How Did The Scientific Revolution Change Europe

Chapter ten: The Scientific Revolution

During the seventeenth century, changes in how educated Europeans understood the natural world marked the emergence of a recognizably modern scientific perspective. The practical impact of that shift was relatively minor at the time, but the long-term consequences were enormous. For the first fourth dimension, a culture emerged in Europe in which empirical observations served as the basis for logical theorize about how natural laws operated, leading to the possibility of a vast range of scientific discovery.

For well over a thousand years, Europeans had looked backwards for insights into the natural earth. They relied on Aristotle and accounts by other aboriginal authors to explain how the universe functioned, how physics operated, and how the man body regulated itself. These teachings were supplemented past Christian scholarship that sought to find the hand of God in the natural world. In that location was a marked absenteeism of empirical research: observing, from a neutral and objective standpoint, natural phenomena and using those observations as the basis of informed experimentation every bit to their causes and operation.

Medieval and early-modern Europeans had never developed an empirical scientific culture considering the betoken of science had never been to discover the truth, only to describe it. In other words, practically every pre-mod person already knew how the globe worked: they knew it from myth, from the teachings of ancient regime, and from religion. In a sense, all of the answers were already at that place, and thus empirical observation was seen equally redundant. The term used at the time for "scientific discipline" was "natural philosophy," a branch of philosophy devoted to observing and cataloging natural phenomena, for the most part without attempting to explain those observations outside of references to aboriginal authorities and the Bible.

The Scientific Process, Mentality, and Method

The Scientific Revolution grew out of Renaissance humanism. Humanistic scholars by the late sixteenth century were increasingly dissatisfied with some aboriginal authors, since those authors did not, in fact, explain everything. While aboriginal authors wrote about astronomy, for instance, they did non adequately explicate the observed movements of the stars and planets. Likewise, with the explosion of new translations of classical works, it became clear that ancient scholars had actively debated and even rejected the teachings of figures like Aristotle. This suggested that it was legitimate to question even the most key ancient ideas.

Even to scholars who respected and deferred to aboriginal authors, much of ancient astronomy was based on some fairly questionable speculations, like the idea that the Earth sits on top of a behemothic body of water that occasionally sloshes around, causing earthquakes. Thus, the first major discoveries in the Revolution had to do with astronomy, as scholars started carrying out their ain observations and advancing theories to explicate what they saw happening in the heavens. This process is known as inductive reasoning: starting with disparate facts, then working toward a theory to explain them. Information technology is the opposite of deductive reasoning, which starts with a known theory so tries to prove that observations fit into it. The archetype example of the latter was taking the idea that the Earth is the center of the universe every bit a given, so trying to force the observed movements of the heavenly bodies to make sense through elaborate explanations.

That beingness noted, deductive reasoning is still an important part of "real" science in that it allows for proofs: in mathematics, for case, one tin offset with a known principle and and so use it to prove more complex formulas. Mathematics itself played a cardinal role in the Scientific Revolution, since many thinkers insisted that mathematics was part of a divine language that existed apart from but was equally nearly important equally the Bible itself. God had designed the universe in such a way that mathematics offered the possibility of real scientific certainty. The shut relationship between math, physics, and engineering is obvious in the work of people like Da Vinci, Galileo, and Isaac Newton, all of whom combined an advanced understanding of mathematics and its practical applications.

That beingness said, it would exist wrong to claim that the Scientific Revolution sparked a completely objective, recognizably "modern" form of science. What early-modernistic scientists hoped to exercise was understand the secrets of the universe. Isaac Newton was a scientist just besides an alchemist, devoting considerable time and effort to trying to effigy out how to "transmute" base of operations metals similar lead into gold. Besides, many thinkers were intensely interested in the works of an ancient (and, as it turns out, fictional) philosopher and wizard named Hermes Trismagistus, Hermes the "Thrice-Blest," who had supposedly discovered a series of magical formulas that explained the universe. There was a keen bargain of crossover between what nosotros might call up of as magic and spirituality on the one mitt and "real" science on the other.

This is evident not only with Newton, but with other scientists of the era – many were astronomers and astrologers, just as many were mathematicians and engineers while also existence alchemists. The point hither is that, ultimately, even though it turns out that magic does not exist, the involvement in discovery piqued past the idea of probing the universe'southward secrets nevertheless led to 18-carat scientific discovery.

The major figure in codifying and popularizing the new empirical, inductive process was Francis Bacon (1561 – 1626), an English nobleman. Bacon is all-time remembered for "creating" the scientific method: advancing a hypothesis to explain observed data, but then trying to disprove the hypothesis rather than trying to force the facts to evidence it. In this manner, the best that could be hoped for was a highly likely, not-yet-disproven theory, rather than a flimsy, vulnerable theory that needed artificial defenses. Over fourth dimension, the scientific method came to include a corollary requirement: the results of an experiment had to yield the same results consistently in order for a hypothesis to exist considered viable.

Salary took the radical footstep of breaking even with the Renaissance obsession with ancient scholarship by arguing that ancient knowledge of the natural earth was all but worthless and that scholars in the present should instead reconstruct their knowledge of the world based on empirical observation. Bacon was a kind of prophet of the movement, not a scientist himself – he was fired as the Lord Chancellor of Rex James I after accepting bribes, and he died subsequently communicable a cold stuffing snowfall into a dead chicken as some kind of sick-conceived biological experiment. Regardless, he codified the new methodology and worldview of the Scientific Revolution itself.

Scientific Discoveries

Astronomy

The most influential aboriginal sources of scientific cognition were Ptolemy, a Greek astronomer and mathematician, and Aristotle. Both argued that the Earth was at the center of the universe, which consisted of a giant crystal sphere studded with the stars. That sphere slowly rotated, while the sun, moon, and planets were suspended above the earth inside the sphere and also rotated around the World. Ptolemy, who lived centuries later on Aristotle, elaborated on the Aristotelian organization and claimed that there were not just ane but shut to lxxx spheres, one within the other, which explained the fact that the dissimilar heavenly bodies did not all motility in the same direction or at the same speed. The thought that the globe is at the center of the universe is known as geocentrism.

The geocentric universe illustrated, with the sun and planets revolving effectually the Earth. Interestingly, the illustration above was created in 1660, a few decades after Galileo popularized the fact that geocentrism was completely inaccurate.

In this model of the universe, the earth was distinct from the other heavenly bodies. The earth was imperfect, chaotic, and irresolute, while the heavens were perfect and uniform. Thus, Christian thinkers embraced the Aristotelian model in part because information technology fit Christian theology so well: God and the angels were on the outside of the most distant crystal sphere in a state of total perfection, while humans and the devil were on, or within in the case of Satan, the imperfect world. This Christianized version of an ancient Greek model of the universe is where the concept that God and sky are "upwards in the sky" and hell is "below the footing" originated. When the astronomers of the Scientific Revolution started detecting irregularities in the heavens, this totally contradicted how well-nigh learned people idea about, and had thought most, the essential characteristics of the universe.

The problem with this model is that information technology did not friction match the observed paths taken by the stars and, peculiarly, the planets, which exercise not follow regular, circular orbits. Medieval astronomers tried to account for these differences by always-more-elaborate caveats and modifications to the idea of simple perfect orbits, positing the beingness of hugely complex paths supposedly taken by various heavenly objects. A Polish priest, Nicolaus Copernicus (1473 – 1543), was the beginning to debate in a book published merely before his death that the whole organization would match reality if the sunday was at the center of the orbits instead of the earth: this concept is chosen heliocentrism. He retained the idea of the crystal spheres, and he as well used Ptolemy's calculations in his own piece of work, but his was notwithstanding the first work to propose the concept of a heliocentric universe. Copernicus himself was a quintessential Renaissance man; he was a medical doctor, an achieved painter, fluent in Greek, and of course, every bit an astronomer.

Copernicus'southward theory was little known outside of astronomical circles, with most astronomers expressing dismay and skepticism at the idea of heliocentrism. A Danish astronomer named Tycho Brahe (1546 – 1601) tried to refute the Heliocentric theory by publishing a massive work of astronomical observations and corresponding mathematical information that attempted to demonstrate that the Earth was indeed at the center of the universe simply that the heavenly bodies followed monstrously circuitous orbits. He spent twenty years carefully observing the heavens from his castle on an island near Copenhagen. The major importance of Brahe's work for posterity was that it provided a wealth of data for later on astronomers to work from, fifty-fifty though his primal argument turned out to exist inaccurate.

A German astronomer, Johannes Kepler (1571 – 1630), who had been Brahe'southward assistant late in his life, ended upward using Brahe's data to argue confronting Brahe'due south conclusion, demonstrating that the data really proved that the sun was indeed at the center of the universe. Kepler also noticed that at that place was some kind of forcefulness emanating from the sun that seemed to hold the planets in orbit; based on the contempo work of another scientist concerning magnets, Kepler concluded that some form of magnetism was likely the cause (in fact, Kepler had noticed the role of gravity in infinite). Interestingly, Kepler did his piece of work while holding a position as the official imperial mathematician of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II, who overlooked the fact that Kepler was a Protestant considering he (Rudolph) was and so interested in science – and this was against the backdrop of the Thirty Years' State of war, no less!

In the end, the almost significant publicist of heliocentrism was an Italian, Galileo Galilei (1564 – 1642). Galileo built a telescope based on a description he had heard and was delighted to notice previously unknown aspects of the heavenly bodies, such equally the fact that the moon and sun did not have smooth, perfect surfaces, and that Jupiter had its own moons. He publicly demonstrated his telescope and speedily became well known among educated elites across Europe. His start major publication, The Starry Messenger in 1610, conclusively demonstrated that the heavens were full of previously unknown objects (e.m. the moons of Jupiter) and that planets and moons appeared to be "imperfect" in the same manner as the globe.

In 1632 he published a work, the Dialogue, that used the piece of work of earlier astronomers and his ain observations to support the heliocentric view of the universe; this piece of work apace became much better known than had Copernicus's or Kepler's. The Dialogue consisted of two imaginary interlocutors, one of whom presented the example for heliocentrism, the other for geocentrism. The supporter of heliocentrism wins every argument, and his debate partner, "Stupid" (Simplicio) is confounded. In publicizing his piece of work, Galileo undermined the idea that the heavens were perfect, that the earth was primal, and by extension, that aboriginal noesis was reliable. Few things could have been more disruptive.

Galileo was tried by the Inquisition in 1633, in part considering his onetime patron, the pope Urban VIII, thought that Galileo had been mocking him personally by naming the imaginary defender of the Ptolemaic view Stupid. Specifically, Galileo was accused of supporting a condemned doctrine, heliocentrism, not of heresy per se. Galileo was forced to recant and his book was placed on the Cosmic Index of banned books, where information technology would remain until 1822. Much of the explanation for this persecution can be plant in the fact that his work was published against the backdrop of religious war and then engulfing Europe; the Catholic Church was not a tolerant institution in the seventeenth century.

Galileo is less well remembered for his piece of work in physics, simply his work at that place was every bit important equally his astronomy. Six years later on the Dialogue was put on the Index, he published another work, Two New Sciences of Move and Mechanics, that provided a theory and mathematical formulas of inertia and aspects of gravity. These theories refuted Aristotelian physics, which had claimed that objects only stay in motion when there is directly impetus; Galileo demonstrated through experiments the principles of inertia and acceleration and began the task of defining their performance mathematically.

Isaac Newton

Peradventure the single most important figure of the Scientific Revolution was Sir Isaac Newton, an English language mathematician (1642 – 1727). Newton was, just put, a genius. He was a chaired professor of mathematics at Cambridge Academy at the historic period of 27 and was renowned inside his ain lifetime for being one of the great minds of his age. In 1687 he published the Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, which posited a unmarried universal police force of gravitation that applied equally to enormous objects like the planet Globe and tiny objects that could barely be detected by homo senses. The entire system of physics was mapped out and described in precise, and accurate, mathematical formulas in the Mathematical Principles. It was one of the single greatest works of science of all time: its importance was not just in being "right," but in providing a comprehensive arrangement that could replace the work of ancient authors like Aristotle. Following Newton, figures like Aristotle and Ptolemy were increasingly regarded in the manner they are today: of import individuals in the history of thought, especially philosophy, just not sources of accurate scientific information.

Newton was i of the bully intellectual over-achievers of all time. He correctly calculated the relative mass of earth and water, deduced that electrical impulses had something to practice with the nervous system, and figured out that all colors are part of the larger spectrum of light. He personally designed and built a new and more constructive kind of telescope, and wrote the founding paper of the modern science of optics.

Newton'south treatise on the properties of lite, the founding document of optics.

Newton, personally, was a humorless curmudgeon. While he was famous in his own lifetime, ultimately being knighted past King William and serving as the chair of Britain's first scientific lodge, he but reluctantly published his work, and that merely later fearing that his self-understood "rivals" would steal it if he did not. He was also completely chaste his entire life and had what might charitably be described as a "bellicose" temperament.

Medicine

While astronomy and physics advanced by leaps and bounds during the period of the Scientific Revolution, other scientific disciplines such as medical scientific discipline and biology advanced much more slowly. At the time there were a host of received notions and prejudices, especially confronting work on homo cadavers, that prevented large-scale experimentation. Instead, most doctors continued to rely on the work of the Greek md Galen, who in the 2nd century CE had elaborated on the Aristotelian idea of the four "humors" that supposedly governed wellness: claret, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. According to that theory, disease was the effect of an overabundance of one humor and a lack of another – hence the centuries-quondam practice of bleeding someone who was ill in hope of reducing the "backlog" blood.

While belief in humors continued to hold sway in the absenteeism of more than compelling theories, important advances did occur in beefcake. The Italian doc Andreas Vesalius (1514 – 1564) published a work on anatomy based on cadavers. Some other doctor, William Harvey (1578 – 1657), conclusively demonstrated that blood flows through the body by existence pumped by the centre, non emanating out of the liver as had been believed earlier. Soon after his decease, other doctors used a new invention, the microscope, the detect the capillaries that connect arteries to other tissues. Increasingly, physicians began to consider the human trunk every bit an particular written into the Book of Nature also.

One of Vesalius's analogy, in this case of homo musculature.

Many medical advances would not have been possible without Renaissance-era advances in other fields. Renaissance creative techniques fabricated precise, authentic anatomical drawings possible, and print ensured that works on medicine could be distributed across Europe apace after their initial publication. Thus, scientists and doctors were able to contribute their discoveries to a growing body of piece of work, all of which led to a more than widespread agreement of how the body worked. Even though the concept of the humors (likewise as other ideas similar miasmas causing illness) remained prevalent, doctors now had a better thought of how the torso was designed and what its constituent parts really did.

Unfortunately for the wellness of humankind, the new understanding of anatomy did not atomic number 82 to an agreement of contamination. The Dutch scientist Antonie Van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723) invented the microscope, and in the 1670s he was able to identify what were later referred to as bacteria. Unfortunately, he did non deduce that bacteria were responsible for affliction; information technology would take until the 1860s with the French doctor and scientist Louis Pasteur for definitive proof of the relationship between germs and sickness to exist established.

Science and Guild

Women

An often-overlooked facet of the Scientific Revolution was the participation of (mostly aristocratic) women. Noblewomen were often the collaborators of their husbands or fathers – for example, it was a husband and wife team, the Lavoisiers, in French republic that invented the premises of modern chemistry in the eighteenth century. In some cases, such as the early on entomologist Maria Sibylla Merian, women struck out on their ain and conducted experiments and expeditions – Merian took a enquiry trip to Southward America and did pioneering work on the life cycles of various insect species. Others made important medical discoveries, as when the Countess of Chincon (wife of the Castilian governor of Peru in the early seventeenth century) discovered that quinine was effective in treating malaria.

I of Merian'due south illustrations, depicting the life cycle of butterflies and moths.

A few male person theorists supported a proto-feminist outlook as well. The French scholar François Poulain de la Barre (1647-1725) ended that empirical observation demonstrated that the custom of male dominance in European society was just that: a custom. Zip about pregnancy or childbearing made women inherently unsuitable to participate in public life. De la Barre applied a like argument to non-European peoples, arguing that there were simply cosmetic differences between what would later be chosen "races." His work was almost unprecedented in its egalitarian vision, anticipating the ideas of human universalism that only really came of age in the nineteenth century, and merely became dominant views in the twentieth.

Despite the beingness of highly-qualified and educated women scientists, informal rules banned them from joining scientific societies or property academy positions. In general, one of the well-nigh obvious failures of the Scientific Revolution to overcome social prejudices was in the marked trend of male person scientists to apply the new science to reinforce rather than overthrow sexist stereotypes. Anatomical drawings drew attending to the fact that women had wider hips than did men, which supposedly "destined" them for a primary function of childbearing. Too, they (inaccurately) depicted women as having smaller skulls, supposedly implying lower intelligence. In fields in which women had held very of import social roles in the by, such as midwifery, male scientists and doctors increasingly pushed them to the side, insisting on a male person-dominated "scientific" superiority of technique.

The Scientific Revolution's claims near female anatomy ultimately created a pseudo-scientific (i.e empirically false just claiming scientific truth) theory of sexual difference that was really worse in its outlook on women's capacity than before ideas. Women were not, according to the new theories, just inferior versions of men, they were biologically crafted to be the polar reverse: foolish, overly emotional, and above all incapable of rational thought. Even the old conventionalities that sexual pleasure for both partners was necessary for procreation was abandoned (although it took until the belatedly eighteenth century for that belief to atrophy), with women reduced to passive receptacles whose pleasance was irrelevant. Women were not, supposedly, biologically capable of political participation or intellectual achievement. To sum upward, in stark contrast to the breakthroughs in astronomy that proved that the earth is not at the middle of the cosmos, it proved easier to overthrow the entire vision of the universe than to upset sexual roles and stereotypes.

Scientific Institutions and Culture

Many developments in the early part of the Scientific Revolution occurred in Catholic countries such equally Italy, simply over time the centre of scientific development shifted north and west. While many Protestants, including Luther himself, were but every bit hostile as were Catholics to new scientific ideas at starting time, in the long term Protestant governments proved more tolerant of ideas that seemed to violate the literal truth of the Bible. This had less to do with some kind of inherent tolerance in Protestantism than to the fact that Protestant institutions were less powerful and pervasive than was the Roman church in Cosmic countries.

In the netherlands and England in particular it was possible to openly publish and/or champion scientific ideas without fright of a backlash; in the case of Newton, it was possible to be outright famous. In general, Protestant governments and elites were more open to the thought that God might reveal Himself in nature itself, non simply in holy scripture, and thus they were sympathetic to the piety of scientific research. Ultimately, this increased tolerance and support of science would see the center of scientific innovation in the northwest of Europe, not in the eye of the before Renaissance in Italy.

That being noted, France was not to be underestimated as a site of discovery, due in office to the cosmopolitanism of Paris and the traditional power of the French kings in holding the papacy at arm'due south length. The Royal Academy of Sciences in France was opened in the same year equally its sister organization, the Majestic Club, in England (1662). Both funded scientific efforts that were "useful" in the sense of serving shipping and military applications besides every bit those which were more purely experimental, as in astronomy. The English Imperial Social club was particularly focused on armed services applications, especially optics and ballistics, setting a design of land-funded scientific discipline in the service of state of war that continues to this mean solar day.

The English and French scientific societies were important parts of the evolution of a larger "Republic of Science," the predecessor to nowadays-day "academia." Learned men (and some women) from all over Europe attended lectures, corresponded, and carried out their own scientific experiments. Newton was the president of the Imperial Guild, which published Philosophical Transactions of the Purple Society, the forerunner to bookish journals that remain the backbone of scholarship today.

The cover of the first volume of the Philosophical Transactions, arguably the first formal academic journal in history.

The importance of the Republic of Science cannot be overstated, because the ongoing commutation of ideas and fact-checking among experts allowed science to progress incrementally and continually. In other words, no scientist had to "start from scratch," because he or she was already edifice on the piece of work of by scholars. Rather than scientific discipline requiring an isolated genius like Da Vinci, now any intelligent and self-disciplined individual could hope to make a meaningful contribution to a scientific field. Newton explicitly acknowledged the importance of this incremental growth of knowledge when he emphasized that "If I have seen further it is by continuing on the shoulders of giants."

The Commonwealth of Science likewise inaugurated a shift abroad from the use of Latin as the official language of scholarship in learned European civilization. Scientific essays were oft written in the colloquial past scientists like Kepler and Galileo in part because they wanted to differentiate their piece of work from church doctrine (which, of course, was traditionally written in Latin). Newton initially wrote in Latin so that it could exist read by his peers on the continent, but his later works were in English language. Over the course of the eighteenth century, Latin steadily declined as the applied language of learning, replaced by the major vernaculars, especially French and English.

The Philosophical Bear upon of Science

One of the effects of the scientific discoveries of the sixteenth century was a growing belief that the universe itself operated according to regular, anticipated, "mechanical" laws that could be described through mathematics. This outlook lent itself to ane in which God could be seen equally a slap-up scientist or clockmaker: the divine intelligence who created a perfect universe and then set it in movement. In this sense, so, the new scientific discoveries in no way undermined religious belief at the time, despite the fact that they contradicted sure specific passages of the Bible. This kind of religious outlook became known every bit deism, and its proponents deists, people who believed that God did not intervene in everyday life but instead but set up the universe in motion, then stepped back to watch.

Some thinkers, nigh notably the French philosopher Rene Descartes (1596 – 1650), tried to employ this new logical outlook to theology itself. Descartes tried to subject belief and doubt to a thorough logical critique, asking what he could exist absolutely sure of as a philosophical starting-point. His conclusion was that the only thing he really knew was that he doubted, that in that location was something thinking and operating skeptically, which in plough implied that there was a matter, himself, capable of thought. This led to his famous statement "I remember, therefore I am." Descartes went on to follow a serial of logical "proofs" from this existing, thinking existence to "prove" that God Himself existed, as the original source of thought. This was a philosophical application not but of the new mechanical and mathematical outlook, but of deductive reasoning. Descartes, personally, embraced the view that God was a chivalrous and reasonable power of creation, merely one who did non lower Himself to meddle in the universe.

Perhaps the most important cultural change that emerged from the Revolution was the unproblematic fact that scientific discipline acquired growing cultural authority. The results of the new science were demonstrable; Galileo delighted onlookers by assuasive them to use his telescope not just to look at the heaven, but at buildings in Rome, thereby proving that his invention worked. The possibility that scientific discipline could, and in fact already had, disproved claims fabricated in the Bible laid the foundation for a whole new approach to noesis that threatened a permanent break with a religiously-founded paradigm. In other words, scientific advances inadvertently led to the growth in skepticism most faith, sometimes up to and including outright atheism: the rejection of the very idea of the existence of God.

The most farthermost figure in this regard was Baruch Spinoza (1632 – 1677), a Sephardic Jew who was born and raised in Amsterdam in the Netherlands. Spinoza took the insights of the era and practical them wholeheartedly to religion itself, arguing that the universe of natural, physical laws was synonymous with God, and that the very thought of a human-like God with a personality and intentions was superstitious, unprovable, and cool. He was excommunicated from Judaism itself when he was only twenty-iv but went on to go on publishing his works, in the procedure laying the background for what were later known equally "freethinkers" – people who may or may not have been actual atheists, simply who certainly rejected the authorisation of holy writings and churches.

Spinoza's work was controversial enough that he was condemned as an atheist non merely by the Jewish community, but past both the Catholic Church and diverse Protestant churches equally well. One of the things about his thought that infuriated practically anybody was that Spinoza claimed that at that place was no such thing equally "spirit" or "the soul" – all of the universe was merely matter, and the simply way to truly acquire about its functioning was to combine empirical experimentation with mathematics. This "materialism" as it was called at the fourth dimension was then close to outright atheism as to be nearly duplicate.

The other side of skepticism was a kind of cynical version of religious belief that dispensed with the emotional connection to God and reduced information technology to a elementary human action of spiritual insurance: the French mathematician Blaise Pascal (1623 – 1662), inventor of the field of probability, postulated "Pascal's Wager." In the Wager, Pascal argued that either God does or does not exist, and each person can cull either to acknowledge Him or not. If He does exist, and one acknowledges Him, then one is saved. If He does exist, and one rejects Him, then one is damned. If He does not exist and 1 acknowledges Him, nada happens, and if He does not exist and one does not acknowledge Him, nothing happens either. Thus, one might likewise worship God in some way, since in that location is no negative fallout if He does not exist, but there is (i.e. an eternity of torment in hell) if He does.

Pascal applied an every bit skeptical view to the existing governments of his day. He noted that "Nosotros see neither justice nor injustice which does not alter its nature with change in climate. Three degrees of latitude reverse all jurisprudence; a peak decides the truth. Central laws change after a few years of possession…a strange justice that is bounded past a river! Truth on this side of the Pyrenees, error on the other side." In other words, at that place was no fixed or eternal or God-given about majestic decrees and laws; they were arbitrary community enforced through the state.

Conclusion

The Scientific Revolution, while it certainly achieved many important breakthroughs and discoveries, was as much about a cultural and intellectual shift as the discoveries themselves. It was non, for example, accompanied by technological advances of annotation with a few exceptions like telescopes. Instead, its importance lay in the fact that, first, educated people came to believe that the workings of the universe could be discovered through inquiry and experimentation, and 2d, that the universe itself was structured along rational lines. Those conclusions would in turn lead to a awe-inspiring motility of philosophy and thought during the eighteenth century: the Enlightenment.

Image Citations (Wikimedia Commons):

Geocentric Illustration – Public Domain

Vesalius Illustration – Wellcome Library

Merian Entomological Drawing – Public Domain

Philosophical Transactions – Public Domain

Source: https://pressbooks.nscc.ca/worldhistory/chapter/chapter-10-the-scientific-revolution/

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