UNIT TWO
THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT
The Scientific Revolution
"The Age of Miracles is past"
One of Shakespeare’s characters remarks in a play written in the 1600’s, ‘The age of miracles is past.’ By the mid-seventeenth century there were quite a few people no longer prepared to believe in miracles. Science had become fashionable, and educated men looked more and more to finding reasonable answers to their questions. A slow transition from societies based on religion to societies based on concerns outside religion was taking place in Western Europe. Religion was receding from the foreground and people were beginning to think that security and stability were matters for a government to take care of, not the church. The long wars of religion also had undermined peoples’ faith in the church. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there were a number of rather spectacular scientific discoveries which were very impressive to people at that time. The change in peoples’ attitudes from being willing to believe what they were told to wanting to know the answers and explanations for things and being willing to experiment until they found those answers is often called the "Scientific Revolution". Most of the scientific discoveries made in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were in the field of astronomy, but the discoveries also involved increasing knowledge in the areas of physics, human anatomy, and mathematics.
Knowledge builds; one always works with the knowledge that someone before one found out and progresses from that. The scientific discoveries of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were dependent on what had been found out during the Renaissance and in particular, some inventions of the Renaissance such as the printing press. With the printing press, scientists could publish their findings and read about the findings of others. Being able to do this sped up the process of invention and discovery.
It is important for you to realize that it was not easy to be a scientist in the sixteenth century and seventeenth centuries. You had to have a great deal of courage and persistence. There were many obstacles to be faced and overcome. There were three obstacles in particular that were hard to deal with. One was the church. The church had attached its authority to certain scientific explanations that already existed. One of the most important of these was the scientific explanation of the universe which existed at that time. The church also however had a great deal to say about things like dissection of human bodies in order to learn about anatomy. Another obstacle was the reverence in which educated people held the ancient Greek scholars such as Aristotle and Galen. If the results of your experimentation contradicted Aristotle, for example, it was likely the educated community would think you were wrong, not Aristotle. Lastly there was the fact that many of the discoveries seemed to contradict what was considered "common sense" at that time. An example would be trying to get people to believe the earth moved. It doesn’t feel like it’s moving; you can’t see it’s moving. People would be likely to laugh at you and tell you any idiot could see the earth did not move!! We know today that sometimes scientific truth contradicts the senses but they did not fully realize that then.
A number of great scientists lived in the sixteen and seventeenth centuries; so many that the time is called the "Age of Genius". We will now take a look at these scientists and see what they discovered.
A new view of the universe
You will remember that the people of the Middle Ages believed that the earth was the center of the universe and that it was unmoving. You might also remember that people then believed that the earth was round and flat like a penny and that Jerusalem was at the center. Everything in the universe moved around the earth; the sun, moon, seven planets and the sphere of fixed stars. Planets moved because invisible spiritual movers moved them. Heaven, hell and purgatory were arranged around this unmoving earth. This belief was an interesting mix of science and religion . The bit about the earth being in the center of the universe came from Ptolemy, who got it from Aristotle; the invisible spiritual movers came from Aristotle’s explanations of how things moved. The heaven, hell and purgatory bit had been added by the church. It was going to take a lot of courage, persistence and hard work to show the world what the truth was; to separate the scientific part from religion. After all, this old theory had been taught for thirteen centuries!!
Nicholas Copernicus
Nicholas Copernicus was a Polish scholar. Copernicus was a busy person but he found time to study the heavens from a small turret set in the walls of a cathedral. Just before his death, he published On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres. In this book, he suggested that if mathematicians assumed the earth moved around the sun, certain problems having to do with calendar-making might be solved. Copernicus could not prove that the earth moved; his suggestion, however, one day, would bring the Aristotelian explanation of the universe crashing down . The church denounced Copernicus and placed his book on the list of books Catholics were forbidden to read.
Tycho Brahe
Tycho Brahe was a Danish astronomer. He was the greatest astronomer of the late 16th century. He took the next step toward learning the truth about the universe by starting regular observations of the heavens. In 1572, he observed a new star among the fixed stars. According to Aristotle, this was impossible. Tycho, with the help of the King of Denmark, established an observatory on an island. Regular observations of the heavens convinced him that the planets revolved around the sun, but the sun revolved around the earth. He could not prove anything, however.
Johannes Kepler
Johannes Kepler worked for Tycho Brahe. Kepler was an astronomer who was determined to show that the universe was not a kind of living being but a type of clockwork. Kepler was convinced that the planets moved around the sun in elliptical orbits. The difficulty was to find the shape of the ellipse. Using the findings of another scientist, William Gilbert, who had done work with magnetism, Kepler decided that magnetism was the key to movement in the universe. The discovery of the elliptical orbits of the planets was Kepler’s greatest contribution to man’s understanding of the universe.
Galileo
Galileo was born in 1564. He investigated and experimented in various areas; among them, mathematics, physics and mechanics. Galileo developed a powerful telescope (it magnified 20 times) in which he studied the heavens. He saw the surface of the moon, saw the stars in the Milky Way, saw four of Jupiter’s moons and saw the phases of Venus. He was convinced that the earth moved. He made a model of Jupiter and its four moons and used this to explain what he thought the solar system might be like. Later, he wrote a book known as Dialogue. Earlier in his career, Galileo had been told by the church not to hold , teach or write about the Copernican view of the universe; if he wrote at all he was to support both views equally. Dialogue did not do this; it favored the Copernican theory and this got Galileo in big trouble with the church. He was brought before the Inquisition, a church court, and was made to take back what he had said, and was placed under a sort of house arrest for the remainder of his life. He is said to have muttered "Yet, it DOES move" under his breath as he left the trial.
Sir Isaac Newton
Isaac Newton is known for several things. First, he explained how the solar system operated and why. Second, he wrote a great scientific work called Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. Third, he discovered the laws of gravity, inertia and motion. Newton also invented a reflecting telescope, and he used a prism to break white light into colors.
In his book Newton demonstrated that the planets are kept in place by two forces: their own speed and the gravitational pull of the sun on them. Furthermore, you could find their orbits if you assumed that all bodies are attracted by a force that depends directly on their mass and distance from each other. For this, Newton produced his inverse square law, the mathematical rule for finding the strength or weakness of such a pull.
Newton’s theory of gravitation was universal because it explained a universe governed by fundamental laws. It revealed that the same forces control planets, tides, cannonballs and falling apples. His discoveries encouraged scientists to look below the surface disorder of things to find the unchangeable laws underlying them.
Newton’s work also showed scientists how to work; he insisted that researches leading to certain conclusions in any branch of science must be backed up by more and more experiments to prove the theory.
Newton discovered so much that the age he lived in admired him and tended to think he had the answers to everything. His work was very impressive to the Enlightenment thinkers who came later.
Why was it hard to accept these new ideas of the universe?
This is a useful question for you to think about. and will help you understand why people were so long in accepting the heliocentric theory. It is, of course, always hard to have to change what one has been taught and has learned earlier. There was more to this than that, however. The new explanation of the universe radically altered man’s place in it. Before he had been able to think of himself as God’s very special creation, living on God’s very special earth right at the center of the universe. Now he could no longer think that; it was kind of depressing to have to think of oneself as just a living thing on one of several planets that none of which was the center of the universe. The new theory also exploded the old concept of heaven, hell and purgatory as physical places people could go. Certainly the idea of a rotating and revolving heaven and hell was absurd! What and where were these places then? This was extremely unsettling to the people of that time. This new explanation of the universe undermined the religious explanations for things and seemed to take away from the importance of the church.
New discoveries about the human body
Knowledge about the human body in the 15 and 1600’s was based on the writings of Greek physicians; in particular a man named Galen. Galen had done research and dissections, but he did this on apes and not humans. Therefore there were bound to be mistakes in what he wrote. Also physiology was based on the four cardinal fluids, or as they called the fluids then, humors, in the body. These were blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile. Pain and disease were caused by an imbalance in these humors; therefore to cure the patient, all you had to do was balance the humors. If you thought the patient had too much blood, you bled him and so on. The balance of the humors were also thought to give you your personality; if you were crabby and sad, for example, you had too much black bile.
It was hard to investigate and experiment in the area of medicine because the church did not approve of dissection and also because the church taught that disease was caused by demonic possession and things of that nature. However, some scientists managed to do dissections anyway.
Andreas Vesalius
Vesalius was one of the first of these men and he published On The Structure of the Human Body in 1543. In it were carefully detailed drawings of the human body. His drawings corrected many of the errors Galen had made.
Phillippus Paracelsus
Paracelsus ,who lived in the early 1500’s, contradicted Galen and asserted that disease comes from agents outside the body, and that it could be treated by certain chemicals, in particular, mercury and sulfur.
William Harvey
William Harvey was a lecturer at the Royal College of Physicians. He discovered exactly how the heart controls the flow of blood around the body. He asserted that the blood travels from the right side of the heart to the lungs and so on to the left side of the heart through special arteries. From these, the blood is pumped all over the body. He postulated the existence of the capillaries, but could not prove their existence since he had no way to actually see them. He published his findings in a book called On The Motion of the Heart and Blood in 1628. His theories were proved to be correct later when the microscope was invented and capillaries were finally seen.
Other scientifi discoveries
Anton von Leeuwenhoek
Leeuwenhoek is known for constructing the first microscope. With this, he saw the actual circulation of the blood in a tadpole and in the foot of a frog. He also saw bacteria for the first time and red blood cells.
Carolus Linnaeus
Linnaeus was a Swedish botanist who was the first to propose a system for classifying plants and animals by genus and species. He established the classification that we still use today.
Joseph Black
Joseph Black was a Scottish professor. He exploded the old theory that air was a single element by proving that air was a combination of several gases.
Antoine Lavoisier
Lavoisier, a French scientist, picked up where Black left off and demonstrated that water was made up of hydrogen and oxygen. He also asserted that all substances were made up of relatively few basic chemical elements. He was able to identify 23 of them.
Benjamin Franklin
Ben Franklin, in addition to being a writer, publisher and inventor, was also a scientist. He contributed to scientific knowledge by showing that lightning is electricity.
New ways of thinking
Sir Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon advanced thinking in a logical manner and not simply accepting something because it came from an authority. He said knowledge was gained through systematic observation of the world and tested by experiment.
Rene Descartes
Rene Descartes advanced the inductive method of reasoning. He rejected the senses as a basis for knowledge and argued that reality can only be known by reasoning from self-evident principles; Descartes set out to doubt everything! The only thing that he couldn’t doubt was that he was doubting! Inductive reasoning makes assumptions based on past experience; if every time a certain teacher tells you to review last night’s assignment, the next day you have a pop quiz, you would assume that if that teacher writes ‘review last night’s assignment’ on the board today, you will have a pop quiz tomorrow.
In summary
It must have been very exciting to live in the years when all these scientific discoveries were made. People came away from these years thinking that science was the answer to everything. As Newton had found laws to govern the universe, other people could find laws that governed human societies. All you had to do was look. The scientific discoveries showed what could be accomplished by using the human mind to reason. People began to think that, by using reason, they could indeed cure all the ills of society and build a better world.
You have to remember that during a good many of these years (1525-1648) men were still fighting off and on over religion. The wars didn’t seem to prove anything or really even settle anything. People were getting tired of the religious issue. Religion no longer had the hold on them that it used to. Many of the thinkers of the 16 and 1700’s turned their back on organized religion completely.
The scientific discoveries gravely undermined the foundation on which the traditional order of the 18th century society rested. It produced a ‘revolution’ in the world of ideas which challenged things as they were. The Enlightenment, which you will be reading about in the next section, was a response to the changes at work in society. It was the beginning of modern secular society. (Secular? Of this world, as opposed to religion, which concentrates on salvation in the afterlife)
The Enlightenment
Reason, natural law and progress were the buzzwords of the eighteenth century. The time was known as the "Age of Enlightenment" because humans assumed that they could cure all past ills in society and create perfect governments, perpetual peace and perfect societies. Reason would help men discover the natural laws governing existence and thereby assure progress.
The thinkers who professed this optimistic creed were a group of men who called themselves philosophes. The philosophes were not philosophers in the traditional sense. We would characterize them today as social activists and reformers. They came from many disciplines; you had historians, economists, scientists, writers, political scientists and even artists. The thing they had in common was their desire to make a better world. They believed firmly that people could correct the errors of their ways, if only the errors were pointed out to them. Their faith in natural law came from Isaac Newton and their confidence in the power of human reason came from Rene Descartes. Philosophes were sure they could find laws comparable to the ones Newton had found to govern and explain human activity. They saw themselves as the Newtons of statecraft, justice and economics; they would find the laws and then "correct" the world so the laws could operate as they should. It was more or less assumed by these people that most of what existed in their time was corrupt and needed to be done over, using human reason. They wanted to tear down and throw out existing institutions and the order of society.
The philosophes were the first to take an interest in children as being the people who would build a better future. This is because of what the philosophes thought about human nature. The church had taught that humans were born sinful and had no chance to be better unless they did what the church said. Philosophes rejected that. They said that a human was born with a mind that was like a ‘blank slate’; that experience made people what they grew up to be. Therefore, if you wanted good adults, they had to have good experiences as children. It a person turned out badly, it was because that person had bad experiences in childhood. This idea led in time to the study of children and appropriate ways to educate them so they would be the kind of adults we want in society. The books you use to learn from, the way you are educated, even the environment of the schoolroom you are educated in today show the influence of the Enlightenment in encouraging the study of children.
Beliefs of the philosophes, or Enlightenment thinkers
The following are major assumptions of the Enlightenment:
Enlightenment thinkers also had ideas on many other subjects such as political science, religion, education and society. We will now look at these:
political science: There were a number of writers on this issue. Generally speaking, Enlightenment thinkers believed that government was instituted by men because they knew they needed one, and that it was the purpose of government to serve the people and protect their natural rights. They believed people should have a voice in government. They thought of government as a "contract" between rulers and people, each having their job to do to see that things worked out.
religion: Many Enlightenment thinkers rejected organized religion completely, saying that it was "superstitious" and not worthy of the reasoning person. Others admitted that a God might exist but that he was not concerned with people in their ordinary lives. It was as though God wound up the clock of the universe and then just let it run. Those who would admit to the existence of God were called "Deists".
education: Enlightenment thinkers wanted to take control of education away from the church and the government. They wanted to study childhood and plan experiences that would be good for children. Education was critical in determining human development, and in the progress of society as a whole.
economics: Enlightenment thinkers wanted to end government control of business such as existed in France in those times. Instead, they wanted what they called "laissez-faire" economics. This means they would let the economic system run without any interference by government.
society: Enlightenment thinkers thought that society at their time was unscientific and corrupt. They wanted to redo society. They wanted to make a society where no one had special rank or privilege.
Where the Enlightenment began and how it spread
The Enlightenment began in France. To everyone , France was the center of culture; therefore, what the French did, others were likely to do. As French had become the international language during the reign of Louis IV, almost every educated person knew it, and this made it easier for the Enlightenment to cross international borders. The rich middle class and the upper class of France adopted the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was cool and awesome. The upper class ladies were in the habit of having late afternoon tea party type affairs called "salons". It was the thing to do at salons to invite prominent artists, musicians, authors and so on to the salon. People then would talk with the prominent person and discussion of the person’s works would ensue. There was competition among the ladies to get the most prominent people. One thing that’s kind of ironic is that these upper class and rich people discussed this Enlightenment thing openly in front of their servants, apparently not thinking at all about the fact that the servants were listening! The Enlightenment ideas sounded good to the servants, especially that one about equality of all men! The upper class and middle class people that discussed the ideas also never seemed to think what would happen to them if the ideas were ever put into practice! However, it was this discussion of the ideas that spread them and saw to it that the ideas were widely known. By the late 18th century educated Americans were very aware of the ideas.
Major Enlightenment Thinkers
Because these people influenced the founding fathers of this country, you need to know about some of the more important ones. Most of these men were French.
Voltaire
Voltaire was one of the most important Enlightenment thinkers. He was considered the most brilliant and influential of the philosophes. He was an author. One play that he wrote got him exiled from France because it made subtle fun of the king and the monarchy. He argued for tolerance, reason, limited government and free speech.
Denis Diderot
Diderot is best known for being the editor of the Encyclopedie, a 22 volume work to which all the Enlightenment thinkers contributed, including Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rousseau and Condorcet. The effect of the Encyclopedie was subversive because it exposed and intended to destroy the superstition, intolerance and the political and religious inequality of the society of the times.
Baron de Montesquieu
Montesquieu was an author. He wrote The Spirit of the Laws. In this he explained his separation of powers theory, which he thought would keep any one part of a government from becoming too powerful. Montesquieu was a great influence on James Madison, the author of our Constitution.
Jean Jacques Rousseau
Rousseau also was an author. He is known for his book, The Social Contract. He makes a sweeping generalization in this that whereas nature dignifies people, civilization corrupts them; people would be corrupted less if institutions were to follow nature more closely. Rousseau attempted to reconcile the liberty of the individual with the institution of government through a new version of the contract theory of government. Earlier theories had been political; Rousseau’s was social. The society agreed to be ruled by its general will. Formulating the general will was the business of all the people in society. Rousseau is also known for his book, Emile, which describes what he thought was the best education for a child. Rousseau had a great influence on Thomas Jefferson, as well as the more radical people involved in the French Revolution.
John Locke
Locke was an English Enlightenment thinker. He wrote Second Treatise on Government, in which he said that people are by nature all free, equal and independent. People submit to government because they find it convenient to do so, not because they acknowledge any divine right on the part of a monarchy. John Locke was also a great influence on Thomas Jefferson.
QUESTIONS
UNIT FOUR-The American Revolution