The Scientific View of the World

This is Unit Five of Western Civilization Two, part two of two: five procedures on the scientific revolution, three of them the exam's own sample questions, and the chain that runs from Copernicus to Locke. Part one ended with Locke's blank slate. This part pays off the unit's governing idea, that natural philosophy stopped describing a known truth and began discovering, by drilling the way the exam tests it. Whose work did Newton culminate: sort every name by field, and only Kepler and Galileo feed the Principia. Put the revolution in order between fifteen forty-three and sixteen eighty-seven. Tell induction from deduction and deism from materialism. Read Locke's passage on the mind as white paper, which the exam quotes without printing, and say whose view it is and what it means for knowledge. Set Hobbes beside Locke. Then the chain. By the end you will be able to sort scientists by field. To sequence the revolution. To classify a method. To read Locke. To compare the two contracts. And to state what the revolution changed.

Three sortings: names by field for sample question four, landmarks in order, and methods by procedure and conclusion.

Only one field feeds the Principia.

WC2 0425 Sorting Scientists by Field: Who Preceded Newton

The exam asks whose work Newton culminated and offers pairs from different fields, so sort every name by what it explained: the heavens and motion, the body, the method, or the mind. Kepler and Galileo: sun-centered laws of planetary motion and the mathematics of falling bodies; heavens and motion; the exam's answer. Vesalius and Paracelsus: anatomy and medicine; the body. Bacon and Boyle: the inductive method and chemistry; a false lead, because Bacon inspired the Royal Society. Descartes and Leibniz: deduction and the calculus; Leibniz invented calculus beside Newton but neither supplied the astronomy. Cardano and Pascal: algebra and probability. The trap is Bacon, since the witness credits his method with inspiring Newton's society; inspiration is not culmination. Newton's law unified Kepler's planets with Galileo's projectiles, and that is what culminate means.

Fifteen forty-three, sixteen thirty-three, sixteen eighty-seven.

WC2 0426 Sequencing the Scientific Revolution, 1543 to 1687

Two fixed points, Copernicus's book in fifteen forty-three and Newton's in sixteen eighty-seven, which the witness calls the revolution's beginning and end, with Galileo's trial in thirty-three as the midpoint. Then place: Brahe's observations, the late sixteenth century, after Copernicus and before Kepler; Kepler's laws, the early seventeenth, from Brahe's data; The Starry Messenger, sixteen ten; Harvey's circulation, the twenties; the Dialogue, thirty-two, the year before the trial; the Royal Society, sixty, after the trial and before the Principia. Copernicus, Brahe, Kepler, the telescope, Harvey, the Dialogue, the trial, the Royal Society, Newton. The anchor misdates the two societies to one year; the witness gives sixty and sixty-six, and both fall between the trial and Newton either way. Locke's Essay of ninety comes after the whole chain.

Procedure and conclusion, sorted separately.

WC2 0427 Classifying a Method: Inductive, Deductive, Deist, Materialist

Two questions sort the cases: does the reasoning run from facts to theory or from theory to facts, and does the conclusion keep a God who acts, a God who does not, or no God at all. A hypothesis tested by attempts to disprove it, only repeatable results trusted: facts to theory, inductive, Bacon. Doubt everything until one certainty remains, then deduce God from it: theory to facts, deductive, Descartes. A universe on mathematical laws, set going by a creator who no longer intervenes: deism. Nature's laws synonymous with God, no soul, no spirit: materialism, Spinoza. A geocentric model kept by adding spheres: theory bending facts, deductive, Ptolemy's heirs. Induction and deduction describe procedure; deism and materialism describe conclusions, and a thinker can hold one of each. Newton induced from data and remained a believer.

Two readings: the white-paper passage for sample questions seven and eight, and Hobbes against Locke on four features.

White paper, void of all characters.

WC2 0428 Reading Locke on the Mind as White Paper

The exam quotes a passage and asks whose view it is and what it means for knowledge. Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book Two, chapter one, read at Project Gutenberg, is the type: suppose the mind white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas, and ask how it comes to be furnished. His answer is one word, experience. Read it in three moves. The image: the mind at birth is blank, so nothing is written in advance. The source: all the materials of reason and knowledge come from experience, divided into sensation, the senses conveying perceptions, and reflection, the mind observing its own operations. The consequence: if knowledge comes from experience, education makes the person, and no one is born to rule or obey, which is why the anchor sets the blank slate beside revocable sovereignty. The distractors: Descartes held some ideas innate, the opposite claim; Burke defended inherited tradition; Newton wrote no theory of mind; Voltaire admired Locke. The significance is that knowledge is gained through contact with and observation of the world, not imprinted at birth, not fixed against education, and not a counsel of despair.

Nature, contract, sovereign, revolt.

WC2 0429 Hobbes and Locke Compared: Nature, Contract, Sovereign, Revolt

Four features carry the comparison; Hobbes and Locke share the contract and disagree on everything else. The state of nature: for Hobbes anarchy, a war of each against all in which life is short; for Locke freedom under a law of nature that reason teaches. The contract: for Hobbes people surrender their rights to the sovereign for security; for Locke they lend power to a government to protect life, liberty and property. The sovereign: for Hobbes absolute, because divided power invites the war back; for Locke limited by law and consent. Revolt: for Hobbes never justified, since any order beats none; for Locke justified when government breaks the law, the principle the witness links to the Bill of Rights. Hobbes wrote from the civil war and Locke from the Glorious Revolution. Hobbes is not a theorist of divine right; his sovereign rules by contract, so Bossuet and Hobbes belong to different columns.

One capstone entry: the chain from Copernicus to Locke, and the change of purpose that runs through it.

A change of purpose.

WC2 0430 From Describing the World to Discovering It: What the Revolution Changed

The exam's third band asks who the major figures were, what new knowledge of man and society came, 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 and fitted observations to it. Humanism showed the ancients disagreed, and Ptolemy's spheres could not hold the planets without endless caveats. Copernicus put the sun at the center in fifteen forty-three; Brahe's data, gathered to refute him, let Kepler find the laws of planetary motion; Galileo's telescope showed imperfect heavens in sixteen ten and his trial in 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 eighty-seven with one law for planets and pebbles, and the witness states the exam's lesson: Kepler and Galileo gave the theory credibility, and the work culminated in the Principia. Medicine followed slowly, Vesalius dissecting and Harvey circulating the blood, and Leeuwenhoek saw bacteria without guessing what they did. The new knowledge of society was double-edged: societies chartered in sixty and sixty-six made science a state interest, Latin gave way to vernaculars, and the same science that admitted a few women built a worse theory of sexual difference. The philosophical result 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 blank at birth, deduced government by consent, revocable when it breaks the law, and toleration. Describing gave way to discovering, and the discoverers turned next to society.

Look at what you can now do. You can sort scientists by field and say why Kepler and Galileo, not Bacon or Descartes, are the pair Newton culminated. You can sequence the revolution between fifteen forty-three and sixteen eighty-seven with the trial at the midpoint. You can classify a procedure as inductive or deductive and a conclusion as deist or materialist, and keep the two apart. You can read Locke's white paper for its author and its meaning: knowledge through experience and observation, not innate, not fixed, not despaired of. You can compare Hobbes and Locke on nature, contract, sovereign and revolt. And you can state the change, describing to discovering, which is this unit's one idea. Unit six opens on the century that applied reason to everything else.