The
Moderns Won.

A Scientific
Revolution
without End.

Dr. Ronald Fritze
February 2, 2004

By its nature, the human mind is indeterminate; hence,
when man is sunk in ignorance,
he makes himself the measure of the universe.
Giambattista Vico, New Science (1725).

The Scientific Revolution, which preceded Vico's career, sought to create a better understanding of the universe and the natural world among Europeans. Although the Scientific Revolution is commonly associated with the seventeenth century, it had its roots in the sixteenth century and its effects continued into the eighteenth century and beyond. In fact, the Scientific Revolution has never stopped.

Prior to the seventeenth century, most scholars tended to believe or assume that ancient knowledge and learning was superior to the learning of the present. The best that modern scholars could hope to do was equal the learning of the ancients; they could not surpass it. This attitude was understandable during the Middle Ages. Medieval Europeans lived among the wreckage of the Roman Empire. They struggled to preserve the books and the learning of the ancient Greeks and Romans. They had little time, opportunity, or need to produce new knowledge.

The coming of the Renaissance changed things dramatically. Scholars of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries made great strides in recovering the knowledge of the classical world. In fact, some people were beginning to surpass the knowledge of the ancient world.

The voyages of Columbus to the Americas and of Vasco da Gama to Asia opened up lands and seas undreamed of by ancient seamen and geographers. Yet universities continued to teach Aristotle's works as they always had and so repeated his assertion that the equatorial regions were a torrid zone, deadly and uninhabitable to humans. Imagine the surprise of Jesuit missionary and ethnographer Jose de Acosta when the ship carrying him to the Americas crossed the equator in the latter part of the sixteenth century amidst the chill air of a choppy sea. Compelled to put on a cloak against the cold, de Acosta laughed at the teachings of Aristotle.

In spite of growing cognitive dissonance of that sort, the authority of the ancients continued into the seventeenth century. There developed the so-called Battle of the Ancients and the Moderns. The Ancients supported the continuing authority and primacy of the ancient authors. The Moderns argued that contemporary scholars, scientists, and explorers had begun to exceed the achievement of the Ancients. Obviously the Moderns won. Time and the evolving state of learning were on their side.

Big contributors to this change in the attitude of European scholars to learning were the scientists of the Scientific Revolution. Copernicus and Vesalius undermined the authority of the ancient greats Ptolemy and Galen. Rene Descartes and Francis Bacon added to the momentum of the moderns by casting doubt on ancient assumptions and advocating an approach to the study of nature based on systematic observation. Telescopes and microscopes opened up aspects of the natural world to seventeenth century people that were undreamed of by the ancients. Galileo used telescopic observations to breakdown the Ptolemaic view of the universe. Sir Isaac Newton completed the job by creating a new explanation of the natural world that dominated physics until the coming of Einstein in the 1920s.

The Scientific Revolution challenged existing authority and certainties, but ultimately it replaced the old authority with a new authority and the old certainties with new certainties. Instead of measuring the universe through the learning of the ancients, the participants in the Scientific Revolution measured it through careful observation of natural phenomenon and experimentation and the careful and systematic analysis of those observations.

What Price Power?

The Old Regime.