Western Civilization: Volume B: 1300 to 1815, 8th Edition
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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).”20 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 chaplain of the New Model Army said that the radicals wanted “the philosophy of Hermes, revived by the Paracelsian schools.” 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. By the eighteenth century, the Newtonian world-machine had been readily accepted, and Newtonian science would soon be applied to trade and industry by a mercantile and landed elite that believed that they “could retain a social order that primarily rewarded and enriched themselves while still improving the human condition.”
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.
Science and Religion
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. To the emerging scientists, however, it often seemed that theologians knew not of what they spoke. These “natural philosophers” then 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.21
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 Ptolemaic-Aristotelian 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.
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Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics (1677)
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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:
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p; 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.22
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.”23 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.”24 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. He had a brief but checkered career. 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, often 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.”25
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CHRONOLOGY Consequences of the Scientific Revolution:Important Works
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Bacon, The Great Instauration
1620
Descartes, Discourse on Method
1637
Pascal, Pens ees
1669
Spinoza, Ethics Demonstrated in the Geometrical Manner
1677
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Blaise Pascal. Blaise Pascal was a brilliant scientist and mathematician who hoped to keep science and Christianity united. In his Pensées, he made a passionate argument on behalf of the Christian religion. He is pictured here in a portrait by Philippe de Champaigne, a well-known French portrait painter of the Baroque period.
© Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library
Pascal: “What Is a Man in the Infinite?”
Perhaps no intellectual in the seventeenth century gave greater expression to the uncertainties generated by the cosmological revolution than Blaise Pascal, himself a scientist. Pascal’s work, the Pensées, consisted of notes for a large unfinished work justifying the Christian religion. In this selection, Pascal presents his musings on the human place in an infinite world.
Blaise Pascal, Pensées
Let man then contemplate the whole of nature in her full and exalted majesty. Let him turn his eyes from the lowly objects which surround him. Let him gaze on that brilliant light set like an eternal lamp to illumine the Universe; let the earth seem to him a dot compared with the vast orbit described by the sun, and let him wonder at the fact that this vast orbit itself is not more than a very small dot compared with that described by the stars in their revolutions around the firmament. But if our vision stops here, let the imagination pass one; it will exhaust its powers of thinking long before nature ceases to supply it with material for thought. All this visible world is no more than an imperceptible speck in nature’s ample bosom. No idea approaches it. We may extend our conceptions beyond all imaginable space; yet produce only atoms in comparison with the reality of things. It is an infinite sphere, the center of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere. In short, it is the greatest perceptible mark of God’s almighty power that our imagination should lose itself in that thought.
Returning to himself, let man consider what he is compared with all existence; let him think of himself as lost in his remote corner of nature; and from this little dungeon in which he finds himself lodged—I mean the Universe—let him learn to set a true value on the earth, its kingdoms, and cities, and upon himself. What is a man in the infinite? …
For, after all, what is a man in nature? A nothing in comparison with the infinite, an absolute in comparison with nothing, a central point between nothing and all. Infinitely far from understanding these extremes, the end of things and their beginning are hopelessly hidden from him in an impenetrable secret. He is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he came, and the infinite in which he is engulfed. What else then will he perceive but some appearance in the middle of things, in an eternal despair of knowing either their principle or their purpose? All things emerge from nothing and are borne onward to infinity. Who can follow this marvelous process? The Author of these wonders understands them. None but He can.
Why did Pascal question whether human beings could achieve scientific certainty? What is the significance of Pascal’s thoughts for modern science?
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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 above). 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 hea
rt 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.”26
In retrospect, it is obvious that Pascal failed to achieve his goal of uniting Christianity and science. Increasingly, the gap between science and traditional religion grew 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.
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CHAPTER SUMMARY
The Scientific Revolution represents a major turning point in modern Western civilization. In the Scientific Revolution, the Western world overthrew the medieval, Ptolemaic-Aristotelian 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.