Dr. Ess
...by the late seventeenth century the science of the ancient Greeks, especially as embodied in the writings of Aristotle, and later Ptolemy, was largely discredited within elite culture. The ancient understanding of the natural world bears little or no relation to our own, and our own is not significantly dissimilar to that of the eighteenth century. (3)
She describes this science as resting on "certain philosophical and mathematical innovations" which can be dated fairly precisely, i.e.
1543 -- Copernicus, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolution of the Heavenly Orbs)
1687 -- Newton, Principia
(Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica)
This science characterized as:
1) "based largely on the actual observation of visible bodies in motion in the heavens and on earth."
2) "It required that the results of observation bee described largely according to mechanical principles (that is, contact action between bodies) as well as mathematically."
3) "This science was in
turn deemed more acceptable than its predecessors, in part because
it was capable of direct application to specific industrial and
technological needs, to the achievement of an unprecedented impact
on, and control over, the natural environment." ( 3)
Further claims that the methodology
of this science, resting on "the interaction of experiments
and hypotheses producing probable explanations," was bound
up with an intrinsically "progressive" quality (3-4).
While empiricist in this way, she is not naively so. At least, she sees that
The new science, that systematic study of the natural world which presumed matter in motion to be the central object of inquiry, was itself a cultural artifact. All expressions of human creativity are historical -- that is, bound by time and place and, as such, relative to eras and epochs. There is no absolute ahistorical Truth over which a select clergy, however much it might seek to do so, may exclusively preside. (5)
While granting that science contains a rational component, she further asserts that
...in order to perceive a body
of knowledge as rational -- and eventually, by the eighteenth
century, as superior to its competitors -- a complex set of historical
circumstances had to exist that enabled some people, and eventually
a whole culture, to embrace a new understanding of the natural
order and to apply that understanding in ways that increasingly
came to be seen as beneficial to themselves. (6)
As a summary:
In early modern Europe the new
science was assimilated and used often as a result of certain
larger historical developments: the Protestant Reformation of
the sixteenth century; the invention of printing; the development
of centralized national states and their attendant bureaucracies;
the fear, or reality, of political revolution or social disorder
coming from the illiterate or less-educated mass of the population
(see Chapter 3); and not least, by the late seventeenth century
in western Europe, the desire on the part of the landed elite
to transform the basis of their power away from feudal dominion
over large land holdings and a dependent peasantry, into a more
flexible use of their resources and power. The necessity of sharing
political and economic power with urban and mercantile elites
forced both the landed and the mercantile to seek new means by
which they might explore and exploit the world around them. The
presence of scientists or scientific devotees trained in the schools
and universities, but / hostile to the monopolies enjoyed by the
clergy and the scholastic learning they promoted, made for the
possibility of a unique merger between the interests of natural
philosophers and the needs of the literate and propertied elites
(see Chapter 4). Where that merger was effected successfully,
first in England then in France and the Low Countries, a synthesis
of scientific knowledge and material interests led to an unprecedented
conquest of nature through commerical and industrial development.
The road from the Scientific Revolution to the Industrial Revolution,
although occasionally requiring detours or impasses, is more straightforward
than we may have imagined (see Chapters 5 through 7). (6-7)
Initially, a story about elites
"university trained philosophers, wealthy aristocrats, and
merchants and clergy who could afford books on science -- in short,
probably to no more than 5 percent of the male population and
only an infinitesimal percentage of the female population."
(7)
This means especially the cities
of northern and western Europe (London, Amsterdam, Paris) as areas
of advanced literacy. (7)
She points out her break with
the "heroic account of the progress of Western science from
genius to genius" -- an account already established among
the champions and promoters of the new science by the mid-eighteenth
century. (8)