From Describing the World to Discovering It: What the Revolution Changed

The idea

The exam's third band asks who the major figures of the scientific revolution were, what new knowledge of man and society it produced, and what political theory came with it, and the anchor's answer to all three is one change of purpose. For a thousand years natural philosophy described a truth already known, from Aristotle and scripture, and fitted the observations to it. Humanism showed that the ancients had disagreed among themselves, and astronomy showed that Ptolemy's spheres could not hold the planets without endless caveats. Copernicus put the sun at the center in fifteen forty-three; Brahe's twenty years of data, gathered to refute him, let Kepler prove him right and find the laws of planetary motion; Galileo's telescope showed imperfect heavens and Jupiter's moons in sixteen ten, and his trial in sixteen thirty-three showed what the claim cost. Bacon wrote the rules, hypothesis, disproof, repetition, and Descartes the opposite rules, doubt, certainty, deduction. Newton closed the chain in sixteen eighty-seven with one law for planets and pebbles, a system that replaced Aristotle rather than patching him, and the witness states the exam's lesson in a sentence: Kepler and Galileo gave the theory credibility, and the work culminated in the Principia. Medicine followed more slowly, Vesalius dissecting and Harvey circulating the blood while the humors lingered, and Leeuwenhoek saw bacteria without guessing what they did. The new knowledge of man and society was double-edged. Societies chartered in sixteen sixty and sixteen sixty-six made science a state interest and a republic of correspondents; Latin gave way to vernaculars; and the same science that admitted a few aristocratic women built a worse theory of sexual difference than the one it replaced. The philosophical impact was a mechanical universe: deism's clockmaker for most, Spinoza's God-as-nature for the few, Pascal's wager for the anxious. Political theory took the method to the state. Hobbes, whom the witness supplies, deduced an absolute sovereign from a war of all against all; Locke, from a mind that is blank at birth and learns by experience, deduced government by consent, revocable when it breaks the law, and toleration because no one holds exclusive truth. Describing gave way to discovering, and the discoverers turned next to society.