Of all the changes that swept over Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the most

widely influential was an epistemological transformation that we call the scientific revolution. In the
popular mind, this revolution is associated with natural science and technological change, but the
scientific revolution was, in reality, a series of changes in the structure of European thought itself:
systematic doubt, empirical and sensory verification, the abstraction of human knowledge into separate
sciences, and the view that the world functions like a machine. These changes greatly altered the human
experience of every other aspect of life. This modification in world view can also be charted in painting,
sculpture and architecture, where it can be seen that people are looking at the world very differently.