Key individuals who devoted themselves to scientific research introduced progress in collective thought that would change the world more than the destruction that was taking place during the years of religious warfare. These individuals saw that the books of ancient writers, especially Aristotle, which were used as textbooks in universities, were full of statements that could not be proven, and therefore adopted a new method of learning. They argued that the only way to advance science was to set to work and try experiments, and determine the laws of nature without regard to what previous generations had thought. They consequently began the Scientific Revolution that ushered in a modern period of European and world history, marking a distinct break that affected how people saw and interacted with the world. Scientists approached the universe from different perspectives from the viewpoints of experimentation and observation, and came to conclusions that were different from anyone who observed the world before them.
This new worldview was eventually extended into many areas of science, but it began with the field of astronomy, in which advances started the Scientific Revolution during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries when it experienced a resurgence following the Renaissance by demonstrating people’s abilities to discover and formulate knowledge about the world. This fostered curiosity and discovery, and encouraged the study of classical texts. The emphasis on navigation, cartography and exploration also necessitated new and better techniques for viewing and mapping the stars. This was a time of disengagement from the medieval belief that world could only be understood in terms of God’s will, and would continue until the nineteenth century, as educated Europeans were secure in their conviction that people’s minds were fully capable of analyzing and guiding human life, and therefore developed new ideas that claimed to explain the past and the present world, and to serve as guides for a better life in the future.
Among the ancient texts that were researched were those of the classical philosophers and astronomers, including Aristotle and Ptolemy, from whom the medieval world borrowed its knowledge about conceptualizing the universe. This had formed the centre of what Europeans believed about the universe for more than a thousand years. Their observations seemed to indicate that the heavenly bodies orbited the Earth in circular patterns, which did not appear to be the case with the planets. Ptolemy explained this by saying that the planets orbited around the Earth in a smaller orbit within a larger orbit, or epicycles, and maintained the geocentric view of the universe that the Earth was the centre of the universe. Aristotle maintained that the heavens and the heavenly bodies were composed of different matter than the Earth, and the combination of Aristotle’s and Ptolemy’s ideas produced the concept known as the Ptolemaic universe. The Ptolemaic universe consisted of a series of crystal spheres containing the orbits of the sun, moon, stars and planets, with the stationary Earth at a fixed point in the centre of the crystal spheres. Beyond the crystal spheres was Heaven where God resided. This suited the Church that accepted the view of the Ptolemaic universe, by which the universe was finite and God was in an absolute location. This made everyone feel secure about things that could not be seen, but this was soon to be shattered when the Scientific Revolution overturned the intellectual authority of the Middle Ages and the classical world by changing how individuals saw the world.
The Polish astronomer, Nicholas Copernicus, began the Scientific Revolution by questioning Ptolemy’s system by introducing new research methods and means of evaluating evidence to reach new forms of conclusions. He did not necessarily doubt the idea about the spheres or perfectly circular orbits, but questioned Ptolemy’s rules explaining the orbits of the heavenly bodies. He theorised that the earth and the other planets revolved around the sun, referred to as the heliocentric theory in his book, On the Revolutions of Heavenly Bodies, published in 1543. This theory challenged the geocentric nature of the universe that was then taught in all universities, by which the sun and the stars revolved around the earth as the centre, and theorised that the universe was exponentially larger than under the Ptolemaic system. The stars also stayed still while the Earth revolves on its axis, which was another huge departure from Ptolemy. One of the biggest points of contention arose over the position and composition of the Earth, which according to the old worldview, the Earth was the centre of the universe and everything else, made of different matter, revolved around it. The Copernican theory took the Earth out of the centre of the universe and made just like any other planet flying through space, and meant that the heavenly bodies were made of the same matter as the Earth. This reduced the importance of the Earth in the universe God created, and took heaven off the map. Hence, Catholic and Protestant theologians declared that the new theory contradicted the teachings of the Bible, and therefore condemned his work. Nevertheless, scientific research continued.
The Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe kept the scientific inquiry moving with his sets of observations of the night sky, which became the foundation for the theories of the solar system by compiling accurate astronomical data. His apprentice, the German astronomer Johannes Kepler, who assisted Tycho Brahe in his final years, kept the data collected by Brahe and applied it to work on Copernicus’s theory. He also produced three fundamental laws of planetary motion. First, he proved that although the planets moved around the sun, they traveled in elliptical orbits and not in circular orbits with epicycles. Second, Kepler showed that a planet’s speed increases as it gets closer to the sun and then slows down as it moves farther away from the sun. Third, he demonstrated a direct relationship between a planet’s distance from the sun and the time it takes that planet to orbit the sun. Kepler’s laws thus proved what Copernicus speculated, and that the Ptolemaic system was wrong.
About the same time that Kepler studied Brahe’s data, the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei explored ideas about motion. Rather than speculating about motion, he experimented with it. After his experiments, he concluded that objects were in a state of motion until a force stops the motion. This idea challenged the physics of Aristotle and other classical philosophers, who said that rest was the natural state of objects. He also pioneered the use of the telescope to observe the night sky, and discovered that Jupiter had moons, the sun had sunspots and revolved on its axis as the earth did, and that the moon had craters everywhere. These discoveries further debunked the old worldview that the planets were embedded in crystal spheres, and that the heavenly bodies were made of a perfect matter different from that which composed the Earth. Galileo publishing his findings in his book, The Starry Universe in 1610, and criticisms of his observations began immediately. The religious authorities in Rome had absolute faith in Aristotle, and were fearful of the world that they could not see without a telescope, whereas Galileo suggested that human scientific experience manifested a much greater degree of common agreement that the interpretation of revelations by theologians, and the science as the observation of physical phenomena could be applied to assist in the explanation of scripture to examine how God had placed His commands in the laws of nature. Galileo was therefore summoned to Rome in 1616, and was ordered to desist teaching Copernican theory. The new science was therefore blocked from public discussion until after the election of Pope Urban VIII in 1623, when he published Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Ptolemaic and Copernican in 1632.
Unfortunately, it was banned by the Inquisition six months later, and remained banned until 1757 since it was considered in direct opposition to Church dogma and was put on trial, and then sentenced to house arrest when he wrote Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences, which was a study of motion and inertia.
Galileo’s trial signified how the weight of papal authority that halted the growth of new science in Italy. Nevertheless, these four astronomers developed the basics of scientific observation, which were used throughout the Scientific Revolution. Following the developments in the fifteenth and sixteenth century astronomy, the knowledge gained during the Scientific Revolution was matched by the change in the methodology used to gain new knowledge. This was the development of the modern scientific method, which was outlined through the fusion of the ideas of two philosophers of science who applied the practices of scientific observation to their respective fields, and marked the beginning of the Scientific Revolution, which continued outside of Italy.
The new science spread rapidly through education in universities, and was diffused to a large audience through books. After findings were published, there followed a wave of replies followed by new replies, which resulted in a growing body of scientific literature. By the end of the 17th century, new societies and academies devoted to science were founded, while there were many who agreed with Francis Bacon, a philosopher who advocated the use of experimental method for gaining knowledge, which was the same method used by Galileo, that scientific work ought to be a collective enterprise that should be pursued by all of its practitioners. His seminal work, New Organon, or True Directions Concerning the Interpretations of Nature, published in 1620, argued for applying deductive reasoning during controlled and consistent experimentation to avoid influences from preconceived bias, and therefore derive reliable scientific data. Bacon believed that true knowledge could only be gained through observation, or specifically through experiments. He developed and argued for the use reasoning based on observation, called inductive reasoning, was a fundamental part of empiricism, or the use of empirical evidence to gain knowledge. He believed that the logic and reasoning used by Aristotle and other ancient philosophers had serious flaws, because several factors could affect human reasoning, and taint the resulting “knowledge,” and speculation did not produce accurate or useful knowledge. If a scientist wanted to gain knowledge of the planets, they should observe, record, and then analyse the data the way Brahe and Galileo had done. Rather than working backward from a generalisation, Bacon recommended observing, then making a conclusion, then generalising once the conclusion was proved. Bacon thus criticised those who relied on thinkers such as Aristotle who did not use the empirical method, and instead relied on reasoning. According to Bacon, there were steps of the inductive method that scientists should follow. These concepts became famous and influential on the next generation of scientists:
One observes a natural occurrence or phenomena.
One accumulates data from observations.
One experiments with the observation to gather better data.
One tests principles against with more experiments and observation.
Another philosopher of science who helped begin the Scientific Revolution was the French René Descartes, who believed that the universe was based on mathematical and logical relationships, and elaborated a series of methodological principles that included systematic doubt, logical analysis, the strict progression of synthesis, meticulous review of procedures and conclusions, and an attempt to assert mathematics as a language of universal precision. He argued in his 1637 work Discourse on Methods that all things should be confirmed by observation. If it could not be observed, it should be doubted. Only logic, or deductive reasoning, could be trusted. His approach involved doubting everything that could be doubted, and then making generalisations based on obvious truths. In his view, the only thing that was truly known was his own existence, proven by the proposition, “I think, and therefore I am.” Descartes also divided all existence into the material and the spiritual, or either falling into the category of matter or mind, creating what is called a Cartesian Dualism. In an attempt to reconcile religion and science, he argued that the material world was subject to the inductive method that Bacon developed, and the spiritual world was subject to the deductive method. European scientists then began to fuse inductive and deductive reasoning, and the combination resulted in what became modern scientific method to reach unbiased conclusions.
In addition to his specialised work on optics, light, gravitation and mathematics, Sir Isaac Newton ascertained the pre-eminence of science in modern Europe and the world by synthesising the physical order of the universe, and mathematically demonstrating the validity of this synthesis. Using natural law as a guide, his account of the movements of the planets and the stars as well as objects on Earth was explained in his Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, or Principia, in 1687, in which he elucidated that the physical universe in its entirety operated according to fixed and definitive laws, or the laws of nature, which could be discovered, recorded and explained. Newton’s research works became the foundations of the study of physics through introducing the notions of fixed natural laws. One of them related to astronomy, in terms of how objects in motion must remain in motion until another forces changes that motion, and therefore did not change without interacting with the environment. As objects move in a straight line, an external force, such as gravity, would change their motion, such as the planets orbiting around the sun. A second natural law governed an object’s accelerated motion. Outside forces can change an object’s direction or speed, while constant forces create a constant speed. A third natural law maintains that every action has an equal and opposition reaction.
Newton believed that the universe operated according to a set of rational, mathematical principles and that these principles could prove the existence of God as the creator of nature as a great mechanical work. Newton studied and determined that the behaviour of matter was due to certain principles of physics that governed the universe. It was this belief in certain laws of physics that led him to develop his theory of gravity, particularly as it applies to the motion of heavenly bodies. Newton’s theory set aside the medieval assumption that God’s active participation explained the forces of nature. Natural laws, such as the law of gravity, are predictable and unchanging, and demonstrate there is little need for theological explanations of the world’s operations. Newton also advocated rationalism, by which the laws of nature could be understood with human reason, and mankind can be understood with human reason, and that mankind could be perfected. From Newton onward, man was the centre of the universe rather than God, and went beyond Galileo by taking observations and turning them into measured and irrefutable fact.
The Scientific Revolution thus provided humanity with new perspectives on the universe by removing the earth from the centre of the universe, and permanently changed the way Europeans thought about and looked at the world by challenging previously maintained ideas, impressing on them the importance of examining everything, asking questions, observing and experimenting as a new spirit of inquiry, when people began to think and read for themselves. This development led to a prolonged process of secularisation of thought during the eighteenth century as a culmination of attempts to explain the world and the role of people therein, which superseded the earlier theological approach of the middle ages that proved to be inadequate. Newly introduced scientific developments led to the emergence of Enlightenment philosophers who envisaged the possibility of sustained social progress through harnessing science to achieve improvements in the organisation of social, political and economic life. They believed that the methodology of science, the union of inductive and deductive reasoning, could be applied to all types of questions about human experiences outside scientific fields explaining the natural world, and that the scientific methodology could lead to improving the qualities of society through new forms of reasoning and experimentation.
Philosophers later applied the same rational process that scientists had used to analyse social problems. This led to the next important break from the medieval past, which was the Age of Enlightenment that was a direct result from the Scientific Revolution. This was an eighteenth-century intellectual movement that focused on humanism, science, rationalism and philosophy, which was the application of the new methods of science to the humanities and philosophy. It was thought that human reason and science would provide order according to higher cultural and intellectual standards, which in turn led to new developments in art, music, philosophy, science and literature, as well as a form of countermovement in the form of romanticism led by Johann Gottfried von Herder to promote the emotional side of human nature.
After the Scientific Revolution undermined traditional thought, political theorists were impelled to seek a new basis for sovereignty and political authority. These intellectuals placed great value on the concept of reason as a natural law combined with empirical evidence. They therefore believed that through the methodology of science, reasoning could be applied to problems outside of natural science and lead to the improvement of society through determining answers to newly posed questions, such as the rights and obligations of individuals, the role of government, and the right to rule over others.
One of the first to observe people and society and then generate propositions about human behaviour, and then deduce political theory from it was Thomas Hobbes. If one believed that God did not intervene in the affairs of people, Divine Right by which monarchs had earlier claimed to rule became more usurpation. This difficulty was met by Thomas Hobbes. He defended absolute monarchy in his book Leviathan, published in 1651, by assuming the existence of a social contract between the ruler and the ruled, which assigned absolute powers to the monarch in order to curb the natural bestiality of men, in which its pre-social state of nature made life “nasty, brutish and short,” by which there was a constant war between every individual.
The first to begin applying the new methods of science and reason to the humanities and philosophy was John Locke, who is considered to be the founder of Enlightenment empiricism as the belief that sensory experience through observations and experiments is the only source of human knowledge, and political liberalism. Locke published two works in 1689 and 1690. In Two Treatises on Government, he argued against the theory of divine right of kings and suggested that the authority of rulers had a human origin and was limited as such, and therefore posed an antithesis to Hobbes by maintaining that individuals should have a voice in governance to benefit the population. Locke stressed the importance of religious liberty in government and society, laying the foundation for the principle of separation of church and state. In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke shed serious doubt on the Cartesian and ancient Greek idea that humans are born with certain innate knowledge that can be drawn out through questions, logic and deductive reasoning. Locke proposed a formal and analytical theory composing a basis for the power of human reason, and thus to make belief in reason and the human mind a self conscious and active force that could supersede following tradition and thus emphasised individual freedom from governmental control although all being equal under the law, while also being subject to moral standards and obligations to the state that was charged with ensuring the well being of the population in a social contract. People’s ideas were all a result of sense perceptions from the external world, and of the subsequent operation of their minds on the consciousness created by those impressions.
All knowledge was based on experience, and that humans are born a blank slate, or tabula rasa, on which all knowledge is written as they live. Universal truths did not exist because each person’s knowledge and version of truth were based solely on their own experiences. Like Hobbes, he built up his political theory from the weaknesses of an imagined pre-civil society. However, he insisted on the natural morality of pre-social man. Hence, contracting into civil society by surrendering personal power to a ruler and magistrates were a way to secure natural morality more efficiently. If the ruling body offended against natural law, it would have to this theory conformed perfectly well in conformity with the Enlightenment idea that man and society could be improved. Educational and social institutions could have an impact on humans if they carried no a priori knowledge, or knowledge independent of experience, but rather were a blank slate waiting to be filled. Locke argued for the empirical perspective, but did not rule out the fact that knowledge was limited and must be reinforced by faith. Locke thus asserted that everyone possessed the natural physical abilities to receive experiences, remember and compare them, and correspondingly adjust their thoughts and actions to a standard of truth that Newton and his adherents had showed to reside in the laws of nature. His argument for empiricism served as the basis for the Enlightenment doctrine that emerged with his writings:
Reason is the most significant and positive capacity of a human.
Reason allows humans to free themselves from primitive, supersititious and dogmatic beliefs that keep humans ignorant and irrational.
Reason allows humans to learn and think correctly.
Reason can lead humans to perfection and to a heavenly existence on Earth.
Human belief should not base itself on human traditions or authority.
Reason, endowed to humans by a creator, makes all equal and deserving of liberty and justice.
Humans should seek to impart and/or gain knowledge, not feelings or emotions.
While people were the products of their environments, they could change their environments to conform to the laws of nature. Locke and Newton thus provided a set of categories for the foundation for the Enlightenment, five French philosophers Voltaire, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Baron Charles de Montesquieu, Francois Quesnay, and Denis Diderot, shaped it thereafter while accepting parts of Hobbes’s arguments in modified form. It was accepted that human nature could be defined by its conduct, and therefore a knowledge of human nature, like the nature of the universe, could only come from observing behaviour. Instincts, innate drives, along with the ability to reason composed the core of human nature, and the notion of self-preservation as part of a greater human drive of pursuing of happiness while avoiding pain.
Voltaire’s criticisms raised questions that later Enlightenment thinkers tried to answer. He wrote against injustice and inequality, and for the dignity of all humans and the importance of science. He believed that God made the laws that put the universe in order, and the evil of the world resulted from man straying from his understanding of natural law. It was mankind’s purpose to rediscover those laws using reason and bring order back into the world.
The most influential political philosopher of the later Enlightenment was Jean-Jacques Rousseau. While other philosophes believed that a better, progressive society would lead to better lives for mankind, Rousseau was wary of society and civilisation. His concept of the noble savage advanced the notion that civilisation corrupts man, and that to return to a more pure and free state of nature would make man more virtuous. Meanwhile, mankind was restrained by the institutions of society, or his words from his work, The Social Contract, “Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains.” This statement showed Rousseau’s distrust of society and civilisation, and stressed the role of the individual in society in the face of government as a necessary evil that restricted individual freedom but also prevented chaos.
Rousseau’s solution to the problems of society and civilisation was to create a society through a social contract that would allow mankind to be free as possible, which should be guided by the will of the people. He argued in this work that man would be best served by entering into an agreement to be governed. Those who gave their consent to be governed would agree to live by certain moral standards that would place the general will of the people above individual interests. The general will, can be described as that which is in the best interest of the collective. This was a plea for a democratic form of government. However, his idea of the general will did not recognise minorities in society and the tyranny of the majority. He also emphasized popular sovereignty, or the people’s ownership of true power, which undermined the political authority of rulers and government who placed no importance on the power of the people.
The other three French philosophes who shaped the Enlightenment did so in a less broad fashion. Baron de Montesquieu argued in his book Spirit of the Laws published in 1748 that the powers of the government should be separated in order to prevent any one person or institution from gaining excessive degrees of power. Montesquieu believed that there should be three branches of government, the legislative, executive and judicial, with each separate branch being dedicated to a specific aspect of governance. Each branch should have some power over the others, which he termed checks and balances. His ideas generated a lot of interest and served as the foundation of the governmental structures of modern democratic states.
The greatest work of the Enlightenment came in 1751 with the appearance of the first volume of the Encyclopedie, or Encyclopedia: The Rational Dictionary of the Sciences, the Arts and the Crafts. By making vast amounts of knowledge available, Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert hoped to promote the greater good of mankind, and hoped to change Europeans’ way of thinking. They edited what became a collection of thirty-five volumes by 1780, collecting the writings and ideas of the philosophes of the Enlightenment, and published these writings in this Encyclopedia, which was a collection of political and social criticisms that helped popularize and spread the ideas of the Enlightenment, making a considerable impact on all of Europe.
The ideas of the Enlightenment were first shaped in France, and built upon by later enlightened thinkers who formulated arguments about economic life. Francois Quesnay believed in laissez-faire economics, in which the government removed all constraints to free trade, including taxes and tariffs. With these restraints removed, the natural laws of economics would be free to operate and society would obtain its highest good. Adam Smith expanded the philosophies of the French enlightenment in his beliefs about how a worldwide economic system could be constructed to meet the needs of society. He introduced the idea of laissez-faire economics in An Inquiry into Nature and Cause of the Wealth of Nations published in 1776, in which he posited allowing an economy through thrive with an invisible free hand composed of market forces supporting a self-organising division of labour. The justifications for capitalism were governed by predetermined tenets: the economy of a nation is governed by natural laws; the essential natural law of economy is the law of supply and demand; in a free market economy, competition will bring producers to produce goods more efficiently so they can sell quality, lower cost goods; governmental legislation and regulations interfere with the natural laws of a self-governing economy, while also allowing for healing social policies to alleviate potential social ills caused by unbridled economic activity. Smith posited that free markets would expand wealth overall, and the free market would control itself through supply and demand, and human self-interest that would be balanced by human empathy. Book V of The Wealth of Nations provided detailed explanations for why the state was responsible for defence, justice, infrastructure and education, which required collective action to complement private market forces.
The practice of mercantilism during this time involved legislation and regulations to steer trade and production into definite channels in the interest of state power by means of bounties, trade tariffs, prohibitions and monopolies, and was therefore to ensure greater amounts of exports than imports to increase a nation’s wealth had two particular weaknesses. Adam Smith insisted that “consumption is the sole end and purpose of production.” Rather than countries specialising in their most efficient industries and trading freely in wider markets and at lower costs and prices, they were therefore caught in policies of protections and self-sufficiency. Another consequence of mercantilism with its complex rules and large bureaucracies involved corruption, mismanagement and conflicts of interest between protected and preferred trades, and those which were discriminated against. Smuggling on an enormous scale was one response to tariffs and prohibitions, and the attempts of the British government to strengthen regulations against smuggling and evasion stimulated problems in the British North American colonies, and eventually led to the American war of independence in 1775.
Immanuel Kant supplemented ideas for political and economic progress by calling for an appropriate global system of governance to maintain peace. He forwarded certain general ideas that decisively proved to be very influential on later philosophers by separating science and morality as two separate branches of knowledge, arguing that science could not serve as a guide for morality. Kant argued for the categorial imperative for morality as an intuitive instinct composing integrity, whereby ethics, morality and trust underlay conduct Everyone was to treat all actions as an end, and not a means to an end that guided one’s actions. He also argued that the basis of moral order should be the freedom of individual will and reasoning as independent thought, rather than merely being subservient to individual commands and ideas. In terms of theology, Kant believed that knowledge such as the existence of God cannot be attained by human reason, since human reason has limits.
All of the Enlightenment ideas had an effect on the intellectual life of Europe as well as the political life. Enlightened despotism arose especially in the generation before the French Revolution, which involved a recognition that royal power should be exercised to some extent in the interest of the population. Partly under the influence of theories of intellectuals, such as Rousseau who argued in his Social Contract, published in 1762. Rousseau followed Locke’s argument that while individuals formed a two way contract of duties, obligations and consultation between a monarchical state and the population, there was yet a tendency toward the use of monarchical power to improve social conditions in the collective community. Individuals therefore owed unconditional obedience to the state that represented the general will, while also emphasising the importance of individual sentiments.
Certain European monarchs, such as Catherine II of Russia, Frederick the Great of Prussia, and Joseph II of Austria, tried to advance the society of their states by fostering education, economic freedom and social justice, and generally using their power to promote the good of the people because they knew best through employing large bureaucracies following fairly coherent programmes, such as how Joseph II attempted to end the tax exemptions for conservative interests, abolish serfdom and reduce the power and influence of the Catholic Church. However, this raised antagonism from conservative interests, while the acceptance of the need to use power in the interests of the population also implied that could be rightfully resisted if this “contract” was broken. In the case of France, all of the main causes for revolution took place at the right time.
What were significant schools of thought during this period in European history, and what were their effects?
Round table
1. Organise groups of 3-4
2. individual students take turns responding to the reading questions
3.Subsequent students reinforce the previous points
4. Report results as a class
Leave a Reply