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taking as her guru (tehgious teacher) an old untouchable shoeriker. Tu visit him,
she apparently tied her saris together and climbed dawn the castle walls at night.
‘Then she would wash his aged feet and drink the water from these ublutions. Much
of her poetry deals with her yearning for union with Krishna, a Hindu deity she
regarded as her husband, lover, and lord. She wrote:
What I paid was my social body, my town body, my family body, and all my
inherited jewels. Mirabai says: The Dark One [Krishna] is my husband now."*
Yet another major cultural change that blended Islam and Hinduism emerged
with the growth of Sikhism as a new and distinctive religious tradition in the
Punjab region of northern India, Its founder, Guru Nanak (1469-1539), had been
involved in the bhakti movement but came to believe that “there is no Hindn;
there is no Muslim; only God.” His teachings and those of subsequent gurus also
generally ignored caste distinctions and untouchability and ended the seclusion of
women. while proclaiming the “brotherhood of all mankind” as well as the essen-
ial equality of men and women, Drawing converts from Punjabi peasants and
‘merchants, both Muslim and Hindu, the Sikhs gradually became a separate reli-
gious community. They developed their own sacred book, known as the Guru
Granth (teacher book); created a central place of worship and pilgrimage in the
Golden Temple of Amritsar; and prescribed certain dress requirements for men,
including keeping hair and beards uncut, wearing a turban, and carrying a short
sword. During the seventeenth century, Sikhs encountered
Srna hostility from both the Mughal Empire and some of their
Hindu neighbors. In response, Sikhism evolved from a peace-
full religious movement, blending Hindu and Muslim cle~
ments, into a militant community whose military skills were
highly valued by the British when they took over India in the
late cightcenth century.
A New Way of Thinking:
The Birth of Modern Science
While some Europeans were actively attempting to spread the Christian faith to
distant comers of the world, others were nurturing an understanding of the cosmos
at least partially at odds with traditional Christian teaching. These were the makers
of Europe’s Scientific Revolution, a vast intellectual and cultural transformation
dat tuk place between the mid-sixteenth and carly eighteenth centuries, These
men of science would no longer rely on the external authontty of the tible, the
Church, the speculations of ancient philosophers, or the received wisdom of cul-
tural tradition. For them, knowledge would be acquired through rational inquiry
based on evidence, the product of human minds alone. Those who created this
revolution—Copemicus from Poland, Galileo from Italy, Descartes from France,Newton from England, and many others -saw thensclves us departing radically
from older ways of thinking. “The old rubbish must be thrown away,” wrote a
seventeenth-century English scientist. “These are the days dhat must lay a new
Foundation of a more magnificent Philosophy.”
‘The long term significance of the Scientific Revulution can hardly be overes-
timated. Within early modern Europe, it fundamentally altered ideas about the
place of humankind within the cosmos and sharply challenged both the teachings
and the authority of the Church, Over the past several centuries, it has substantially
eroded religious belief and practice in the West, particularly among the well edu-
cated, When applied to the affairs of human society, scientific ways of thinking
challenged aucieut social hierarchies and political systems and played a role in the
revolutionary upheavals of the modem era. But science was also used to legitimize
racial and gender inequalities, giving new support to old ideas about the natural
inferiority of women and enslaved people. When married to the technological inno~
vations of the Industrial Revolution, science fostered both the marvels of modern
production and the horrors of modem means of destruction, By the twentieth een
ury, science had become so widespread that it largely lost its association with Euro-
pean culture and became the chief marker of global modemity. Like Buddhism,
Christianity, and Islam, modem science became a universal worldview, open to all
who could accept its premises and its techniques.
The Question of Origins: Why Europe?
Why did the breakthrough of the Scientific Revolution occur first in Europe and
during the early modem era? The realm of Islam, after all, had generated the most
advanced science in the world during the centuries between 800 and 1400. Arab
scholars could boast of remarkable achievements in mathematics, astronomy. optics.
and medicine, and their libraries far exceeded those of Europe." And what of
China? Its elite culture of Confacianism was both sophisticated and secular, less
burdened by religious dogma than that of the Christian or Islamic worlds; its tech
nological accomplishments and economic growth were unmatched anywhere in
the several centuries after 1000. In neither civilization, however, did these achieve
‘ments lead to the kind of mntellectual innovation that occurred in Europe.
Europe's historical development as a reinvigorated and fragmented civilization
arguably gave tise to conditions particularly favorable to the scientific enterprise. By
the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Europeans had evolved a legal system that
guaranteed a measure of independence for a variety of institutions —the Church,
ics. This legal 1evu~
towns and cities, guilds, professional associations, and univer
lution was based on the idea of a “corporation,” a collective group of people that
was treated a5 a unit, a legal person, with certain rights to regulate and control its
own members.
Most important for the development of science in the West was the autonomy
of its emerging universities, By 1215, the University of Paris was recognized as a
Guided Reading
Questi
COMPARISON
Why did the Scientitic
Revolution occur in Furope
rather than in China or
the Islamic world?Res
5
“comporation of masters and scholars,” which could admit and expel students,
establish courses of instruction, and grant a “license to teach” to its faculty. Such
universities —for example, in Paris, Bologna, Oxford, Cambridge, and Salamanca—
became “neutral zones of intellectual autonomy” in which scholars could pursue
their studies in relative freedom from the dictates of church or state authorities.
‘Wichin them, the study of the natural order began to slowly separate itself from
philosophy and theology and to gain a distinct identity. ‘Their curricula featured “a
basically scientific core of readings and lectures” that drew heavily on the writings
of the Greek thinker Aristotle, which had only recently become available to West-
em Europea, Must of the major figures in the Scientific Revolution had be
trained in and were affliated with these universities,
In the Islamic world, by contrast, science was patronized by a variety of local
authorities, but it occurred largely outside the formal system of higher education.
Within colleges known as madrassas, Quranic studies and religious law held the
contral place, whereas philosophy and natural science were viewed with great sus-
picion, To religious scliolas, dhe Quian held all wisdom, and scientific thinking
might well challenge it. An earlier openness to free inquiry and religious toleration
was increasingly replaced by a disdain for scientific and philosophical inquiry, for
it seemed to lead only to uncertainty and confusion. “May God protect us from
useless knowledge” was a saying that reflected this outlook. Nor did Chinese
anthorities permit independent institutions of higher learning in which scholars
could conduct their sudies iu sekaive fiecdum. Instead, Chinese education focused
‘on preparing for a rigidly defined set of civil service examinations and emphasized
the humanistic and moral texts of classical Confucianism, “The pursuit of scientific
subjects,” one recent historian concluded, “was thereby relegated to the margins of
Chinese society.""5
Reyeind its distinctive institntional development, Western Europe was in a posi-
tion to draw extensively on the knowledge of vibe: vultutes, especially that of the
Islamic world. Arab medical texts, astronomical research, and translations of Greek
classics played a major role in the birth of European natural philosophy (as science
‘was then called) herween 1000 and 1500. Then, in the sixteenth through the eigh~
teenth centuries, Europeans found dieupelves at dhe ceuter of « mussive new
exchange of information as they hecame aware of lands, peoples. plants. animals,
societies, and religions from around the world. This tidal wave of uew Kuuwledge,
uniquely available to Furopeans, shook up older ways of thinking and opened the
‘way to new conceptions of the world. The sixteenth-century Italian doctor, math
ematician, and writer Girolamo Cardano (1501-1576) clearly expressed this sense
of wonderment: “The most unusual {circumstance oF my Life] is cist T was bs
this century in which the whole world became known; whereas the ancients were
familiar with but a litle more than a third part of it.” He worried, however, that
amid this explosion of knowledge, “certainties will be exchanged for uncertain
ties.” It was precisely those uncertainties—skepticisit about established views—
that provided such a fertile cultural grond for the emergence af modem science.‘The Reformation tao contributed to that cultural climate in its challenge to avis
ity, its encouragement of mass literacy, and its affirmation of secular professions.
Science as Cultural Revolution
Before the Scientific Revolution, educated Europeans held a view of the world
that derived from Aristotle, pethaps the greatest of the ancient Greek philosophers,
and from Ptolemy, a Greco-Egyptian mathematician and astronomer who lived
in Alexandria during the second century ct. To medieval European thinkers, the
earth was stationary and at the center of the universe, and around ir revalved the
sun, moon, and stars embedded in ten spheses uf wausparent crystal. This under
standing coincided well with the religious outlook of the Catholic Church because
the attention of the entire universe was centered on the earth and its human inhab-
itants, among whom God's plan for salvation unfolded. It was a universe of divine
purpose, with angels guiding the hierarchically arranged heavenly bodies along
their way while God watched over the whole from his realm heyond the spheres.
The Scientific Revolution was 1evulutionary because it fandamentally challenged
this understanding of the universe.
The initial breakthrough in the Scientific Revolution came from the Polish
mathematician and astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, whose famous book On the
Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres was published in che yeat of his death, 1543. Its
essential argument was that “at the middle of all things lies the sun” and that the
earth, like the other planets, revolved around it, Thus the earth was no longer
unique or at the obvious center of God’s attention,
Other European scientists built on Copernicus’s central insight, and some even
argued that other inhabited worlds and other kinds of humans existed. Less specula-
Sively, in the carly seventeenth century Johannes Kepler, a German mathematician,
showed that the planets followed elliptical orhits, undermining the ancient belief that
they moved in perfect circles, The Italian Galileo (gal-uh-LAY-oh) developed an
improved telescope, with which he made many observations that undermined estab-
lished understandings of the cosmos. (See Zooming In: Galileo and the Telescope,
page 668.) Some thinkers hegan tn discuss the notion of an unlimited universe in
which hunaukind occupied a mere speck of dust in an unimaginable vastness. ‘he
French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) perhaps spoke for
“The eternal silence of infinite space frightens me.””
‘The culmination of the Scientific Revolution came in the work of Sir Isaac
Newton (1642-1727), the Englishman who formulated the modern laws of motion
and mechanics, which remained sinchallenged until the twentieth century. At the
Lore of Newton's thinking was the concept of universal gravitation. “All bodies
whatsoever,” Newton declared, “are endowed with a principle of mutual gravita-
tion.” Here was the grand unifying idea of early modem science. ‘Ihe radical
implication of this view was that the heavens and the earth, long regarded as separate
ul distinct spheres, were not so different after all, for the motion of a cannonball
‘many when he wrote,
The Scientific Revo-
lution marked a
major turing point
Inthe way western-
ers saw the world
around them. Pay
close attention 10
thissection,
Guided Reading
Question
CHANGE
What was revolutionary
about the Scientific
Revolution?Galileo and the Telescope:
Reflecting on Science and Religion
he Scientific Revolution
‘vas predicated on the idea
that knowledge of how the
universe worked was acquired
through a combination of care~
fal observations, controlled
experiments, and the formula~
tion of general law, expressed
in mathematical terms. New
scientific instruments capable
cof making precise empirical
observations underpinned some
of the miost important bresk-
throughs of the period, Perhaps ny single iuveuion
produced more dramatic discoveries than the telescope,
the first of which were produced in the exrly seventeenth
century by Dutch eyeglass makers.
‘The impart af new instruments depended on how
selentiss exployed dieu. Lu Whe Loe uf te telescope, it
1was the brilliant Italian mathematician and astronomer
Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) who unlocked is potential
swhen he used it to observe the night sky. Within months
‘of cresting his own telescope, which improved on earlier
designs, Galileo made a series of dscoverics that put into
question well-established understandings ofthe cosmos.
He olverved craters on the moon and sunspots, ar lem=
ishes, moving across the fice ofthe sun, which challenged
the mditional notion that no imperfection or change
Galileo on trial.
marred the heavenly haviee
Moreover, his discovery of die
‘moons of Jupiter and many
hhew stars suggested a cosmos
far larger than the finite uni-
verse of traditional astronomy.
In 1010, Galileo publslied lis
remarkable findings in a book
titled The Stay Messenger,
‘where he emphasized time and
again that his precise observa
tions provided irrefutable
evidence of a cosmos unlike
that described by traditional authorities. “With the aid
of the telescope,” he argued, “this has been scrutinized
so directly and with such ocular certainty that all the
disputes which hive vexed the philosophers through so
many ages have been resolved, and we are at last freed
from wordy debates about it.””
Galileo's empirical evidence transformed the debate
lover the nature of the cosmos, His dramatic and unex-
pected discoveries were readily grasped, and with the aid
‘ofa telescope anyone could confirm their veracity. His
initial findings were heralded by many in the scientific
community, including Christoph Clavius, the Church's
learing astronomer in Rome. Galileo's findings led him
et: Tf Galo, 168, ion cnr, lel / Pvt Colleon agen
or the falling of an apple obeyed the same natural laws that governed the orbiting
planets.
By the time Newton died, a revolutionary new understanding of the physical
universe had emerged among educated Europeans: the universe was no longer
propelled by supernatural forces but functioned on its own according to scientific
principtes that could be described uathentically. Articulating this view, Kepler
wrote, “The machine of the universe is not similar to a divine animated being but
similar to a clock.”® Furthermore, it was a machine that regulated itself, requiring
neither God nor angels to account for its normal operation. Knowledge of that
universe could be obtained through human reason alone—by observation, dedue-
Hon, and experimentation —withont the aid of ancient authorities or divine reve~
668t0 conclude that Copemicus (1473-1543), an earlier
astronomer and mathematician, had heen camect when
he had advanced the theory that dhe sun rather chan the
earth was at the center of the solar system. But Galileo's
evidence could not definitively prove Copemicus'sthe-
ory to the satisfaction of critics, leading Galileo to study’
ther phenomena, exch ae the tides, that could provide
fuuhes evideuce dia die earth was in motion,
‘When the Church condemned Copernicus’s theory
in 1616, it remained silent on Galileo's astronomical
‘observations, instead warning him to refrain from teach~
ing or promoting Copernicis’s ideas. Ultimately, though,
Galileo Laue io coullice with church authorises when
in 1629 he published, with what he thoughe was the
consent ofthe Church, the Dialogue Concening the Tivo
Chief World Systems, a work sympathetic to Copernicus’s
sun-centric system. In 1632, Galileo was tried hy the
Roman Inquisition, an ecclesiastical court charged wid
‘maintaining orthodoxy, and convicted of teaching doc-
tines against the express orders of the Church, He
recanted his belief and at the age of sixty-nine was
sentenced to house arrest,
Although Galileo was formally convicted of disobey-
ang the Church’s order to remain sient on the issue of
Copemicur's theory, the qu
at stake in the tral was “What does it mean, ‘to know
something’? This question of the relationship between
scientific knowledge, primarily concerned with how the
yn moet Fundamentally
lation. The French philusupher Re:
‘umiverse works, and other forms of “knowledge.”
derived from divine revelation or mystical expcricnce,
hhas persisted in the West, Over 350 years after the tral,
Pope John Paul II spake of Galileo's conviction in a
public speech in 1992, declaring ita “sad misunderstand
ing” that belongs to the past, but one with ongoing
resonance because “the underlying problems of this ease
concer both the nature of science and the message of
faith.” Addressing the central question of what it means
to know something, the pope declared scientific and reli-
gious knowledge to be compatible: “There exist two
realms of knowledge, one which has its source in Rev
elation and one which reason can discover by 1ts own
power. ... The distinction henveen the nwa realms of
knowledge ought not to be undleistood as opposition,
he methodologies proper to each make it possible to
bring out different aspects of reality.”
Strangely enough, Galileo himself had expressed some-
thing similar centuries earlier. “Nor is God,” he wrote,
“any less excellently revealed in Natuse’s activi dat tt
the sacred statements of the Bible.” Finding the place of
new scientific knowledge in a constellation of older wis
dour traditions proved a fraughe buc highly significant
development in the emergence of the modem world
‘yvestion: what can Galileo's discoveries with his telescope and
his conviction by the Inquisition tellus about the Seientiic
Revolution?
€ Descattes (day-KAHRT) resolved “to seek
no other knowledge than that which T might find within myself. or perhaps in the
book of nature.”
Like the physical universe, the human body also lost some of its mystery. The
carefll dissections of cadavers and animals enabled doctors and scientists to describe
the human body with much greater ac
vf the Lloud Unvughout the body. The heart was no longer che mysterious center
of the body’s heat and the seat ofits passions; instead it was just another machine, a
complex muscle that functioned as a pump.
‘The movers and shakers of this enormous cultural transformation were almost
entirely male, European women, after all, had been largely excluded from the
racy and to ninderstand the cisenlation‘universities where much of the new science was
discussed. A few aristocratic women, however, had
the leisure and connections to participate informally
in the scientific networks of their male relatives.
Uhrough her marmage to the Duke of Newcastle,
Margaret Cavendish (1623-1673) joined in conver-
sations with a circle of “natural philosophers,” wrote
six scientific texts, and was the only seventeenth-
century English woman to attend a session of the
Royal Society of London, created to foster scientific
learning. In Germany, a number of women took part
in astronomical work as assistants to their husbands
or brothers. Mana Winkelman, for example, discov-
ered a previously unknown comet, though her hus
band took credit for it. After his death, she sought to
continuc his work in the Berlin Academy of Sciences
but was refused on the grounds that
gape” ifa woman held such a position.
Much of this scientific thinking developed in
the face of strenuous opposition from the Catho
lic Church, for both its teachings and its authority
nouths would
pea ietecpe were under attack, The Italian philosopher Giordano
iohannes Hevei, an astrnomer of German Lutheran background ving aldara a
in what snow Poland, constructed extraordinarily long telescopes in the ‘Bruno, proclaiming an infinite universe and many
rig-seventeenth century with which he observed sunspots, chated the su- worlds, was burned at the stake in 1600, and Galileo
fee he oon nd eee econ ih ena! as compelled by the Church to publicly renounce
rival oe in transforming understandings ofthe univese during the
eel lll beable his belief that the earth moved around an orbit and
rotated on its axis.
Dut schulats have sometimes exaggerated the conflict of science and religion,
casting it in military terms as an almost unbroken war. None of the early scientists
Compare examples "ected Christianity. Copernicus in fict published his famous book with the sup-
of cooperation and Port of several leading Catholic churchmen and dedicated it to the pope. Afterall,
conflict between several eatlier Catholic wu
1s had pruposed the idea of the carth in motion. Te
ca and rai more likely feared the criticism of fellow scientists than that of the church hierar-
givin Europe tv chy. Galilew Isinself proclaimed dhe compatiblity of science and faith, and his lack
examples ofthese of diplomacy in dealing with church leaders was at least in part responsible for his
in the Islamic world
quarrel with the Church.”* Newton was a serious biblical scholar and saw no inher
ent contradiction between his ideas and belief in God. “This most beautiful system
oF the su, planets, aud Louets,” he declared, “could uuly proceed fun the coun
sel and dominion of an intelligent Being.”2* Thus the Church gradually accom-
modated as well as resisted the new ideas, largely by compartmentalizing them.
Science might prevail in its limited sphere of describing the physical universe, but
religion was still the arbiter of tuth about those ultimate questions concerning
inthis era.
human salvation, righteons hehavior, and the larger purposes of life.Science and Enlightenment
Initially Iimited to a small handful of scholars, the ideas of the Scientific Revolu~
tion spread to a wider European public during the eighteenth century. That process
‘was aided by novel techniques of printing and bookmaking, by a popular press, by
growing literacy, and hy a host of scientific societies. Moreover, the new approach
to knowledge—roored in human reason, skeptical of authority, expressed in natu
ral lavis—was now applied to human affairs, not just to the physical universe, The
Scottish professor Adam Smith (1723-1790), for example, formulated laws that
accounted for the operation of the economy and that, if followed, he believed,
would generate inevitably favorable results for society. Growing numbers of people
believed that the long term outcome of scientific develops
would be “enlight=
enment,” a term that has come to define the eighteenth century in European his-
tory. Ifhuman reason could discover the laws that governed the universe, surely it
could uncover ways in which humankind might govern itself more effectively.
“What ie Enlightenment?” asked the prominent Geaman intellectual Luunanuel
Kant (1/24-1804), “It is man’s emergence from his self-imposed . .. inahility to
use one’s own understanding without another’s guidance. . . . Dare to know! ‘Have
the courage to use your own understanding’ is therefore the motto of the enlight-
enment.””” Although they often disagreed sharply with one another, European
Enlightenment thinkers shared this belief in the power of knowledge to transform
human society. They also shared a satirical, citival style, a Louuniuunent vo open
mindedness and inquiry, and in various degrees a hostility to established political
and religious authority. Many took aim at arbitrary governments, the “divine right
of kings,” and the aristocratic privileges of European society. The English phi-
losopher John Locke (1632-1704) offered principles for constructing a constitu-
tional government, a contract between rulers and ruled thar was created by hiram
ingenuity rather than divinely presuiibed. Much of Eulightenment thinking was
directed against the superstition, ignorance, and corruption of established religion.
In his Treatise on Toleration, the French writer Voltaire (16941778) reflected the
outlook of the Scientific Revolution as he commented sarcastically on religious
intolerance:
This litte globe. nothing more than a point, roll in space like sa many other
globes; we ate lust in ity inmmensity. Man, some five feet tll, fs surely a very
simall part ofthe universe. One of these imperceptible beings says to some of his
neighbors in Arabia or Aftica: “Listen to me, for the God ofall these worlds has
enlightened me; there are nine hundred million litle ants like ws om the earth,
‘but uuly any aihilly beloved of God; He will hold all others in horror through
all eternity; only mine will be blessed, the others will he eternally wretched.”
Voltaire’s own faith, like that of many others among the “enlightened,” was
deism, Deists believed in a rather abstract and remote Deity, sometimes compared to
a clockmaker, who had created the world, but not in a personal God who intervened
ae tun
The AP® exam might
ask you to explain
haw Europe's new
views of science led
‘tonew ideas about
human government
and philosophies.
Guided Reading
Question
CHANGE
In what ways did the
Falightenment challenge
older patterns of European
thinking?Reruns
Pay attention to
how the enlight-
enment led to
new ideas about
‘women’s roles in
‘Western society.
The Philosophers ofthe Enlightenment
This panting shows the Hench philosopher Vokalre wth a goup of Intellectual luminaries atthe snes pale of
the Prussian king Frederick, Such teary gatherings, sometimes called salons, were places of ively conversaon
among mostly ale participants and came tobe seen as emblematic ofthe Eutopean Enlightenment. (Painting by
‘gh Mec! 1815-190), 18501 a-mages/he nace Woks)
in history or tampered with natural law. Others became pantheists, who believed
that God and nature were identical. Here was a conception of religion shaped by
the outlook of science. Sometimes called “natural religion,” it was devoid of mys-
tery, revelation, ritual, and spiritual practice, while proclaiming a God that could
be “proven” by human rationality, logic, and the techniques of scientific inquiry.
In this view, all else was superstition. Among the most radical of such thinkers were
the several Dutchmen who wrote the Treatise of Three Imposters, which claimed that
Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad were fraudulent impostors who based their teachings,
on “the ignorance of Peoples [and] resolved to keep them in it."
Prominent among the debates spawned by the Enlightenment was the question
of women's nature, their role in society, and che education most appropriate for
them, Although well-to-do Parisian women hosted 1m thetr elegant salons many
gatherings of the largely male Enlightenment figures, most of those men were
anything but ardent feminists. The male editors of the famous Encyclopédie, a vast
compendium of Enlightenment thought, included very few essays by women.
One of the male authors expressed a common view: “[Women] constitute theprincipal omamentofthe world May they, through submissive discretion and
artless cleverness, spur us [men] on to virtue.” In his treatise Emile, Jean-Jacques
Rousseau deserihed women as fundamentally different from and inferior to men
aud urged that “the whole education of women ought to be relative to men.”
Such views were sharply contested by any number of other Enlightcnment
figures—men and women alike. Lhe Journal des Dames (Ladies Journal), founded
in Paris in 1759, aggressively defended women. “If we have not been raised up in
the sciences as you have,” declared Madame Beaulmer, the Journa’ frst editor, “it
isyou [men] who are the guilty ones; for have you not always abused . .. the bodily
strength that nature has given you?”™ The philosopher Condorcet looked forward
to the “complete destruction of those prejudices that have established au inequality
of rights between the sexes.” And in 1792, the British writer Mary Wollstonecraft
‘What non-
sense! .. . Ti women are mote rationally educated, the progress of human virtue
and improvement in knowledge must receive continual checks.” Thus was inici-
ated a debate that echoed throughout the centuries that followed.
Though solidly rooted in Europe, Enlightenment diuught way influenced by
the growing global awareness of its major thinkers. Voltaire, for example, ideal-
ized China as an empire governed by an elite of secular scholuts selected for their
talent, which stood in sharp contrast to continental Europe, where aristocratic hitth
and military prowess were far more important. The example of Confucianism —
supposedly secular, moral, rational, and tolerant— encouraged Enlightenment think-
ers to imagine a future for European civilization without the kind of supemnacural
religion that they found so offensive in the Christian West
‘The central theme of the Enlightenment—and what made it potentially revo-
lutionary—was the idea of progress. Human society was not fixed by tradition or
divine command but could be changed, an inuproved, by human action guided
by reason. No one expressed this soaring confidence in hnman possihility more
clearly than the French thinker the Marquis de Condorcet (1743-1794), who boldly
declared that “the perfectibility of humanity is indefinite.” Belief in progress was a
sharp departure from much of premodern social thinking, and it inspired those who
later made the great revolutions of the modem era in the Americas, France, Russia,
China, and ebewhere. Bus of the Scientific Revolution, that was the faith of the
Enlightenment. For some, it was virtnally a new religion
‘The age of the Enlightenment, however, also witnessed a reaction against too
much reliance on human reason, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) minimized
the importance of book learning for the education of children and prescribed
instead an immersion in nature, which tanght self-reliance and generosity rather
haut the giced aud envy fostered by “civilization. The Romantic movement in art
and literature appealed to emotion, intuition, passion, and imagination rather than
cold reason and scientific learning, Religious awakenings—complete with fiery
sermons, public repentance, and intense personal experience of sin and redemp-
tion—shook Protestant Europe and North America in the eighteenth and early
directly confronted Rousseau’s view of women and their educatio
nd nineteenth
turGuided Reading
Question
CHANGE
How did nineteenth-century
dlovelopments inthe sc-
‘ences challenge the faith
of the Enlightenment?
nineteenth centuries. The Methodist movement — with its enypliasis vu Dible stucly,
confession of sins, fisting, enthusiastic preaching, and resistance to worldly plea-
sures—was a case in point.
Various forms of “enlightened religion” also arose in the early modem centu-
ries, reflecting the influence of Enlightenment thinking, Quakers, for example,
emphasized tolerance, an absence of hierarchy and ostentation, a benevolent God,
and an “inner light” available to all people. Unitarians denied the Trinity, original
sin, predestination, and the divinity of Jesus, but honored him as a great teacher and
a moral prophet. Later, in the nineteenth century, proponents of the “social gos-
pel” saw the essence of Christianity not in personal salvation but in ethical behav
ior. Science and the Enlightenment surely challenged religion, and for some they
croded religious belief and practice. Just as surely, though, religion persisted, adapted,
and revived for many others.
Looking Ahcad: Science in the
Nineteenth Century and Beyond
‘The perspectives of the Enlightenment were challenged not only by romanticism
and religious “enthusiasm” but also by the continued development of European
science itself. This remarkable phenomenon justifies a brief look ahead at several
scientific developments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Modern science was a cumulative and self eritical enterprise, which in the nine-
teenth century and later was applied to new domains of human inquiry in ways that
undermined some of the assumptions of the Enlightenment. In the realm of biol-
ogy, for example, Charles Darwin (1809-1882) laid out a complex argument that
all fe was in constant change, that an endless and competitive struggle for survival
over millions of years constantly generated new species of plants and animals, while
Lanting vtheis into extinction. Laman beings were not excluded from this vast
process, for they too were the work of evolution operating through natural selec
tion. Darwin's famous books The Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man
(1871) were threatening to many traditional Christian believers, perhaps more so than.
‘Copeuticus’s ideas abuut a sun-centcred universe had been several centurico carlier.
At the same time, Karl Marx (1818-1883) articulated a view of human history
Unt likewise e1phusized change and struggle. Conflicting social classes slave own.
ers and slaves, nobles and peasants, capitalists and workers—successively drove the
process of historical transformation. Although he was describing the evolution of
human civilization, Marx saw himself as a scientist, He based his theories on exten
sive historical reseuich, like Newton aint Darwin, he sought to formulate gencral
laws that would explain events in a rational way. Nor did he believe in heavenly
intervention, chance, or the divinely endowed powers of kings. The coming of
socialism, in this view, was not simply a good idea; it was inscribed in the laws of
historical development. (See Working with Evidence, Source 17.1, page 776.)
ike the intellectuals of the Enlightenment. Darwin and Marx believed strongly
in progress, but iu dieis Uhiiking, Conflict and struggle rather than reason and edu-
The Beginnings of Western Science The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical Religious and Institutional Context Prehistory to A D 1450 2nd Edition David C. Lindberg pdf download