Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution

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4: The Enlightenment and the Age of Revolution

Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution

Introduction

The Enlightenment, also known as the Age of Reason, was an intellectual and philosophical movement that dominated the world of ideas during the 18th century. These ideas centered on reason as the primary source of knowledge and advanced ideals such as liberty, progress, toleration, fraternity, constitutional government, and the separation of church and state. The Enlightenment produced numerous books, essays, inventions, scientific discoveries, laws, wars and revolutions. Abolitionists questioned the morality and need for slavery, and eventually succeeded in emancipating enslaved men, women, and children around the Atlantic World. Women challenged the ideas of the state and gained the right to vote after a long Suffrage Movement. This period is one that will set the stage for many events to come in World History, and we can connect many of the events that will occur in future units to the ideas of The Enlightenment.

The central doctrines of the Enlightenment philosophers were individual liberty and religious tolerance, as well as the opposition to an absolute monarchy. The period stimulated people to look at authority in a new way and to posit new and different ideas to remedy the daily problems they encountered. This meant drawing on relatively new ways of interacting with the world. Enlightenment intellectuals argued in favor of empiricism. Empirical thinking posited that knowledge comes from experience or observation rather than belief or tradition. They also championed rationalism. Rationalism was a way of thinking that argued reason was the ultimate test of knowledge and that through rational deduction—breaking the problem down into its constituent parts—they could investigate and understand the logic behind ideas, systems, and experiences. Beyond this, they relied on skepticism, which maintained that nothing was certain until proven. For the Enlightenment intellectuals, proof often came from reason or empirical observation. Finally, cosmopolitanism reflected Enlightenment thinkers’ view of themselves as actively engaged citizens of the world as opposed to provincial and close-minded individuals. In all, Enlightenment thinkers endeavored to be ruled by reason, not prejudice.

The Scientific Revolution

Tracing the beginning of the Enlightenment is difficult, but most agree that it was sparked by the Scientific Revolution, a period of history that lasted from the 16th through the 18th centuries. The Scientific Revolution was an outgrowth of the European Renaissance and Reformation, which we discussed in Unit 2, increased contact with Asia, and the voyages of exploration. The Scientific Revolution took these new ways of thinking—empiricism, rationalism, skepticism, and cosmopolitanism—and asked questions about the natural world. They questioned the authority of classical Roman knowledge and Catholic Church belief by questioning the nature of man and man’s role in the natural world and universe.

Left to Right: Nicholas Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler, and Isaac Newton

This was incredibly revolutionary. It opened questions of planetary movement—Nicholas Copernicus (1473-1543) argued with the ideas of the Roman philosopher Ptolemy who argued that the universe’s center was the Earth. Copernicus, after observing the sun’s movement suggested that the sun, and not the Earth, was the center of the universe.  A follower of Copernicus’ ideas, Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) conducted experiments to understand the mechanics of items on Earth and in the sky. Galileo’s decision to teach Copernicus’ heliocentric (sun-centered) theory of the universe brought him into conflict with the Catholic Church in Rome and he was ordered to stop teaching it. He did, for a while, but in 1632 he published the Dialogue Concerning Two Chief World Systems, Ptolemaic and Copernican. This brought him back into conflict with the Catholic Church because one of the characters in this dialogue, Simplico, was a fool whose ideas were precisely that of the Catholic Church’s. He was summoned to Rome, tried, and promised never to write. He spent the rest of his life under house arrest.

As Copernicus was beginning to question the center of the universe, Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) opened new lines of inquiry of his own. Kepler posited not only that the universe revolved around the sun and that these movements were mechanical, but that planetary movements were also predictable. He argued that planets move in ellipses, not perfect circles and that there was a way to determine the size of a planet’s orbit from its axis and relationship to the sun. Kepler’s laws of planetary motion form the basis of modern astronomical physics. These intellectuals demonstrate how knowledge built upon itself, it still does, and how intellectuals used each other’s work to go one step further in their analysis. Indeed, Isaac Newton (1642-1726) used Copernicus’ and Kepler’s ideas to help him create an entirely new field of study, calculus. In his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathmatica (1687) Newton proposed mathematical models for understanding not only the natural world but also the universe.

APPLYING IDEAS TO HUMANS AND PLANTS

It was not only the field of planetary motion that the Scientific Revolution made its mark, but this period also stimulated artists’ and intellectuals’ desires to understand the world around them. When combined with the desires of the Scientific Revolution and its guiding methodologies—empiricism, skepticism, rationalism, and cosmopolitanism—this meant also trying to understand the human body.

During the Renaissance, physicians investigated the human body through direct observation. Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564) observed skeletal, vascular, and muscular systems, creating diagrams and positing explanations with regard to their purposes. As he was uncovering the insides of the body, Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) investigated the external appearance of the body. Da Vinci was an artist born in the Italian city-state of Florence during the Renaissance and he worked to understand the proportions of the human body and famously created the Vitruvian Man drawing that you see here.

William Harvey (1578-1657), an English scientist, helped launch the field of physiology by investigating the circulatory system. Like Vesalius, he observed the flow of fluids through the body, but unlike Vesalius, he not only traced circulation but proved that bodies have a finite amount of blood that is constantly recirculated. Additionally, he observed and dissected the heart and its chambers, noting how blood moved through the system.

Moving away from the human body, natural philosophers (scientists) began applying what they learned in the human body to plants. Working slightly after Harvey, Robert Hooke (1635-1703) used the microscope to identify the smallest portions of plants, which he named, cells. The idea that plants consisted of small, observable units that could be observed, measured, and compared, was revolutionary.

The observations of natural philosophers (scientists) during the 17th and 18th centuries led to the creation of new and different ways of understanding the world. When combined with the European journeys of exploration and more regular communication between natural philosophers, they needed a way to communicate information without having to constantly restate their experiences. One way they did this was through classification. Aristotle (384-322 BCE) suggested that species existed within a hierarchy with higher life forms on the top and lower on the bottom. During the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment, these ideas shifted slightly.

Carolus Linneaus (1707-1778), a Swedish botanist and zoologist, published a work entitled the Systema Naturae in which he classified thousands of animal and plant species in a more systemic way than Aristotle’s method. Using the hierarchy—kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species—Linneaus enabled scientists to group together animals or plants that shared characteristics. When Europeans encountered new animals or plants, there was a way to sort them without disrupting the entire hierarchy—new categories of class, order, family, or genus could be created to accommodate new species. Further, he gave natural philosophers a way to refer to plants and animals—through binomial nomenclature, in which you take the genus and species names and use these to refer to specific animals or plants. This hierarchy based on the shared characteristics of animals or plants enabled natural philosophers to converse with one another about the discoveries they were making and to reach a consensus about the plants or animals being observed through shared scientific naming practices. Without the use of binomial nomenclature, it was possible that scientists observed the same animal, but did not know it.

By the 18th century, this was particularly important as natural philosophers began having the ability to observe plants and, in some cases, animals that never existed prior in Europe. As Europeans traveled abroad some brought new plants and animals back to Europe. The first botanical garden was established in Padua in the mid-16th century and was quickly established elsewhere in the Italian city-states as well as in other European cities, such as Cologne and Prague. In 1621 the University of Oxford established its botanical garden.  Botanical gardens became not only a scientific endeavor, but they also helped prove political and economic power. Spain established its Real Jardin Botanico in 1755 and England established the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew in 1759. It is currently designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Many of the botanical gardens included greenhouses where natural philosophers not only observed their growth and development but also attempted to cultivate them for economic gain.

The Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew