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.
CHAPTER REVIEW
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Upon Reflection
How do you explain the emergence of the Scientific Revolution?
What do we mean by the “Newtonian world-machine,” and what is its significance?
Compare the methods used by Bacon and Descartes. Would Pascal agree with the methods and interests of these men? Why or why not?
Key Terms
Scientific Revolution
geocentric conception
heliocentric conception
world-machine
querelles des femmes
Cartesian dualism
rationalism
scientific method
empiricism
Suggestions for Further Reading
GENERAL WORKS General surveys of the entire Scientific Revolution include J. Henry, The Scientific Revolution and the Origins of Modern Science, 2nd ed. (London, 2002), and J. R. Jacob, The Scientific Revolution: Aspirations and Achievements, 1500–1700 (Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1998). For a revisionist perspective, see S. Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago, 1996). See also the collections of articles in R. Porter, ed., Scientific Revolution in National Context (Cambridge, 2007), and P. Dear, Revolutionizing the Sciences: European Knowledge and Its Ambitions, 1500–1700 (Princeton, N.J., 2001). On the relationship of magic to the beginnings of the Scientific Revolution, see the pioneering works by F. Yates,
CHAPTER TIMELINE
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Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (New York, 1964) and The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (London, 1975). On the importance of mathematics, see P. Dear, Discipline and Experience: The Mathematical Way in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago, 1995). On the relationship between Renaissance artists and the Scientific Revolution, see P. H. Smith, Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago, 2006).
A REVOLUTION IN ASTRONOMY On the important figures of the revolution in astronomy, see E. Rosen, Copernicus and the Scientific Revolution (New York, 1984); H. Margolis, It Started with Copernicus: How Turning the World Inside Out Led to the Scientific Revolution (New York, 2002); M. Sharratt, Galileo: Decisive Innovator (Oxford, 1994); S. Drake, Galileo, Pioneer Scientist (Toronto, 1990); M. Casper, Johannes Kepler, trans. C. D. Hellman (London, 1959), the standard biography; R. S. Westfall, The Life of Isaac Newton (New York, 1993); and P. Fara, Newton: The Making of Genius (New York, 2004). On Newton’s relationship to alchemy, see M. White, Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer (Reading, Mass., 1997).
ADVANCES IN MEDICINE The worldview of Paracelsus can be examined in P. Ball, The Devil’s Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science (New York, 2006). The standard biography of Vesalius is C. D. O’Malley, Andreas Vesalius of Brussels, 1514–1564 (Berkeley, Calif., 1964). The work of Harvey is discussed in G. Whitteridge, William Harvey and the Circulation of the Blood (London, 1971).
IMPACT OF SCIENCE The importance of Francis Bacon in the early development of science is underscored in P. Zagorin, Francis Bacon (Princeton, N.J., 1998). A good introduction to the work of Descartes can be found in G. Radis-Lewis, Descartes: A Biography (Ithaca, N.Y., 1998). The standard biography of Spinoza in English is S. Hampshire, Spinoza (New York, 1961).
WOMEN AND SCIENCE On the subject of women and early modern science, see the comprehensive and highly informative work by L. Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science (Cambridge, Mass., 1989). See also C. Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco, 1980).
SCIENCE AND SOCIETY The social and political context for the triumph of science in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is examined in M. Jacobs, The Cultural Meaning of the Scientific Revolution (New York, 1988) and The Newtonians and the English Revolution, 1689–1720 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1976).
Visit the CourseMate website at www.cengagebrain.com for additional study tools and review materials for this chapter.
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CHAPTER 17
The Eighteenth Century: An Age of Enlightenment
The Parisian salon of Madame Geoffrin (third figure from the right in the first row)
Chateaux de Malmaison et Bois-Preau//© R_eunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY
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CHAPTER OUTLINE AND FOCUS QUESTIONS
The Enlightenment
What intellectual developments led to the emergence of the Enlightenment? Who were the leading figures of the Enlightenment, and what were their main contributions? In what type of social environment did the philosophes thrive, and what role did women play in that environment?
Culture and Society in the Enlightenment
What innovations in art, music, and literature occurred in the eighteenth century? How did popular culture differ from high culture in the eighteenth century?
Religion and the Churches
How did popular religion differ from institutional religion in the eighteenth century?
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CRITICAL THINKING
What was the relationship between the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment?
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THE EARTH-SHATTERING WORK of the “natural philosophers” in the Scientific Revolution had affected only a relatively small number of Europe’s educated elite. In the eighteenth century, this changed dramatically as a group of intellectuals known as the philosophes popularized the ideas of the Scientific Revolution and used them to undertake a dramatic reexamination of all aspects of life. In Paris, the cultural capital of Europe, women took the lead in bringing together groups of men and women to discuss the new ideas of the philosophes. At her fashionable home in the Rue Saint-Honoré, Marie-Thérése de Geoffrin (ma-REE-tay-RAYZ duh zhoh-FRANH), the wife of a wealthy merchant, held sway over gatherings that became the talk of France and even Europe. Distinguished foreigners, including a future king of Sweden and a future king of Poland, competed to receive invitations. When Madame Geoffrin made a visit to Vienna, she was so well received that she exclaimed, “I am better known here than a couple of yards from my own house.” Madame Geoffrin was an amiable but firm hostess who allowed wide-ranging discussions as long as they remained in good taste. When she found that arti
sts and philosophers did not mix particularly well (the artists were high-strung and the philosophers talked too much), she set up separate meetings. Artists were invited only on Mondays, philosophers, on Wednesdays. These gatherings were among the many avenues for the spread of the ideas of the philosophes. And those ideas had such a widespread impact on their society that historians ever since have called the eighteenth century the Age of Enlightenment.
For most of the philosophes, “enlightenment” included the rejection of traditional Christianity. The religious wars and intolerance of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had so alienated intellectuals that they were open and even eager to embrace the new ideas of the Scientific Revolution. Whereas the great scientists of the seventeenth century believed that their work exalted God, the intellectuals of the eighteenth century read those scientific conclusions a different way and increasingly turned their backs on Christian orthodoxy. Consequently, European intellectual life in the eighteenth century was marked by the emergence of the secularization that has characterized the modern Western mentality ever since. Ironically, at the same time that reason and materialism were beginning to replace faith and worship, a great outburst of religious sensibility manifested itself in music and art. Clearly, the growing secularization of the eighteenth century had not yet captured the hearts and minds of all European intellectuals and artists.
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The Enlightenment
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FOCUS QUESTIONS: What intellectual developments led to the emergence of the Enlightenment? Who were the leading figures of the Enlightenment, and what were their main contributions? In what type of social environment did the philosophes thrive, and what role did women play in that environment?
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In 1784, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (i-MAHN-yoo-el KAHNT) defined the Enlightenment as “man’s leaving his self-caused immaturity.” Whereas earlier periods had been handicapped by the inability to “use one’s intelligence without the guidance of another,” Kant proclaimed as the motto of the Enlightenment: “Dare to know! Have the courage to use your own intelligence!” The eighteenth-century Enlightenment was a movement of intellectuals who dared to know. They were greatly impressed with the accomplishments of the Scientific Revolution, and when they used the word reason—one of their favorite words—they were advocating the application of the scientific method to the understanding of all life. All institutions and all systems of thought were subject to the rational, scientific way of thinking if only people would free themselves from the shackles of old, worthless traditions, especially religious ones. If Isaac Newton could discover the natural laws regulating the world of nature, they too, by using reason, could find the laws that governed human society. This belief in turn led them to hope that they could make progress toward a better society than the one they had inherited. Reason, natural law, hope, progress—these were the buzz words in the heady atmosphere of the eighteenth century.
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Immanuel Kant,What Is Enlightenment?
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The Paths to Enlightenment
The intellectuals of the eighteenth century were especially influenced by the revolutionary thinkers of the seventeenth century. What were the major intellectual changes that culminated in the intellectual movement of the Enlightenment?
THE POPULARIZATION OF SCIENCE Although the intellectuals of the eighteenth century were much influenced by the scientific ideas of the seventeenth, they did not always acquire this knowledge directly from the original sources. Newton’s Principia was not an easy book to read or comprehend. Scientific ideas were spread to ever-widening circles of educated Europeans not so much by scientists themselves as by popularizers. Especially important as the direct link between the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century and the philosophes of the eighteenth was Bernard de Fontenelle (bayr-NAHR duh fawnt-NELL) (1657–1757), secretary of the French Royal Academy of Science from 1691 to 1741.
Although Fontenelle performed no scientific experiments and made no scientific discoveries, he possessed a deep knowledge of all the scientific work of earlier centuries and his own time. Moreover, he was able to communicate that body of scientific knowledge in a clear and even witty fashion that appealed to his upper-class audiences in a meaningful way. One of his most successful books, Plurality of Worlds, was actually presented in the form of an intimate conversation between a lady aristocrat and her lover who are engaged in conversation under the stars. What are they discussing? “Tell me,” she exclaims, “about these stars of yours.” Her lover proceeds to tell her of the tremendous advances in cosmology after the foolish errors of their forebears:
There came on the scene a certain German, one Copernicus, who made short work of all those various circles, all those solid skies, which the ancients had pictured to themselves. The former he abolished; the latter, he broke in pieces. Fired with the noble zeal of a true astronomer, he took the earth and spun it very far away from the center of the universe, where it had been installed, and in that center he put the sun, which had a far better title to the honor.1
In the course of two evenings under the stars, the lady learned the basic fundamentals of the new mechanistic universe. So too did scores of the educated elite of Europe. What bliss it was to learn the “truth” in such lighthearted fashion.
Thanks to Fontenelle, science was no longer the monopoly of experts but part of literature. He was especially fond of downplaying the religious backgrounds of the seventeenth-century scientists. Himself a skeptic, Fontenelle contributed to the growing skepticism toward religion at the end of the seventeenth century by portraying the churches as enemies of scientific progress.
The Popularization of Science in the Age of the Enlightenment. During the Enlightenment, the ideas of the Scientific Revolution were spread and popularized in a variety of ways. Scientific societies funded by royal and princely patronage were especially valuable in providing outlets for the spread of new scientific ideas. This illustration shows the German prince Frederick Christian visiting his Academy of Sciences in 1739. Note the many instruments of the new science around the rooms—human skeletons, globes, microscopes, telescopes, and orreries (mechanical models of the solar system).
Archivio di Stato, Bologna//© Alinari/Art Resource, NY
A NEW SKEPTICISM The great scientists of the seventeenth century, including Kepler, Galileo, and Newton, had pursued their work in a spirit of exalting God, not undermining Christianity. But as scientific knowledge spread, more and more educated men and women began to question religious truths and values. Skepticism about religion and a growing secularization of thought were especially evident in the work of Pierre Bayle (PYAYR BELL) (1647–1706), who remained a Protestant while becoming a leading critic of traditional religious attitudes. Bayle attacked superstition, religious intolerance, and dogmatism. In his view, compelling people to believe a particular set of religious ideas (as Louis XIV was doing at the time in Bayle’s France) was wrong. It simply created hypocrites and in itself was contrary to what religion should be about. Individual conscience should determine one’s actions. Bayle argued for complete religious toleration, maintaining that the existence of many religions would benefit rather than harm the state.
Bayle was one of a number of intellectuals who believed that the new rational principles of textual criticism should be applied to the Bible as well as secular documents. In his most famous work, the Historical and Critical Dictionary, Bayle demonstrated the results of his own efforts with a famous article on the Israelite King David. Undermining the traditional picture of the heroic David, he portrayed the king as a sensual, treacherous, cruel, and basically evil man. Bayle’s Dictionary, which attacked traditional religious practices and heroes, was well known to eighteenth-century philosophes. One critic regarded it as the “Bible of the eighteenth century.”
Pacific Discoveries
THE IMPACT OF TRAVEL LITERATURE Skepticism about both Christianity and European culture itself was nourished by trav
el reports. As we saw in Chapter 14, Europeans had embarked on voyages of discovery to other parts of the world in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In the course of the seventeenth century, traders, missionaries, medical practitioners, and explorers began to publish an increasing number of travel books that gave accounts of many different cultures. Then, too, the new geographic adventures of the eighteenth century, especially the discovery of the Pacific island of Tahiti and of New Zealand and Australia by James Cook, aroused much enthusiasm. Cook’s Travels, an account of his journey, became a best seller. Educated Europeans responded to these accounts of lands abroad in different ways.
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