from sense experiences and necessary demonstrations; for the holy Bible and the phenomena of nature proceed alike from the divine word, the former as the dictate of the Holy Ghost and the latter as the observant executrix of God’s commands. It is necessary for the Bible, in order to be accommodated to the understanding of every man, to speak many things which appear to differ from the absolute truth so far as the bare meaning of the words is concerned. But Nature, on the other hand, is inexorable and immutable; she never transgresses the laws imposed upon her, or cares a whit whether her abstruse reasons and methods of operation are understandable to men.
To Galileo, it made little sense for the church to determine the nature of physical reality on the basis of biblical texts that were subject to radically divergent interpretations. The church, however, decided otherwise in Galileo’s case and lent its great authority to one scientific theory, the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic cosmology, no doubt because it fit so well with its own philosophical views of reality. But the church’s decision had tremendous consequences, just as the rejection of Darwin’s ideas did in the nineteenth century. For educated individuals, it established a dichotomy between scientific investigations and religious beliefs. As the scientific beliefs triumphed, it became almost inevitable that religious beliefs would suffer, leading to a growing secularization in European intellectual life – precisely what the church had hoped to combat by opposing Copernicanism. Many seventeenth-century intellectuals were both religious and scientific and believed that the implications of this split would be tragic. Some believed that the split was largely unnecessary, while others felt the need to combine God, humans, and a mechanistic universe into a new philosophical synthesis.
Two individuals - Spinoza and Pascal - illustrate the wide diversity in the response of European intellectuals to the implications of the cosmological revolution of the seventeenth century.
SPINOZA Benedict de Spinoza (spi-NOH-zuh) (1632-1677) was a philosopher who grew up in the relatively tolerant atmosphere of Amsterdam. He was excommunicated from the Amsterdam synagogue at the age of twenty-four for rejecting the tenets of Judaism. Ostracized by the local Jewish community and major Christian churches alike, Spinoza lived a quiet, independent life, earning a living by grinding optical lenses and refusing to accept an academic position in philosophy at the University of Heidelberg for fear of compromising his freedom of thought. Spinoza read a great deal of the new scientific literature and was influenced by Descartes.
Spinoza was unwilling to accept the implications of Descartes’s ideas, especially the separation of mind and matter and the apparent separation of an infinite God from the finite world of matter. God was not simply the creator of the universe; he was the universe. All that is is in God, and nothing can be apart from God. This philosophy of pantheism (or monism) was set out in Spinoza’s book Ethics Demonstrated in the Geometrical Manner, which was not published until after his death.
To Spinoza, human beings are not “situated in nature as a kingdom within a kingdom” but are as much a part of God or nature or the universal order as other natural objects. The failure to understand God had led to many misconceptions for one, that nature exists only for one’s use:
As they find in themselves and outside themselves many means which assist them not a little in their search for what is useful, for instance, eyes for seeing, teeth for chewing, herbs and animals for yielding food, the sun for giving light, the sea for breeding fish, they come to look on the whole of nature as a means for obtaining such conveniences.
Furthermore, unable to find any other cause for the existence of these things, they attributed them to a creator-God who must be worshiped to gain their ends: “Hence also it follows, that everyone thought out for himself, according to his abilities, a different way of worshiping God, so that God might love him more than his fellows, and direct the whole course of nature for the satisfaction of his blind cupidity and insatiable avarice.” Then, when nature appeared unfriendly in the form of storms, earthquakes, and diseases, “they declared that such things happen, because the gods are angry at some wrong done them by men, or at some fault committed in their worship,” rather than realizing “that good and evil fortunes fall to the lot of pious and impious alike." Likewise, human beings made moral condemnations of others because they failed to understand that human emotions, “passions of hatred, anger, envy and so, considered in themselves, follow from the same necessity and efficacy of nature” and “nothing comes to pass in nature in contravention to her universal laws.” To explain human emotions, like everything else, we need to analyze them as we would the movements of planets: “I shall, therefore, treat of the nature and strength of my emotions according to the same method as I employed heretofore in my investigations concerning God and the mind. I shall consider human actions and desires in exactly the same manner as though I were concerned with lines, planes, and solids.” Everything has a rational explanation, and humans are capable of finding it. In using reason, people can find true happiness. Their real freedom comes when they understand the order and necessity of nature and achieve detachment from passing interests.
PASCAL Blaise Pascal (BLEZ pass-KAHL) (1623-1662) was a French scientist who sought to keep science and religion united. An accomplished scientist and a brilliant mathematician, he excelled at both the practical, by inventing a calculating machine, and the abstract, by devising a theory of chance or probability and doing work on conic sections. After a profound mystical vision on the night of November 23, 1654, which assured him that God cared for the human soul, he devoted the rest of his life to religious matters. He planned to write an “apology for the Christian religion” but died before he could do so. He did leave a set of notes for the larger work, however, which in published form became known as the Pensées (pahn-SAY) (Thoughts).
In the Pensées, Pascal tried to convert rationalists to Christianity by appealing to both their reason and their emotions. Humans were, he argued, frail creatures, of ten deceived by their senses, misled by reason, and battered by their emotions. And yet they were beings whose very nature involved thinking: “Man is but a reed, the weakest in nature; but he is a thinking reed.”
Pascal was determined to show that the Christian religion was not contrary to reason: “If we violate the principles of reason, our religion will be absurd, and it will be laughed at.” Christianity, he felt, was the only religion that recognized people’s true state of being as both vulnerable and great. To a Christian, a human being was both fallen and at the same time God’s special creation. But it was not necessary to emphasize one at the expense of the other-to view humans as only rational or only hopeless. Pascal even had an answer for skeptics in his famous wager. God is a reasonable bet; it is worthwhile to assume that God exists. If he does, then we win all; if he does not, we lose nothing.
Despite his own background as a scientist and mathematician, Pascal refused to rely on the scientist’s world of order and rationality to attract people to God: “If we submit everything to reason, there will be no mystery and no supernatural element in our religion.” In the new cosmology of the seventeenth century, “finite man,” Pascal believed, was lost in the new infinite world, a realization that frightened him: “The eternal silence of those infinite spaces strikes me with terror” (see the box on p. 499). The world of nature, then, could never reveal God: “Because they have failed to contemplate these infinites, men have rashly plunged into the examination of nature, as though they bore some proportion to her.... Their assumption is as infinite as their object.” A Christian could only rely on a God who through Jesus cared for human beings. In the final analysis, after providing reasonable arguments for Christianity, Pascal came to rest on faith. Reason, he believed, could take people only so far: “The heart has its reasons of which the reason knows nothing.” As a Christian, faith was the final step: “The heart feels God, not the reason. This is what constitutes faith: God experienced by the heart, not by the reason.”
In retrospect, it is obvious that Pascal failed to achieve his goal of uniting Christianity and science. The gap between science and traditional religion grew ever wider as Europe continued along its path of secularization. Of course, traditional religions were not eliminated, nor is there any evidence that churches had yet lost their followers. That would happen later. Nevertheless, more and more of the intellectual, social, and political elites began to act on the basis of secular rather than religious assumptions.
The Scientific Revolution represents a major turning point in modern Western civilization. In the Scientific Revolution, the Western world overthrew the medieval, Aristotelian-Ptolemaic worldview and geocentric universe and arrived at a new conception of the universe: the sun at the center, the planets as material bodies revolving around the sun in elliptical orbits, and an infinite rather than finite world. This new conception of the heavens was the work of a number of brilliant individuals: Nicolaus Copernicus, who theorized a heliocentric, or sun-centered, universe; Johannes Kepler, who discovered that planetary orbits were elliptical; Galileo Galilei, who, by using a telescope and observing the moon and sunspots, discovered that the universe seemed to be composed of material substance; and Isaac Newton, who tied together all of these ideas with his universal law of gravitation. The contributions of each individual built on the work of the others, thus establishing one of the basic principles of the new science-cooperation in the pursuit of new knowledge.
With the changes in the conception of “heaven” came changes in the conception of “earth.” The work of Bacon and Descartes left Europeans with the separation of mind and matter and the belief that by using only reason they could in fact understand and dominate the world of nature. The development of a scientific methodology furthered the work of the scientists, and the creation of scientific societies and learned journals spread its results. The Scientific Revolution was more than merely intellectual theories. It also appealed to nonscientific elites because of its practical implications for economic progress and for maintaining the social order, including the waging of war.
Although traditional churches stubbornly resisted the new ideas and a few intellectuals pointed to some inherent flaws, nothing was able to halt the supplanting of the traditional ways of thinking by new ways of thinking that created a more fundamental break with the past than that represented by the breakup of Christian unity in the Reformation.
The Scientific Revolution forced Europeans to change their conception of themselves. At first, some were appalled and even frightened by its implications. Formerly, humans on earth had viewed themselves as being at the center of the universe. Now the earth was only a tiny planet revolving around a sun that was itself only a speck in a boundless universe. Most people remained optimistic despite the apparent blow to human dignity. After all, had Newton not demonstrated that the universe was a great machine governed by natural laws? Newton had found one-the universal law of gravitation. Could others not find other laws? Were there not natural laws governing every aspect of human endeavor that could be found by the new scientific method? Thus, as we shall see in the next chapter, the Scientific Revolution leads us logically to the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century.