The Intellectual Origins of the Scientific Revolution

The scientific breakthroughs of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were rooted in earlier developments. Artists and intellectuals had been observing the natural world with great precision since at least the twelfth century. Medieval sculptors accurately carved plants, animals, and human forms. The link among observation, experimentation, and invention was not new. The magnetic compass had been known in Europe since the thirteenth century; gunpowder since the early fourteenth; and printing—which opened new possibilities for disseminating ideas quickly and building libraries—since the middle of the fifteenth. A fascination with light encouraged the study of optics. Lens grinders laid the groundwork for the invention of the telescope and microscope, creating reading glasses along the way. Astrologers were also active in the later Middle Ages, charting the heavens in the firm belief that the stars controlled the fates of human beings.

Behind these efforts to understand the natural world lay a nearly universal conviction that the natural world had been created by God. Religious belief spurred scientific study. One school of thinkers, the Neoplatonists, argued that nature was a book written by its creator to reveal the ways of God to humanity. Convinced that God’s perfection must be reflected in nature, Neoplatonists searched for the perfect structures they believed must lie behind the “shadows” of the everyday world. Mathematics, particularly geometry, were important tools in this quest.

Renaissance humanism provided a foundation for the scientific revolution. Humanists revered the authority of the ancients. The energies the humanists poured into recovering and translating classical texts about the natural world made many of those important works available for the first time to a wider audience. Previously, Arabic sources had provided Europeans with the main route to ancient Greek learning. Greek authors such as Ptolemy were translated into Arabic by Islamic scholars, who often knew them better than Europeans did. Later these texts returned to Europe through the work of late-medieval scholars in Spain and Sicily. The humanists’ return to the original texts—and the fact that they could be printed and circulated in larger numbers—encouraged study and debate. The humanist rediscovery of works by Archimedes—the great Greek mathematician who had proposed that the natural world operated on the basis of mechanical forces, like a great machine, and that these forces could be described mathematically—profoundly impressed important late-sixteenth- and seventeenth-century thinkers.

The Renaissance also encouraged collaboration between artisans and intellectuals. Twelfth- and thirteenth-century thinkers had observed the natural world, but they had little contact with the artisans who constructed machines for practical use. During the fifteenth century, however, these two worlds began to come together. Renaissance artists such as Leonardo da Vinci were accomplished craftsmen; they investigated the laws of perspective and optics, they worked out geometric methods for supporting the weight of enormous architectural domes, they studied the human body, and they devised new and more-effective weapons for war. Wealthy amateurs built observatories, measured the courses of the stars, and published work in astrology and alchemy. This fusion of intellectual curiosity and skilled handiwork created new possibilities for research and encouraged the creation of new fields of knowledge.

Sixteenth-century observers often linked the exploration of the globe to new knowledge of the cosmos. An admirer wrote to Galileo that he had kept the spirit of exploration alive: “The memory of Columbus and Vespucci will be renewed through you, and with even greater nobility, as the sky is more worthy than the earth.” The parallel does not work quite so neatly, however. Columbus had not been driven by an interest in science. Moreover, it took centuries for European thinkers to realize the New World’s implications for different fields of study, and the links between the voyages of discovery and breakthroughs in science were largely indirect. The discoveries of new lands made the most immediate impact in the field of natural history, which was vastly enriched by travelers’ detailed accounts of the peoples, animal life, and plants of the Americas. Finding new lands and cultures in Africa and Asia and the revelation of the Americas—a world unknown to the ancients and unmentioned in the Bible—also laid bare gaps in Europeans’ inherited body of knowledge. In this sense, the exploration of the New World dealt a blow to the authority of the ancients.

In sum, the late medieval recovery of ancient texts, the expansion of print culture and reading, turmoil in the Church after the Reformation, and the encounter with the Americas all shook the authority of older ways of thinking in Europe. What we call the scientific revolution was part of the intellectual excitement that surrounded these challenges to established beliefs.