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During the seventeenth century, scientific learning and investigation began to increase dramatically. Major universities in Europe established new chairs of science, especially in medicine. Royal and princely patronage of individual scientists became an international phenomenon. Even in the late sixteenth century, the king of Denmark had constructed an astronomical observatory for Tycho Brahe; later Emperor Rudolf II hired Brahe and Kepler as imperial mathematicians, and the grand duke of Tuscany appointed Galileo to a similar post.

The Scientific Method

Of great importance to the work of science was establishing the proper means to examine and understand the physical realm. This development of a scientific method was crucial to the evolution of science in the modern world.

FRANCIS BACON Curiously enough, it was an Englishman with few scientific credentials who attempted to put forth a new method of acquiring knowledge that made an impact on the Royal Society in England in the seventeenth century and other European scientists in the eighteenth century. Francis Bacon (1561–1626), a lawyer and lord chancellor, rejected Copernicus and Kepler and misunderstood Galileo. And yet in his unfinished work, The Great Instauration, he called for his contemporaries “to commence a total reconstruction of sciences, arts, and all human knowledge, raised upon the proper foundations.” Bacon did not doubt humans’ ability to know the natural world, but he believed that they had proceeded incorrectly: “The entire fabric of human reason which we employ in the inquisition of nature is badly put together and built up, and like some magnificent structure without foundation.”

Bacon’s new foundation—a correct scientific method— was to be built on inductive principles. Rather than beginning with assumed first principles from which logical conclusions could be deduced, he urged scientists to proceed from the particular to the general. From carefully organized experiments and thorough, systematic observations, correct generalizations could be developed.

Bacon was clear about what he believed his method could accomplish. His concern was more for practical than for pure science. He stated that “the true and lawful goal of the sciences is none other than this: that human life be endowed with new discoveries and power.” He wanted science to contribute to the “mechanical arts” by creating devices that would benefit industry, agriculture, and trade. Bacon was prophetic when he said that he was “laboring to lay the foundation, not of any sect or doctrine, but of human utility and power.” And how would this “human power” be used? To “conquer nature in action.”18 The control and domination of nature became a central proposition of modern science and the technology that accompanied it. Only in the twentieth century did some scientists begin to ask whether this assumption might not be at the heart of the earth’s ecological crisis.

DESCARTES Descartes proposed a different approach to scientific methodology by emphasizing deduction and mathematical logic. As Descartes explained in the Discourse on Method, each step in an argument should be as sharp and well founded as a mathematical proof:

Those long chains of reasonings, each step simple and easy, which geometers are wont to employ in arriving even at the most difficult of their demonstrations, have led me to surmise that all the things we human beings are competent to know are interconnected in the same manner, and that none are so remote as to be beyond our reach or so hidden that we cannot discover them—that is, provided we abstain from accepting as true what is not thus related, i.e., keep always to the order required for their deduction one from another.19

Descartes believed, then, that one could start with self-evident truths, comparable to geometric axioms, and deduce more complex conclusions. His emphasis on deduction and mathematical order complemented Bacon’s stress on