Chapter 16: Toward a New Worldview

Major Breakthroughs of the Scientific Revolution

Scientific Thought in 1500

One of the most important disciplines was natural philosophy, which focused on fundamental questions about the nature of the universe, its purpose, and how it functioned.
Aristotle’s cosmology made intellectual sense, but it could not account for the observed motions of the stars and planets and, in particular, provided no explanation for the apparent backward motion of the planets (which we now know occurs because planets closer to the sun periodically overtake the earth on their faster orbits).
Aristotle’s views, revised by medieval philosophers, also dominated thinking about physics and motion on earth.
Aristotle had distinguished sharply between the world of the celestial spheres and that of the earth— the sublunar world.
Natural philosophy was considered distinct from and superior to mathematics and mathematical disciplines like astronomy, optics, and mechanics, and Aristotle’s ideas about the cosmos were accepted, with revisions, for two thousand years.

Origins of the Scientific Revolution

The Scientific Revolution drew on long-term developments in European culture, as well as borrowings from Arabic scholars.
Medieval philosophers acquired a limited but real independence from theologians and a sense of free inquiry.
Medieval universities drew on rich traditions of Islamic learning.
With the expansion of Islam into lands of the Byzantine Empire in the seventh and eighth centuries, the Muslim world had inherited ancient Greek learning, to which Islamic scholars added their own commentaries and new discoveries.
The Renaissance also stimulated scientific progress.
Renaissance patrons played a role in funding scientific investigations, as they did for art and literature.
Developments in technology also encouraged the emergence of the Scientific Revolution.
The rise of printing in the mid-fifteenth century provided a faster and less expensive way to circulate knowledge across Europe.
The navigational problems of long sea voyages in the age of overseas expansion, along with the rise of trade and colonization, led to their own series of technological innovations.
Recent historical research has also focused on the contribution to the Scientific Revolution of practices that no longer belong to the realm of science, such as astrology.
Centuries-old practices of magic and alchemy also remained important traditions for natural philosophers.
Unlike modern-day conjurers, the practitioners of magic strove to understand and control hidden connections they perceived among different elements of the natural world, such as that between a magnet and iron.

The Copernican Hypothesis

The desire to explain and thereby glorify God’s handiwork led to the first great departure from the medieval system.
This was the work of the Polish cleric Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543).
Finishing his university studies and returning to a position in church administration in East Prussia, Copernicus worked on his hypothesis from 1506 to 1530.
The Copernican hypothesis had enormous scientific and religious implications, many of which the conservative Copernicus did not anticipate.
First, it put the stars at rest, their apparent nightly movement simply a result of the earth’s rotation.
Second, Copernicus’s theory suggested a universe of staggering size.
Religious leaders varied in their response to Copernicus’s theories.
A few Protestant scholars became avid Copernicans, while others accepted some elements of his criticism of Ptolemy, but firmly rejected the notion that the earth moved, a doctrine that contradicted the literal reading of some passages of the Bible.
Other events were almost as influential in creating doubts about traditional astronomy.
In 1572 a new star appeared and shone very brightly for almost two years.
In 1577 a new comet suddenly moved through the sky, cutting a straight path across the supposedly impenetrable crystal spheres.
It was time, as a sixteenth-century scientific writer put it, for “the radical renovation of astronomy.

Brahe, Kepler, and Galileo: Proving Copernicus Right

One astronomer who agreed with Copernicus was Tycho Brahe(1546–1601).
Upon the king’s death, Brahe acquired a new patron in the Holy Roman emperor Rudolph II and built a new observatory in Prague.
It was left to Brahe’s young assistant, Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), to rework Brahe’s mountain of observations
Kepler’s examination of his predecessor’s meticulously recorded findings convinced him that Ptolemy’s astronomy could not explain them.
Kepler’s contribution was monumental.
Whereas Copernicus had used mathematics to describe planetary movement, Kepler proved mathematically the precise relations of a sun-centered (solar) system.
Kepler was a genius with many talents. Beyond his great contribution to astronomy, he pioneered the field of optic.
Kepler was not, however, the consummate modern scientist that these achievements suggest.
His duties as court mathematician included casting horoscopes, and he based his own daily life on astrological principles.
While Kepler was unraveling planetary motion, a young Florentine named Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) was challenging all the old ideas about motion.
His great achievement was the elaboration and consolidation of the experimental method.
That is, rather than speculate about what might or should happen, Galileo conducted controlled experiments to find out what actually did happen.
In his early experiments, Galileo focused on deficiencies in Aristotle’s theories of motion.
Through another experiment, he formulated the law of inertia.
He found that rest was not the natural state of objects.
Rather, an object continues in motion forever unless stopped by some external force.
Galileo then applied the experimental method to astronomy.
On hearing details about the invention of the telescope in Holland, Galileo made one for himself and trained it on the heavens.
A new method of learning and investigating was being developed, one that proved useful in any field of inquiry.
In 1597, when Johannes Kepler sent Galileo an early publication defending Copernicus, Galileo replied that it was too dangerous to express his support for heliocentrism publicly.
3 Galileo was a devout Catholic who sincerely believed that his theories did not detract from the perfection of God.

Newton’s Synthesis

Despite the efforts of the church, by about 1640 the work of Brahe, Kepler, and Galileo had been largely accepted by the scientific community.
Newton was born into the lower English gentry in 1642, and he enrolled at Cambridge University in 1661.
Newton arrived at some of his most basic ideas about physics between 1664 and 1666, during a break from studies at Cambridge caused by an outbreak of plague.
In 1684 Newton returned to physics and the preparation of his ideas for publication.
The result appeared three years later in Philosophicae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy).
The key feature of the Newtonian synthesis was the law of universal gravitation.
According to this law, every body in the universe attracts every other body in the universe in a precise mathematical relationship, whereby the force of attraction is proportional to the quantity of matter of the objects and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.
Newton’s synthesis of mathematics with physics and astronomy prevailed until the twentieth century and established him as one of the most important figures in the history of science.

Important Changes in Scientific Thinking

Bacon, Descartes, and the Scientific Method

Two important thinkers, Francis Bacon (1561–1626) and René Descartes(1596–1650), were influential in describing and advocating for improved scientific methods based, respectively, on experimentation and mathematical reasoning.
English politician and writer Francis Bacon was the greatest early propagandist for the new experimental method.
Bacon formalized the empirical method, which had already been used by Brahe and Galileo, into the general theory of inductive reasoning known as empiricism
On the continent, more speculative methods retained support.
The French philosopher René Descartes was a multitalented genius who made his first great discovery in mathematics.
Descartes used mathematics to elaborate a highly influential vision of the workings of the cosmos.
Accepting Galileo’s claim that all elements of the universe are composed of the same matter, Descartes began to investigate the basic nature of matter.
Although Descartes’s hypothesis about the vacuum was proved wrong, his notion of a mechanistic universe intelligible through the physics of motion proved inspirational.
Descartes’s greatest achievement was to develop his initial vision into a whole philosophy of knowledge and science.
The devout Descartes believed that God had endowed man with reason for a purpose and that rational speculation could provide a path to the truths of creation.
His view of the world as consisting of two fundamental entities is known as Cartesian dualism.
Both Bacon’s inductive experimentalism and Descartes’s deductive mathematical reasoning had their faults.

Medicine, the Body, and Chemistry

The Scientific Revolution soon inspired renewed study of the microcosm of the human body.
For many centuries the ancient Greek physician Galen’s explanation of the body carried the same authority as Aristotle’s account of the universe.
Swiss physician and alchemist Paracelsus (1493–1541) was an early proponent of the experimental method in medicine and pioneered the use of chemicals and drugs to address what he saw as chemical, rather than humoral, imbalances.
Some decades later, Irishman Robert Boyle (1627– 1691) helped found the modern science of chemistry.
Following Paracelsus’s lead, he undertook experiments to discover the basic elements of nature, which he believed was composed of infinitely small atoms

Empire and Natural History

While the traditional story of the Scientific Revolution focuses exclusively on developments within Europe itself, and in particular on achievements in mathematical astronomy, more recently scholars have emphasized the impact of Europe’s overseas empires on the accumulation and transmission of knowledge about the natural world.
Building on the rediscovery of Theophrastus’s botanical treatise (see page 506) and other classical texts, early modern scholars published new works cataloguing forms of life in northern Europe, Asia, and the Americas that were unknown to the ancients.
Much of the new knowledge contained in such works resulted from scientific expeditions, often sponsored by European governments eager to learn about and profit from their imperial holdings.
Audiences at home eagerly read the accounts of naturalists, who braved the heat, insects, and diseases of tropical jungles to bring home exotic animal, vegetable, and mineral specimens.
Many public museums, like the British Museum in London, began with the donation of a large private collection.

Science and Society

The rise of modern science had many consequences, some of which are still unfolding.
First, it went hand in hand with the rise of a new social group— the international scientific community.
Second, as governments intervened to support and sometimes direct research, the new scientific community became closely tied to the state and its agendas, a development strongly endorsed by Francis Bacon in England.
It was long believed that the Scientific Revolution had little relationship to practical concerns and the life of the masses until the late-eighteenth-century Industrial Revolution.
Some things did not change in the Scientific Revolution. Scholars have noted that nature was often depicted as a female, whose veil of secrecy needed to be stripped away and penetrated by male experts.
There were, however, a number of noteworthy exceptions.
In Italy, universities and academies did offer posts to women, attracting some foreigners spurned at home.
By the time Louis XIV died in 1715, many of the scientific ideas that would eventually coalesce into a new worldview had been assembled.
By 1775, however, a large portion of western Europe’s educated elite had embraced the new ideas.
This was the work of many men and women across Europe who participated in the Enlightenment, either as publishers, writers, and distributors of texts or as members of the eager public that consumed them.

The Enlightenment

The Scientific Revolution was a crucial factor in the creation of the new worldview of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment.
This worldview, which has played a large role in shaping the modern mind, grew out of a rich mix of diverse and often conflicting ideas that were debated in international networks.
The first and foremost idea was that the methods of natural science could and should be used to examine and understand all aspects of life.
Nothing was to be accepted on faith; everything was to be submitted to rationalism, a secular, critical way of thinking.
A second important Enlightenment concept was that the scientific method was capable of discovering the laws of human society as well as those of nature.

The Emergence of the Enlightenment

Loosely united by certain key ideas, the European Enlightenment (ca. 1690–1789) was a broad intellectual and cultural movement that gained strength gradually and did not reach its maturity until about 1750.
Like the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment was also fueled by Europe’s increased contacts with the wider world.
In the wake of the great discoveries of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the rapidly growing travel literature taught Europeans that the peoples of China, India, Africa, and the Americas all had their own very different beliefs and customs.
The excitement of the Scientific Revolution also generated doubt and uncertainty, contributing to a widespread crisis in late-seventeenth-century European thought.
In the wake of the devastation wrought by the Thirty Years’ War, some people asked whether ideological conformity in religious matters was really necessary.
These concerns combined spectacularly in the career of Pierre Bayle (1647–1706), a French Protestant, or Huguenot, who took refuge from government persecution in the tolerant Dutch Republic
Like Bayle, many Huguenots fled France for the Dutch Republic, a center of early Enlightenment thought for people of many faiths.
The German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646–1716), who had developed calculus independently of Isaac Newton, refuted both Cartesian dualism and Spinoza’s monism (the idea that there is only one substance in the universe).
Out of this period of intellectual turmoil came John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690).
In this work Locke (1632–1704), a physician and member of the Royal Society, brilliantly set forth a new theory about how human beings learn and form their ideas.
Locke’s equally important contribution to political theory, Two Treatises of Civil Government (1690), insisted on the sovereignty of the elected Parliament against the authority of the Crown.

The Influence of the Philosophies

Divergences among the early thinkers of the Enlightenment show that, while they shared many of the same premises and questions, the answers they found differed widely.
The spread of this spirit of inquiry and debate owed a great deal to the work of the philosophes, a group of intellectuals who proudly proclaimed that they, at long last, were bringing the light of reason to their ignorant fellow humans.
One of the greatest philosophes, the baron de Montesquieu(1689–1755), brilliantly pioneered this approach in The Persian Letters, an extremely influential social satire published in 1721 and considered the first major work of the French Enlightenment.
Having gained fame by using wit as a weapon against cruelty and superstition, Montesquieu turned to the study of history and politics.
Showing that forms of government were shaped by history and geography, Montesquieu focused on the conditions that would promote liberty and prevent tyranny.
The most famous and perhaps most representative philosophe was François Marie Arouet, who was known by the pen name Voltaire (1694– 1778).
Returning to France, Voltaire had the great fortune of meeting Gabrielle-Emilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, marquise du Châtelet(1706–1749), a noblewoman with a passion for science.
While living at Cirey, Voltaire wrote works praising England and popularizing English science.
He had witnessed Newton’s burial at Westminster Abbey in 1727, and he lauded Newton as history’s greatest man, for he had used his genius for the benefit of humanity.
Yet, like almost all of the philosophes, Voltaire was a reformer, not a revolutionary, in politics.
He pessimistically concluded that the best one could hope for in the way of government was a good monarch, since human beings “are very rarely worthy to govern themselves.”
Voltaire’s philosophical and religious positions were much more radical than his social and political beliefs.
The ultimate strength of the philosophes lay in their dedication and organization.
The philosophes felt keenly that they were engaged in a common undertaking that transcended individuals
The Encyclopedia survived initial resistance from the French government and the Catholic Church.
Published between 1751 and 1772, it contained seventy two thousand articles by leading scientists, writers, skilled workers, and progressive priests, and it treated every aspect of life and knowledge.
. Summing up the new worldview of the Enlightenment, the Encyclopedia was widely read, especially in less-expensive reprint editions, and it was extremely influential.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

In the early 1740s Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), the son of a poor Swiss watchmaker, made his way into the Parisian Enlightenment through his brilliant intellect.
Like other Enlightenment thinkers, Rousseau was passionately committed to individual freedom.
Unlike them, however, he attacked rationalism and civilization as destroying, rather than liberating, the individual.
Rousseau also called for a rigid division of gender roles.
According to Rousseau, women and men were radically different beings.
Destined by nature to assume a passive role in sexual relations, women should also be subordinate in social life.
Rousseau’s contribution to political theory in The Social Contract (1762) was based on two fundamental concepts: the general will and popular sovereignty.
According to Rousseau, the general will is sacred and absolute, reflecting the common interests of all the people, who have displaced the monarch as the holder of sovereign power.
Rousseau was both one of the most influential voices of the Enlightenment and, in his rejection of rationalism and social discourse, a harbinger of reaction against Enlightenment ideas.

The International Enlightenment

The Enlightenment was a movement of international dimensions, with thinkers traversing borders in a constant exchange of visits, letters, and printed materials.
Within this broad international conversation, scholars have identified regional and national particularities.
The Scottish Enlightenment, which was centered in Edinburgh, was marked by an emphasis on common sense and scientific reasoning.
A central figure in Edinburgh was David Hume (1711–1776), whose emphasis on civic morality and religious skepticism had a powerful impact at home and abroad.
Another major figure of the Scottish Enlightenment was Adam Smith.
His Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) argued that the thriving commercial life of the eighteenth century produced civic virtue through the values of competition, fair play, and individual autonomy.
The Enlightenment in British North America was heavily influenced by English and Scottish thinkers, especially John Locke, and by Montesquieu’s arguments for checks and balances in government.
After 1760 Enlightenment ideas were hotly debated in the German-speaking states, often in dialogue with Christian theology.
Northern Europeans often regarded the Italian states as culturally backward, yet important developments in Enlightenment thought took place in the Italian peninsula.

Urban Culture and Life in the Public Sphere

A series of new institutions and practices encouraged the spread of enlightened ideas in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
First, the European production and consumption of books grew significantly.
Moreover, the types of books people read changed dramatically.
Reading more books on many more subjects, the educated public approached reading in a new way.
The result was what some scholars have called a reading revolution.
Conversation, discussion, and debate also played a critical role in the Enlightenment.
Evolving from the gatherings presided over by the précieuses in the late seventeenth century, the salon was a regular meeting held in the elegant private drawing rooms (or salons) of talented, wealthy men and women.
The salon thus represented an accommodation between the ruling classes and the leaders of Enlightenment thought.
Elite women also exercised great influence on artistic taste.
Soft pastels, ornate interiors, sentimental portraits, and starry-eyed lovers protected by hovering cupids were all hallmarks of the style they favored.
This style, known as rococo, was popular throughout Europe in the period from 1720 to 1780.
While membership at the salons was restricted to the wellborn, the well connected, and the exceptionally talented, a number of institutions provided the rest of society with access to Enlightenment ideas.
In addition to these institutions, book clubs, debating societies, Masonic lodges (groups of Freemasons, a secret society that accepted craftsmen and shopkeepers as well as middle-class men and nobles), and newspapers all played roles in the creation of a new public sphere that celebrated open debate informed by critical reason.
Enlightenment philosophes did not direct their message to peasants or urban laborers.
Although they were barred from salons and academies, ordinary people were not immune to the new ideas in circulation.

Race and the Enlightenment

In recent years, historians have found in the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment a crucial turning point in European ideas about race.
Enlightenment thinkers such as David Hume and Immanuel Kant helped popularize these ideas.
Kant taught and wrote as much about “anthropology” and “geography” as he did about standard philosophical themes such as logic, metaphysics, and moral philosophy.
Using the word race to designate biologically distinct groups of humans, akin to distinct animal species, was new.
Previously, Europeans grouped other peoples into “nations” based on their historical, political, and cultural affiliations, rather than on supposedly innate physical differences.
The abbé Raynal’s History of the Two Indies (1770) fiercely attacked slavery and the abuses of European colonization.
Scholars are only at the beginning of efforts to understand the links between Enlightenment thinkers' ideas about race and their notions of equality, progress, and reason.
The new powers of science and reason were thus marshaled to imbue traditional stereotypes with the force of natural law.

Enlightened Absolutism

Many government officials were interested in philosophical ideas.
They were among the best-educated members of society, and their daily involvement in complex affairs of state made them naturally attracted to ideas for improving human society.
Encouraged and instructed by these officials, some absolutist rulers tried to reform their governments in accordance with Enlightenment ideals— what historians have called the enlightened absolutism of the later eighteenth century.

Frederick the Great of Prussia

Frederick II (r. 1740–1786), commonly known as Frederick the Great, built masterfully on the work of his father, Frederick William I.
Although in his youth he embraced culture and literature rather than the militarism championed by his father, by the time he came to the throne Frederick was determined to use the splendid army he had inherited.
He invaded her rich province of Silesia (sigh-LEEzhuh), defying solemn Prussian promises to respect the Pragmatic Sanction, a diplomatic agreement that had guaranteed Maria Theresa’s succession.
Though successful in 1742, Frederick had to fight against great odds to save Prussia from total destruction after the ongoing competition between Britain and France for colonial empire brought another great conflict in 1756.
The terrible struggle of the Seven Years’ War tempered Frederick’s interest in territorial expansion and brought him to consider how more humane policies for his subjects might also strengthen the state.
The legal system and the bureaucracy were Frederick’s primary tools.
Prussia’s laws were simplified, torture was abolished, and judges decided cases quickly and impartially.
Frederick’s dedication to highminded government went only so far, however.
While he condemned serfdom in the abstract, he accepted it in practice and did not free the serfs on his own estates.
In reforming Prussia’s bureaucracy, Frederick drew on the principles of cameralism, the German science of public administration that emerged in the decades following the Thirty Years’ War.
Cameralism shared with the Enlightenment an emphasis on rationality, progress, and utilitarianism.

Catherine the Great of Prussia

Catherine the Great of Russia (r. 1762–1796) was one of the most remarkable rulers of her age, and the French philosophes adored her.
Catherine was a German princess from Anhalt-Zerbst, an insignificant principality sandwiched between Prussia and Saxony.
Catherine’s Romanov connection made her a suitable bride at the age of fifteen for the heir to the Russian throne.
Catherine had drunk deeply at the Enlightenment well.
Never questioning that absolute monarchy was the best form of government, she set out to rule in an enlightened manner.
She had three main goals.
First, she worked hard to continue Peter the Great’s effort to bring the culture of western Europe to Russia.
Catherine’s second goal was domestic reform, and she began her reign with sincere and ambitious projects.
Catherine’s third goal was territorial expansion, and in this respect she was extremely successful.
Her armies subjugated the last descendants of the Mongols and the Crimean Tartars, and began the conquest of the Caucasus.

The Austrian Habsburgs

Another female monarch, Maria Theresa (r. 1740–1780) of Austria, set out to reform her nation, although traditional power politics was a more important motivation for her than were Enlightenment teachings.
Emerging from the long War of the Austrian Succession in 1748 with the serious loss of Silesia, Maria Theresa was determined to introduce reforms that would make the state stronger and more efficient.
Coregent with his mother from 1765 onward and a strong supporter of change from above, Joseph II moved forward rapidly when he came to the throne in 1780.
Despite differences in their policies, Joseph II and the other absolutists of the later eighteenth century combined old-fashioned state-building with the culture and critical thinking of the Enlightenment.

Jewish Life and the Limits of Enlightened Absolutism

Perhaps the best example of the limitations of enlightened absolutism are the debates surrounding the emancipation of the Jews.
In the eighteenth century an Enlightenment movement known as the Haskalah emerged from within the European Jewish community, led by the Prussian philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786).
Arguments for tolerance won some ground.
The British Parliament passed a law allowing naturalization of Jews in 1753, but later repealed the law due to public outrage.
Many monarchs rejected all ideas of emancipation. Although he permitted freedom of religion to his Christian subjects, Frederick the Great of Prussia firmly opposed any general emancipation for the Jews, as he did for the serfs.
The first European state to remove all restrictions on the Jews was France under the French Revolution.
Over the next hundred years, Jews gradually won full legal and civil rights throughout the rest of western Europe.
Emancipation in eastern Europe took even longer and aroused more conflict and violence.