Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [37]
When I set before me the condition of these times, in which learning hath made her third visitation or circuit, in all the qualities thereof: the excellency and vivacity of the wits of this age; the noble helps and lights which we have by the travails of ancient writers; the art of printing, which communicateth books to men of all fortunes; the openness of the world by navigation, which hath disclosed multitudes of experiments, and a mass of natural history…I cannot but be raised to this persuasion, that this third period of time will far surpass that of the Græcian and Roman learning.1
Such sweeping predictions usually prove wrong, but not this one. Within the century, knowledge would reach a level not even Bacon could have imagined, thanks to the “new learning” of science fostered by major social developments that had been reshaping European society. The semiprimitive feudal way of life centered about church, castle, and keep had given way to larger national groupings, the revival of city life, and the expansion of trade and industry, and the Reformation had weakened the grip of church-centered traditionalism over men’s minds and induced a spirit of questioning and intellectual ferment in Protestant lands and, by a kind of social osmosis, even in Catholic ones.
These developments spurred advances in both utilitarian and pure knowledge. Seventeenth-century businesses, armies, and monetary and taxation systems required new, efficient ways of thinking about and handling data. On the purely intellectual side, many thoughtful men turned from engaging in theological hairsplitting to gathering factual information about the real world. For both reasons, this was the century that produced the decimal system, logarithms, analytic geometry, the calculus, the air pump, the microscope, the barometer, the thermometer, and the telescope.
Not that science was universally welcomed. Renaissance humanism had revived the Platonic tradition, with all its mysticism and scorn of the material world, and many intellectuals, echoing Petrarch, Erasmus, Rabelais, and Vives, disparaged science. Religion offered more dangerous opposition: Throughout the seventeenth century not only Catholics but Lutherans and Calvinists harshly punished heretics, and anyone who publicly espoused a scientific theory in conflict with the doctrines of the established church of his country was risking his good name, social position, fortune, and possibly his life.
Despite such obstacles, science flourished. In every major country of western Europe, inquisitive men peered through microscopes and telescopes, mixed reagents in glass flasks, burrowed into the earth, dissected animal and human cadavers, and calculated the movements of the stars and planets. Among these men were such illuminati, in England, as Wallis, Harvey, Boyle, Hooke, Halley, and Newton; in France, Descartes, Fermat, Mariotte, and Pascal; in Italy, Galileo, Viviani, and Torricelli; in Switzerland, Jacques and Jean Bernoulli; in Germany, Leibniz; and in Holland, Huygens and Leeuwenhoek.
Most of them, deeming themselves to be partners in a great movement, wrote to one another to share their thoughts and results. By mid-century, in Oxford, London, and Paris, scientists and science-minded amateurs were meeting in informal groups—“invisible colleges,” they were called—to exchange their findings and debate their theories. In 1662 Charles II conferred a charter on the London group, designating it the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge; through its Philosophical Transactions and similar journals on the Continent, scientists began to create an information network and subculture of their own.
Although psychology was far slower than the physical sciences to emerge from its philosophic-theological chrysalis, some of the finest minds of the age turned their attention to it and for the first time in two millennia began formulating new answers to the questions first asked by Greek philosophers. Although