AP European History

Barron’s

The Scientific Revolution

The Development of “Natural Philosophy” or Science

The idea of studying the universe through scientific experimentation and observation emerged as the ultimate form of gathering knowledge. The great thinkers of the day turned away from their artistic pursuits, which had been so profitable, and began to try to explain the mysteries of the universe or even the multiverse: The term science would have to wait until the nineteenth century but, for the time being, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the study of natural phenomena was labeled “natural philosophy.”

The Philosophers of Modern Science

Francis Bacon (1561-1626) was an English thinker who advocated the inductive or experimental method: observation of natural phenomena, accumulating data, experimenting to refine the data; drawing conclusions; formulating principles that are subject to continuing observation and experimentation. He is generally credited as an original empiricist.

René Descartes (1596-1650) was a French philosopher whose Discourse on Method (1637) argued that everything that is not validated by observation should be doubted, but that his own existence was proven by the proposition: “I think, therefore I am” (cogito ergo sum). God exists, he argued, because a perfect being would have existence as part of its nature. Cartesian Dualism divided all existence into the spiritual and the material-the former can be examined only through deductive reasoning; the latter is subject to the experimental method. His goal to reconcile religion with science was short-circuited by the very method of skepticism that subsequent philosophers inherited from his writings. He is generally credited as an original rationalist.

The Revolutionary Thinkers of Science

• • Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543), a Polish astronomer, upset the comfortable assumptions of the geocentric (earth-centered) universe of Ptolemy (the second century Egyptian) with his heliocentric (sun-centered) conception of the universe.
  1. Although his work, Concerning the Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies, was not published until after his death, his theories were proven by Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), a German who plotted the elliptic orbits of the planets, thereby predicting their movements.
  2. Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) made telescopic observations that validated Copernican theory, and his spirited advocacy of Copernicus earned him condemnation by the Inquisition.
• • The Copernican heliocentric view seemed to contradict the primacy of humanity in God’s creation and thereby to deny the teachings of the Church.
  1. Supported in Protestant northern Europe, where the Reformation had questioned all orthodoxy.
  2. The theory and the scientific method that had formulated it symbolized Europe’s new intellectual freedom.
  3. The Roman Catholic Church tried to suppress the Copernican revolution by banning writings of the charismatic Galileo and putting him under lifelong house arrest for possible heresy.
  4. Galileo had observed the moons of Jupiter as support for Copernicus, which earned him a lasting reputation for rigidity.
  5. (It took nearly 350 years for the papacy to exonerate Galileo.)
• • The field of medicine began to advance with the rising practice of human dissection, allowing medical knowledge to grow. New advances in anatomy, the study of human systems such as circulation, and toxicology occurred during this period. The practice of Rome’s Greek-born physician and philosopher, Galen, who had healed through adjusting bodily humors, was challenged on many fronts.
  1. Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564) was the father of modern anatomy. His anatomy book, De Humani Corporis Fabrica, revolutionized me study of the human body. He is of ten credited with the discovery of our skeletal, nervous, and other systems. .
  2. Paracelsus (1493-1541), was a German physician, botanist, and astronomer who invented toxicology. He rejected Galen and wanted to perform medical research based purely on observations in nature rather than by studying what others had writ ten. He served as a physician in the Venetian wars.
  3. William Harvey (1578-1657) explained the circulatory system in detail for the first time in his work, On the Motion of the Heart and Blood.

Results of the Scientific Revolution

• • Deism emerged from the discovery of the natural sciences as the religious ideal of an era in which God was a kind of cosmic clockmaker who created a perfect universe that He does not have to intervene in.
• • Rationalism: the conviction that the laws of nature are fathomable by human reason, and that humanity is perfectible-as an assumption and an achievable goal.
• • The scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries redefined astronomy and physics.
• • Less dramatic but still-significant advances took place in mathematics, especially with the development of probability and calculus, and in medicine through advances in surgery, anatomy, drug therapy, and with the discovery of microorganisms.
• • Creation of learned societies dedicated to the advance of science, such as the French Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society of London.
• • The development of science transformed the intellectual life of Europe by convincing people that human reason could understand the secrets of the universe and transform life without the help of organized religion.

The eighteenth century marked the end of the Age of Religion, which had governed European thought for over a millennium. Skepticism and rationalism became offshoots of the development of science, which encouraged the growth of secularism.