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The Scientific Method

Name: Verite Kishore

Course: B. A. Programme
Roll No.: 2022/49/089
Paper Name: Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe-II

Context: The Scientific Revolution

The early modern period was one of sweeping change all over Europe in more ways than one.
The intellectual and scientific spheres were particularly affected by this. Education and
research, hitherto controlled firmly by the Catholic Church, were, in informal terms, put
through the wringer by a rising tide of thinkers, philosophers and scientists, mostly of the
humanist mould. Scholastic education, which was based largely on Aristotelian principles with
a distinct religious hue mixed in, began to come under question for redundancy and a greatly
limited outlook. Thinkers like Bacon and Descartes called for radical changes in the approach
to research and the sciences as a whole, and others, like Copernicus, Kepler, Pascal and Galileo,
embodied these changes with their discoveries, inventions and theories, in the process
antagonising the Church either openly or clandestinely. Some paid for their transgressions with
their lives, while others gave up with their freedom. Copernicus, himself a clergyman, wisely
put off the publication of his work until he was on his deathbed so that he could escape
persecution. In the long run, however, science and the human world in general would be
nowhere close to where it is now if it had not been for these industrious, bold and creative
individuals.

Going by the traditional definition, the Scientific Revolution was a roughly 200-year period
from the mid-1500s to the mid-1700s which saw radical changes in the scientific fields, the
effects of which spilled over to other aspects of public life like education and popular culture.
Modern historians, however, have questioned the usage of the term ‘revolution’ to describe this
period. A revolution, goes the argument, is something that is necessarily rapid as well as radical,
and while the changes that took place in this period fit the latter description, a series of events
over a span of 200 years cannot be considered fast. This may seem a little pedantic and overly
specific to some, but there are some relevant corollaries to this argument; one would be hard
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put to date this period of European history as accurately as one would, say, the French or the
Russian Revolution. Since the beginning of a revolution is always significant in terms of
creating a split between the pre- and post-revolution periods, not being able to nail one down is
something of a hindrance from an archival perspective. In addition, the use of the term
‘revolution’ (this particular meaning of the term, at least) seldom leaves the sociopolitical
sphere, though in recent years this has changed somewhat. Thomas Nickles, in an article
published in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, has the following to say on the matter:

…I. B. Cohen (1985) notes that the French word revolution was being used in
early eighteenth-century France to mark significant developments. By
mid-century it was pretty clear that Clairaut, D’Alembert, Diderot and others
sometimes applied the term to scientific developments, including Newton’s
achievement but also to Descartes’ rejection of Aristotelian philosophy. Cohen
fails to note that Émilie Du Châtelet preceded them, in her Institutions de
Physique of 1740, where she distinguished scientific from political revolutions
(Châtelet and Zinnser (sic) 2009, p. 118). However, the definition of revolution
in the Encyclopédie of the French philosophes was still political… Kant, in The
Critique of Pure Reason (first edition 1781), spoke of his “Copernican
Revolution'' in philosophy. In fact, Cohen (1985) and Ian Hacking (2012)
credit Kant with originating the idea of a scientific revolution… (Nickles)

In any case, though, the importance of this era of European intellectual development cannot
be denied, and so no discussion of early modern Western history can omit this age of
advancement, revolution or not.

The Scientific Revolution was characterised by a mind-boggling level of innovation and drive,
with inventions and hypotheses that changed fields or created new ones entirely. The changes
ran so deep that the very essence of science as it then existed was questioned and eventually
replaced. Biologists uncovered hitherto unknown bodily phenomena, as well as more efficient
ways to examine it. These advancements helped better the healthcare sector. William Harvey’s
discovery of blood circulation and Leeuwenhoek’s pioneering work in microbiology are
examples of this. Advancements in physics and mathematics such as the invention of the
telescope and the pendulum clock and the framing of Cartesian geometry proved to be a
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massive boost for their respective fields as well as other specialisations like astronomy. And
luminaries like Cavendish, Priestley and Lavoisier revolutionised (note the term) chemistry and
its associated disciplines. Enumerating all such instances of individual and collective scientific
brilliance would require an entire essay all on its own. The most fundamental of these
developments was inarguably the manner in which the scientific method and approach were
reshaped beyond recognition. Thinkers like Bacon and Descartes, who, interestingly, were not
even trained scientists, rather bluntly rubbished the Scholastic way of doing things and
proposed a near-complete overhaul of the scientific process. All these names, and more, fed the
constantly hungry creature that was progress for two hundred tireless years. And thank
goodness they did, I’m sure everyone would agree. It is their fearlessness - both in terms of their
ideas and their attitude to the opposition they faced - and unfettered creativity that made the
Scientific Revolution what it was - a phenomenon that “...[outshone] everything since the rise
of Christianity and. reduces the Renaissance and Reformation to the rank of mere episodes,
mere internal displacements, within the system of medieval (sic) Christendom”; something that
“looms so large as the real origin both of the modern world and of the modern mentality that
our customary periodisation of European history has become an anachronism and an
encumbrance” (Butterfield vii-viii).

We shall now focus on the people who took aim at the roots of scientific practice as it then
existed and sought to inject new life into them.

The scientific method: past and…well, less past

It has already been mentioned that the likes of Francis Bacon, René Descartes, Thomas
Hobbes and John Locke inspired drastic changes in the scientific method, which formed the
basis of all activity in the field. In order to understand just how stark the transformation was
and how truly impactful it was, we must give ourselves a quick look at what preceded it.

Science and research, prior to the period of the Scientific Revolution, was bound rigidly by
Church regulations. The Church was a proponent of Aristotelian and more specifically
Scholastic principles, which had long since become obsolete. This strain of science or rather
natural philosophy tended to leave a great deal to the “mysteries of the universe” and refuse to
question them any further. It was considered preferable to let wisdom and knowledge remain
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obscure and abstract, perhaps because it was not ideal to attempt to get too close to God (I
speculate a little freely here). Ancient wisdom and tenets, such as those of the classical Greek
philosophers, was accepted as the gospel truth, above any and all scrutiny. Disciplines steeped in
vagueness such as alchemy and astrology were at the forefront of all scientific activity.
Philosophers of this period believed in deductive reasoning, which entailed making one’s
observations and subsequent conclusions based only only on certain ‘universal’ axioms from
the past. With the advent of the Scientific Revolution, however, things took a sharp turn:

…whereas medieval (sic), Renaissance, and Reformation thinkers all assumed

that past knowledge was the most reliable source of wisdom, the greatest
thinkers from the seventeenth century onward rejected any obeisance to ancient
authority and resolved to rely on their own intellects to see where knowledge
would lead them… For a Plato, an Aristotle, or a St. Thomas Aquinas alike, the
greatest wisdom was the most abstract wisdom since such wisdom helped to
turn the human mind away from all earthly "corruptibility" and supposedly
brought happiness by its sheer resemblance to timeless divinity. But after the
change in Europe's climate of opinion in the late seventeenth century, all
knowledge without practical value was belittled… Finally, the new climate of
opinion was characterized (sic) by the demystification of the universe.
(Burns et al. 861-62)

The reason for such a drastic about-turn is a subject of widespread speculation. It is generally
linked with the humanism-fuelled urge to reach backwards to the classical, pre-Christian era.
Ironically enough, Scholastic thought takes its strongest inspiration from the ancient Greeks
themselves, rendering that theory somewhat suspect. The shift is also linked to the rise of
Protestantism (Davies), possibly with regard to the willingness to counter the Church. In any
case, we are sure of the period in which these changes occurred - the sixteenth and the
seventeenth centuries.

The new scientific method rejected the model of deductive reasoning and instead favoured
inductive reasoning, logic and reason. There were differences in the specifics - Bacon’s
empiricism and Cartesian rationalism, for instance - but the fundamental train of thought
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remained consistent - to perceive and seek to understand the world with a fully open mind,
unfettered by assumptions of the past. People were encouraged to do their own work, be it
calculative or experimental, make their own observations, use their own heads and come up
with their own inferences. It is here that we may, perhaps, see a similarity with humanist
thought; in the encouragement to think for oneself, quite akin to the humanist ideal of
individuality and unique human ability. Clutching on to past conclusions whilst making no
effort on one’s own part to verify said conclusions was viewed as restrictive; rather than doing
so, it was advised to consider everything in any given situation unknown or unexplored.

As has been stated earlier, the greatest opponent (and, in the long run, victim) of the wave(s) of
change was the Church, for obvious reasons. Its stubborn refusal to accept any scientific study
or theory beyond that which was within the scope of the Bible proved a major obstacle to
scientific advancement in its early days, what with its willingness to go to any lengths to get its
way - Giordano Bruno and Galileo Galilei being notable victims of this policy. It was
mentioned in the introduction to this assignment that some paid for their heresy with their
lives, and some others with their freedom. Bruno fits in the former category and Galileo, having
been forced to endure house arrest, falls in the latter. These were not the only ones, of course.
Few escaped the Church’s ruthlessness. Galileo’s punishment was not limited to house arrest;
he was made to publicly retract his statement that the earth revolved around the sun, and not
the other way round, for geocentrism was a vital part of the Christian narrative that human
being’s were God’s ultimate creation. A story goes, in fact, that after having issued this apology
at a public trial, the Italian astronomer muttered under his breath, “Eppur si muove” - Latin for
“and yet it does move”. Though this anecdote is almost certainly apocryphal, it succinctly
depicts the attitude of the persecuted people of science towards the mighty jackhammer that
was the Catholic Church.

I must digress in order to mention this, but it is sufficiently important to warrant digression.
Heliocentrism, more accurately the Copernican model, is considered to be the breakthrough
that kickstarted the Scientific Revolution, chiefly for how fundamental the theory (or rather its
opposite) was to the Church and their ‘scientific’ claims. I have, once again, mentioned in the
introduction that Copernicus was himself a man of the Church by profession and, out of sheer
fright for the torment he would be subjected to, chose to hide his findings until the last
possible moment. Even so, rumours leaked of the Dutchman’s theories, and those of the Bible
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did not mince their words regarding the issue. Even Martin Luther, an inveterate enemy of the
Catholic Church and a well-documented hypocrite, had this to say on the matter:

People gave ear to an upstart astrologer who strove to show that the earth
revolves, not the heavens or the firmament, the sun and the moon. . . . This fool
wishes to reverse the entire science of astronomy; but sacred Scripture tells us
that Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, and not the earth.
(Luther quoted in White, 1896)

Christian authorities tended to use Ptolemy’s model in order to consolidate their point. Once
Copernicus’ model gained traction among the scientific community, however, the Church lost
its upper hand in the argument and astronomy rose in prominence and credibility. Things
would have been easier than before as far as spreading the word was concerned, given the
impact of Renaissance humanism on reading and the language of knowledge. Those benefits,
however, took a while to make themselves felt. Copernicus, of course, despite having arrived at
his conclusion independently (at least, we do not seem to have unearthed any evidence yet that
would suggest the contrary), was far from the first to come up with a heliocentric model.
Ancient Greece’s Aristarchus of Samos had produced such a model - the first in recorded
human history - more than a dozen centuries earlier; even after the Ptolemaic model became
widely accepted, it was not without its critics. There are, in fact, several recorded instances of
prominent Islamic astronomers of the 10th-13th centuries expressing doubt or even flatly
rejecting the notion that the stars and other celestial bodies revolve around a stationary earth.
Copernicus’ theory merely had the additional benefit of being perfectly timed to set in motion
a series of changes in a wildly turbulent and volatile scholarly environment. With that said, let
us return to our primary concern.

Now that a foundation has been laid for further understanding the scientific method, let us
study it in greater detail through the lens of two major contributors to its framing - Francis
Bacon and René Descartes.
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Francis Bacon (1561-1626): he came, he saw , he inferred

Given that his upbringing and political career are virtually irrelevant to us, I shall be spending
just the bare minimum amount of space on them. Born to erudite, affluent parents, Bacon
grew up in an environment which nurtured his ample potential. Following the completion of
his education (which included a highly illuminating stint at Trinity College), he worked first at
the English embassy in France; in 1579, he returned to England, and two years later started a
political career that lasted forty years, with stints as a member of both houses of Parliament.
His tenure under Queen Elizabeth I’s reign was marked by a tightrope act of falling in and out
of favour with her. He reached his peak as a political figure under King James I of the newly (as
of 1603, that is) unified crown of England and Scotland, receiving a knighthood that very year
and serving in two major posts under him - as Attorney-General of England and as Lord
Chancellor. In 1621, however, he was impeached for corruption, to which he pleaded guilty.
With no real scope left for him in politics, he spent the next five years devoted entirely to
studies in natural philosophy and the sciences until his death in 1626. His fascination with said
fields, of course, preceded this period, though he never professionally engaged in any of them.
The latter fact makes his influence on science and the scientific method all the more impressive,
for his tenets and theories helped shape the course of science for centuries to come.

Bacon’s vision of the scientific approach, elaborated on in his work Novum Organum (1620),
included two (at the time) groundbreaking concepts: empiricism and inductive reasoning. The
latter was proposed as part of his rejection of deductive reasoning or syllogism, which
depended on ‘universally’ accepted dogmas or assumptions to make inferences. Bacon’s
method stressed, above all else, on facts and observational evidence. Any and every
phenomenon was to be perceived with a clean slate and a fully open mind so as not to be
limited by pre-existing beliefs and tenets. This concept of a ‘clean slate’ is (albeit in a slightly
closely associated with empiricism, which relies on nothing but sensory experience to
understand the world around them. This sets it apart from rationalism, another
epistemological view that relies on logic and - as its name suggests - rational thought. It must be
stated that Novum Organum was not the first book in which he had mentioned his scientific
method. He had touched upon the subject in earlier works like Advancement of Learning
(1605) and Cogitata et Visa (1607).
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Rather than using axioms to explain phenomena, Baconian induction prescribed the use of
observations and their subsequent inferences to frame axioms. Experiments and hypotheses
were integral to Bacon’s scientific method. Observations were to be made of the experiments
performed, from which conclusions derived and axioms, theories or generalisations (essentially
the same thing, as far as our study is concerned) would be formed. Bacon held that an approach
that sought to ‘anticipate nature’ rather than interpret it and showed undue deference to past
findings and achievements was detrimental to growth and progress. Plus ultra or ‘go beyond’
was the motto he lived by.

Bacon minced no words in expressing his distaste for the obsolete Aristotelian organum, as he
put it; in one instance, he wrote disparagingly of the Greeks and the alchemists that “one never
faileth to multiply words, and the other ever faileth to multiply gold” (Bacon quoted in
Gleick). He was also openly critical of Scholasticism, the mode of study and research
perpetuated by the Church at the time. However, he was in no way opposed to religious
involvement in science. In fact, he believed that scientific research must be “complementary to
the study of the Bible” (Davies). “The scientist,” Davies writes further, “became the priest of
God’s book of nature.” Bacon also stressed the need for a collective effort to further scientific
research, promoting the idea of a “cooperative venture proceeding by means of meticulously
recorded empirical experiments” (Burns et al. 863).

Francis Bacon, therefore, was of great calibre and influence, but that is not to say that his
points were taken as the gospel truth. Doing so, in fact, would go against everything he stood
for. Some agreed with him in part, such as regarding the attitude towards past knowledge, but
differed regarding the way forward. The most prominent of these, of course, was René
Descartes.

René Descartes (1596-1650): he came, he thought, he was

Before the legendary mental gymnastics which have led him to be titled “the father of modern
philosophy”, René Descartes was a baby. He may not have been thinking, but he most certainly
was (I offer no apologies for the pun) on the 31st of March, 1596, and continued to be for the
next five decades, until his death on 11 February 1650.
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In-text jokes aside, let us proceed. Despite being born in France, Descartes spent a significant
portion of his life in the Netherlands (known then as the Dutch Republic), serving in their
military and later rising as a major figure in the Dutch Golden Age. Descartes was educated at
the Jesuit College of La Flèche, where he was primarily exposed to Aristotelian philosophy,
among other things. In retrospect, Descartes considered his overwhelmingly scholastic
education to have left him with “so many doubts and errors that I came to think I had gained
nothing...but increasing recognition of my ignorance” (quote taken from his 1637 work
Discourses on the Method). Despite studying law, he never went on to actually practise in the
field. He instead joined the Protestant Dutch Army at Breda in 1618. Two years later, he left
and threw himself into reading scholarly literature. His life during this period is rather murky,
but in 1628, he returned to the Netherlands, and between 1629 and 1649, he wrote his most
famous works on philosophy, including Le Monde (Fr. The World; 1633), Discourses and
Meditations (1641). In addition to philosophy, he wrote extensively on other subjects,
primarily mathematics. His contributions to the latter are massive, having pioneered the very
idea of Cartesian or analytical geometry as well as the representation of exponential figures and
variables in equations. His work is also held to have held the basis of calculus, later developed
independently by Leibniz and Newton. Descartes’ influence on his time in general has been
succinctly put by Wasson as follows:

While not a direct participant in the Enlightenment, Descartes' legacy would be

his influence on those who contributed to the scientific, political, and social
changes throughout this age, an age of reason.
(Wasson)

As earlier mentioned, Descartes did agree with his earlier-mentioned British contemporary on
certain crucial points, but it was in their respective discourse on the way ahead that their paths
diverged. Unlike the Baconian ideal, which laid heavy emphasis on experimentation and visual
proof, Descartes’ philosophy was rationalist in nature, with a strong mathematical bent.
Descartes’ school of thought had a deep impact on the field of epistemology, for one of his
(some would say the absolute) greatest preoccupations was the unblemished, unadulterated
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truth and where it was to be found. In order to facilitate his pursuit of such universal facts, the
Frenchman resolved to accept nothing that could not be irrefutably proven as true. It was this
policy of stringent scepticism that led him to eventually boil his own existence down to
something provable only by the functioning of his own mind.

This form of stone-cold logic was still almost wholly theoretical, as it did not involve physical
verification or express any need for empirical data at any point. Descartes’ rationalism was
speculative and sought to view everything within the bounds of conceivable logic. Anything
that could not be washed clean of every shred of doubt was to be discarded. This obsession
with absolutes lines up well with his famed love for and proficiency in mathematics. He,
however, seemed rather unconcerned by the challenges posed to his work by empiricism,
writing in Discourses, “natural processes almost always depend on parts so small that they
utterly elude our senses”. Descartes, somewhat like Copernicus, started a line of immediate
ideological successors who subscribed to Cartesian thought. There were also those who
independently followed these same principles. Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) was of the former
category to some extent; though not an out-and-out Cartesianist, he “shared Descartes’s
intensely mathematical and logical view of a universe formed by first principles” and
considered blind faith to be “despicable” (Davies). Another contemporary, Blaise Pascal
(1623-1662), “took [Descartes’ mechanistic worldview- that all beings are complex machines]
to the point where he was able to produce the first ‘computer’” (ibid).

Conclusion

And there we have it. Descartes’ method did not directly cause or inspire any discovery or
invention in the field of science. In fact, neither did Bacon’s. Their importance lay more in the
fact that they openly chose to oppose the status quo, which was at the time in a condition of
such abject stagnation that their equally extreme (albeit in the opposite direction) ideas were
necessary to give the world a wake-up call. Through empiricism and rationalism respectively,
they sought to open people's eyes to their potential for introspection and independent
deliberation, in similar vein to the luminaries of the humanist movement during the
Renaissance.

There is a great deal more to be written about the Scientific Revolution and even the scientific
method alone. However, given the scope of this essay, I believe I have put my best foot forward
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in terms of explaining the concept in question precisely and with a fair balance of detail and
brevity. It is here, therefore, that I must conclude.
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Works Cited

Burns, Edward McNall, et al. World Civilizations. vol. 2, W.W.Norton, 1982.

Butterfield, Herbert. The Origins of Modern Science. The Macmillan Company, 1957.

Davies, Norman. Europe: A History. HarperCollins, 1998.

Gleick, James. Isaac Newton. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2007.

Nickles, Thomas. “Scientific Revolutions (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).” Stanford

Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 5 March 2009,

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-revolutions/. Accessed 25 March 2024.

Wasson, Donald L. “René Descartes.” World History Encyclopedia, 22 September 2020,

https://www.worldhistory.org/Rene_Descartes/. Accessed 1 April 2024.

White, Andrew Dickson. A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom.

vol. 1, Appleton, 1896. 2 vols. Internet Archive,

https://archive.org/details/ahistorywarfare00whitgoog/page/n5/mode/2up. Accessed

25 March 2024.
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Other References

Cartwright, Mark. “Scientific Revolution.” World History Encyclopedia, 8 November 2023,

https://www.worldhistory.org/Scientific_Revolution/. Accessed 1 April 2024.

Cartwright, Mark. “Francis Bacon.” World History Encyclopedia, 27 September 2023,

https://www.worldhistory.org/Francis_Bacon/. Accessed 1 April 2024.

Hatfield, Gary. “René Descartes (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).” Stanford

Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 3 December 2008, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/descartes/.
Accessed 1 April 2024.

Sylvester, Joshua, et al. “Francis Bacon (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).” Stanford

Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 29 December 2003,
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/francis-bacon/. Accessed 1 April 2024.

Drake, Stillman. “Scientific Revolution.” Wikipedia,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Revolution. Accessed 1 April 2024.

Fowler, Thomas. “Francis Bacon.” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Bacon.

Accessed 1 April 2024.

Veitch, John. “René Descartes.” Wikipedia,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Descartes#. Accessed 1 April 2024.

“Cartesianism.” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartesianism. Accessed 1 April

2024.

“Baconian method.” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baconian_method. Accessed 1

April 2024.
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