The Impact of the Scientific Revolution on Society

Between the publication of Copernicus’s De revolutionibus in 1543 and Newton’s Principia in 1687, the way Europeans understood the natural world was rebuilt from the foundations up. The earth was no longer the center of the cosmos. The heavens were no longer immutable. The body was no longer governed by the four humors, and the surface of the moon was no longer a perfect sphere. In place of a closed, hierarchical, qualitatively ordered universe, the new natural philosophers described a vast, law-governed, quantitatively measurable machine. But the consequences of that intellectual revolution extended far beyond the laboratory and the observatory. The Scientific Revolution transformed the relationship between science and religion, redrew the boundaries of permissible knowledge, reorganized the patronage and practice of learning, and produced a cascade of practical innovations — from the pendulum clock to the steam engine — that would eventually industrialize Europe. It shaped the way governments thought about their subjects, the way subjects thought about their governments, and the way both thought about the natural world. It created new institutions: the scientific society, the research journal, the public lecture, the modern university. It produced new audiences: a literate, curious, increasingly secular public that read, argued, and experimented. And it laid the conceptual and institutional groundwork for the Enlightenment, the democratic revolutions of the eighteenth century, and the Industrial Revolution that followed. this section examines those transformations. The four sections collected here look in turn at the new relationship between science and the Church, at the long-term links between scientific knowledge and industrial technology, at the political and philosophical inheritance that fed into the Enlightenment, and at the slow transformation of the university and the publishing world that carried the new science into wider European culture. Together they show how a revolution in natural philosophy became a revolution in European society as a whole. For a chronological account of the revolution itself, see An Overview of the Scientific Revolution. For the people who made it, see The Key Figures of the Scientific Revolution. And for the conceptual breakthroughs that drove it, see The Major Discoveries of the Scientific Revolution.

A Revolution in Natural Philosophy and a Revolution in Everything Else

It is one of the commonplaces of intellectual history to say that the Scientific Revolution had consequences “beyond science.” The commonplace is true, but it understates the depth of the transformation. The new science was never simply a matter of new theories about planets and pendulums. From the start it carried with it a new conception of what it meant to know something, a new conception of the kind of community in which knowledge was produced and validated, and a new conception of the relationship between human beings and the natural world. Three features of the new science were especially consequential. First, it insisted that knowledge of nature should be public, demonstrable, and in principle accessible to anyone who would attend carefully to the evidence. The model of the experiment, repeatable in any well-equipped workshop, replaced the model of the secret revelation, accessible only to the initiate. Second, it treated nature as a system of regular, mathematically describable laws rather than as a living, purposeful, qualitatively ordered whole. That shift made possible a technology that could systematically exploit natural processes — what we now call engineering. Third, it gradually established the natural philosopher as a figure with social authority independent of the Church and the universities, with a claim to speak about the natural world that rested not on ordination or academic degree but on demonstration and argument. Each of these features had social effects that compounded over time. The insistence on public demonstration led to the creation of scientific societies, journals, and popular lectures, and eventually to the idea that knowledge should be freely exchanged among citizens. The mathematical description of nature made possible the construction of accurate clocks, the calculation of insurance risks, the design of steam engines, and the navigation of ships across oceans. The independent social authority of the natural philosopher made it possible to criticize the claims of theologians, the authority of monarchs, and the privileges of the established universities without immediately being dismissed as impious or seditious. None of this happened quickly, and none of it happened in a straight line. The Scientific Revolution was, in part, a slow, contested, often bitter process of negotiation between the new natural philosophy and the older authorities it challenged. That process is the subject of the rest of this section.

The Religious Upheaval

If there is one dimension of European life that the Scientific Revolution transformed more visibly than any other in the seventeenth century, it is the relationship between the new natural philosophy and the Christian churches. The story is not a simple one of science against religion. Many of the central figures of the revolution were devout: Kepler saw his astronomy as a reading of God’s thoughts after the event of creation; Newton wrote more about biblical chronology and theology than he did about physics; Descartes argued that the existence of God could be proved by the idea of God in us; Galileo insisted that the Bible tells us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go. And many of the institutions of the new science — the Jesuit colleges, the Protestant universities, the chapels of the Royal Society — were thoroughly religious. What the Scientific Revolution did do, however, made it increasingly difficult for religious authorities to settle questions about the natural world by appeal to scripture or tradition alone. The case of Galileo is the most famous: his condemnation by the Roman Inquisition in 1633 is examined in How Did the Church Respond to Heliocentrism? and in the deeper analysis of Why Did the Church Oppose Heliocentrism?. But the Galileo affair was the surface of a much larger shift. By the end of the seventeenth century, Catholic, Lutheran, Reformed, and Anglican theologians were all grappling with the same problem: if nature is a book written by God, and if the new science is producing reliable readings of that book, what is the relationship between the two books, and which takes precedence in cases of apparent conflict? The various answers that were developed — accommodation, double-truth, natural theology, the distinction between primary and secondary causation — did not resolve the problem. They did, however, establish a new conceptual space in which science and religion could be seen as addressing different, if overlapping, questions. That new space is the immediate ancestor of the modern view that science and religion answer different kinds of questions, and it was one of the most durable legacies of the Scientific Revolution. The full complexity of the relationship is explored in The Scientific Revolution and the Church.

The Rise of Natural Theology

One particularly important development was the rise of what came to be called natural theology — the project of inferring the existence and attributes of God from the study of nature rather than from the study of scripture. Although natural theology in some form goes back to the ancient world, it acquired a new rigor and a new prominence in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in large part because the new science seemed to provide such striking evidence of design. The clock, with its intricate, regular, purposeful motion, became the dominant metaphor. Just as a clock implies a clockmaker, the regularity of planetary motion, the complexity of the eye, and the structure of the solar system were taken to imply a divine designer. The metaphor was popularized in works such as William Derham’s Astro-Theology (1714) and William Paley’s Natural Theology (1802), and it became one of the cornerstones of eighteenth-century thought. The argument from design was, importantly, not an argument against science. It was, rather, an argument that science, properly pursued, would lead the mind to God. For many natural philosophers — Boyle, Newton, Ray, Derham — the practice of natural philosophy was itself a form of devotion. Robert Boyle, the founder of modern chemistry, left money in his will for the Boyle Lectures, a series of sermons demonstrating the existence of God from the evidence of nature. Newton wrote the General Scholium at the end of the Principia, an extended meditation on the role of God in maintaining the stability of the solar system. This religious framing of the new learning helped make it socially acceptable in a deeply Christian society. It also, however, set the stage for the later critique. Once it was conceded that the evidence of design was the central evidence for God, the discovery of natural mechanisms that could produce what had seemed to require a designer — most famously Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection — would strike at the foundations of the argument. That is a story for the nineteenth century, not the seventeenth, but its roots lie in the natural theology of the Scientific Revolution.

The Mechanization of the World-Picture

Perhaps the deepest transformation associated with the Scientific Revolution is what historians have called the mechanization of the world-picture — the gradual replacement of a teleological, animistic, qualitatively ordered cosmos with a universe of inert matter in motion under the action of forces. The new cosmos was, in Descartes’s phrase, full of “matter and motion,” and its operations could in principle be reduced to the interactions of corpuscles bouncing off one another according to mathematical laws. This was not a single dramatic discovery. It was a slow process of conceptual change, running from Descartes’s mechanical philosophy in the 1630s, through Boyle’s corpuscular chemistry in the 1660s, to Newton’s synthesis in the Principia in 1687. By the end of the seventeenth century, the dominant view among natural philosophers was that the natural world — excluding only the human soul and the realm of grace — operated according to mechanical principles, and that the task of the natural philosopher was to discover those principles and express them mathematically. The consequences were enormous. A mechanical world is a predictable world, and a predictable world is a controllable world. If the laws of motion are mathematical, then in principle one can calculate the future state of any mechanical system from its present state. The Industrial Revolution, which depended on the ability to design, build, and control machines, was in this sense the practical child of the mechanical philosophy. So too was the rise of modern engineering, modern medicine, and modern economics. The full arc of that inheritance is traced in Technology, Industry, and the Useful Sciences. The mechanical philosophy also had a profound effect on how Europeans thought about themselves. If animals are machines, as Descartes suggested, what about the human body? If the body is a machine, what about the mind? The materialist philosophy of the eighteenth century — La Mettrie’s L’homme machine (1747) is the most famous example — was the direct descendant of the mechanical philosophy of the seventeenth. The same line of thinking eventually fed into the contemporary debates about artificial intelligence and the nature of consciousness.

The Patronage and Social Organization of Science

Science in the seventeenth century was expensive. Telescopes had to be ground, air pumps had to be built, chemical reagents had to be purchased, observatories had to be constructed, and the practitioners themselves had to be fed and housed. The new natural philosophy could not have flourished without the patronage of states, churches, wealthy individuals, and (eventually) the new scientific societies. The early phases of the revolution were supported by a heterogeneous mix of patrons. Tycho Brahe was supported by the Danish king and later by the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II. Galileo obtained his best telescopes from the workshop in the Netherlands and his financial support from the Medici in Florence. Kepler was patronized by the Imperial court and by the Estates of Styria. Newton, by contrast, was a Cambridge don, supported by the college, and later became Warden and Master of the Royal Mint — a position in which he put his chemical knowledge to use in combating counterfeiting. The establishment of the new scientific societies transformed the social organization of the seventeenth-century science. The Accademia dei Lincei (founded 1603) in Rome, the Académie des Sciences (founded 1666) in Paris, and the Royal Society of London (founded 1660) brought together natural philosophers, gave them a forum for the presentation and discussion of results, established journals — the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society began publication in 1665 and is still published today — and won them state recognition and funding. The model of the scientific society as a public, semi-official institution devoted to the advancement of useful knowledge was one of the most important institutional inventions of the seventeenth century, and it has shaped the organization of science ever since. These institutions also provided a model of reasoned public deliberation. The fellows of the Royal Society, meeting weekly to witness experiments and discuss papers, were practicing a form of collective reasoning in which the authority of the speaker rested not on rank or wealth but on the quality of the argument and the evidence. The model is the ancestor of the modern scientific conference, the peer-reviewed journal, and the public scientific advisory committee. It also, as argued in What Is the Connection Between Science and Democracy?, provided one of the templates for the democratic deliberation of the eighteenth century.

The Practical Inventions

The Scientific Revolution produced, directly or indirectly, an extraordinary range of practical inventions. The telescope and the compound microscope, both of which emerged in the Netherlands around 1600, opened up realms of the natural world — the moons of Jupiter, the cellular structure of plants, the existence of microorganisms — that had been entirely inaccessible to unaided human senses. The barometer (Torricelli, 1643) and the air pump (von Guericke, 1650; Boyle, 1659) made it possible to study the vacuum and the behavior of gases, and in doing so undermined the Aristotelian horror vacui. The pendulum clock (Huygens, 1656) brought timekeeping within an accuracy of seconds per day, transforming navigation, astronomy, and the organization of urban life. The thermoscope and the air thermometer established the scientific study of temperature. The calculating machine, independently invented by Pascal (1642) and Leibniz (1671), opened the way to mechanical computation. And the steam engine, developed by Newcomen in 1712 and radically improved by Watt in the 1760s and 1770s, provided the power source for the Industrial Revolution. The full list of these inventions, and the chain of connections from natural philosophy to industrial practice, is given in What Inventions Came From the Scientific Revolution?. The story of how those inventions fed into the Industrial Revolution is told in How Did Science Drive the Industrial Revolution?. It is important not to overstate the directness of the connection. Many of the key industrial technologies of the eighteenth century — the flying shuttle, the spinning jenny, the water frame — were developed by practical craftsmen with little or no formal training in natural philosophy. The steam engine was the work of an ironmonger (Newcomen) and an instrument maker (Watt) before it was the work of a physicist. The link from science to industry was real, but it was indirect, gradual, and often mediated by intermediate figures — instrument makers, mathematical practitioners, naval architects, military engineers — who had absorbed the methods of the new natural knowledge without necessarily being part of its elite. By the early nineteenth century, however, the connection had become tight. The first chemical industries, the first electrical technologies, the first precision-engineering workshops, and the first research-based pharmaceutical firms all rested firmly on the foundation of the Scientific Revolution.

The Spread of Scientific Literacy

The new science was not just the work of a few geniuses. It required an audience — a public able to read, understand, and judge the new works, and to participate in the experimental and observational culture that supported them. The expansion of that audience between 1550 and 1700 was one of the most important cultural transformations of early modern Europe. The printing press, invented by Gutenberg around 1450, was the necessary infrastructure. By 1500 there were presses in more than 250 European cities, and by 1600 an estimated 200 million books had been printed. The Scientific Revolution coincided with the maturation of the printed book as a mass medium. Copernicus’s De revolutionibus (1543) appeared in print, not in manuscript, and within a generation had been read, discussed, and attacked across Europe. Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632) and Two New Sciences (1638) reached an international audience within months of publication. Newton’s Principia was a much harder read, but it too was published, reviewed, summarized, and discussed across Europe within a few years. The rise of vernacular scientific publishing, examined in Why Was Latin So Important in Scientific Publishing?, was crucial. Latin had been the universal language of the learned Republic of Letters since the Middle Ages, and it remained the language of much scientific publication well into the eighteenth century. But this new approach gradually outgrew the Latin audience. Galileo wrote in Italian, Descartes in French, Newton in Latin (though his Opticks appeared in English in 1704), Boyle in English, Huygens in Latin and French. By the early eighteenth century, the major national languages of Europe had become the principal vehicles of scientific publication, and the audience for science had correspondingly expanded to include educated laypeople, women, and the growing middle classes. The new scientific societies supported this expansion directly. The Royal Society made the publication of scientific works in English a matter of policy. The Académie des Sciences published both in French and in Latin. The Journal des sçavans (1665) and the Philosophical Transactions (1665) — the first two scientific journals — brought summaries of new work to a broad, mixed audience. The popular lecture, the public demonstration, the coffee-house discussion of the latest experiment, and the gentleman’s private laboratory all played their part. By the early eighteenth century, science was a public culture, not just a professional one.

The Transformation of the Universities

The universities of early modern Europe were conservative institutions. Most were still organized around the medieval curriculum of arts, theology, law, and medicine, and most taught natural philosophy from Aristotle’s Physics, De caelo, and De generatione, often as filtered through the commentaries of Thomas Aquinas or the late-scholastic manuals of the Jesuits. The new science entered these institutions slowly, often against the resistance of the established faculty, and usually at the margins before becoming part of the mainstream. The story is told in How Did Universities Change During the Scientific Revolution?. The change was not uniform. The Italian universities, traditionally strong in medicine and natural philosophy, absorbed some new ideas (Galileo’s mechanics, Torricelli’s air-pressure experiments, Malpighi’s microscopy) but remained nominally Aristotelian in their formal teaching for decades. The Spanish universities, under tight royal and ecclesiastical control, were particularly resistant; chairs in the reformed natural philosophy were established only in the eighteenth century. The German universities, weakened by the Thirty Years’ War and the fragmentation of the Holy Roman Empire, varied widely; the Protestant universities in particular proved more open to the new natural philosophy. The Dutch universities, especially Leiden, became important centers of the experimental science, particularly in anatomy and Cartesian natural philosophy. The English universities, Oxford and Cambridge, were dominated by the established Church and resistant to the new philosophy of nature, with the consequence that much of the most innovative work of the seventeenth century was done outside the universities — at Gresham College in London (where the Royal Society was founded), in private laboratories, and in the Royal Society itself. The transformation of the universities accelerated in the eighteenth century. The teaching of the Newtonian philosophy gradually displaced the teaching of Aristotelian physics in Protestant Europe from the 1720s onward, and in Catholic Europe from the 1750s. New chairs in natural philosophy, chemistry, and mathematics were established. Laboratory instruction began to supplement lecture-based teaching. The German research university of the nineteenth century, with its seminar method, its research seminars, and its doctoral training, was a distant descendant of the slow transformation that the Scientific Revolution set in motion.

Science and the State

The relationship between science and political power was transformed by the Scientific Revolution. In the medieval and early modern periods, the prince had sometimes patronized astrologers and alchemists, and the universities had sometimes supplied advisors. But there was no systematic relationship between natural philosophy and the apparatus of state. That began to change in the seventeenth century. The Royal Society and the Académie des Sciences, both founded with state involvement, supplied the English and French governments with expert advice on a widening range of technical questions: navigation, fortification, shipbuilding, mining, metallurgy, military engineering, hydraulic works, and the calendar. The establishment of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich in 1675, with the specific aim of improving navigation, was an early example of a state-funded research institute with a practical mission. Colbert’s reform of the Académie des Sciences in the 1690s, with its emphasis on applied projects, was another. The use of the natural philosopher as a state consultant, and the corresponding use of the state as a patron of science, became routine by the early eighteenth century. The political theorist John Locke, who knew Newton personally, drew on the model of the natural-law-governed universe in his Two Treatises of Government (1689) and his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). The image of a universe governed by discoverable, regular laws suggested, by analogy, that human society might similarly be governed by discoverable, regular laws of nature — what be called natural rights. The argument from nature to politics, examined in How Did the Scientific Revolution Influence the Enlightenment?, became one of the most powerful intellectual tools of the eighteenth century.

The Road to the Enlightenment

The Scientific Revolution is often presented as the direct precursor of the Enlightenment, and with some justice. The philosophes of the eighteenth century — Voltaire, Diderot, d’Alembert, Hume, Smith, Condorcet — were heirs to the seventeenth-century natural philosophers. They took from them the conviction that the natural world could be understood by human reason, the conviction that public demonstration was preferable to private authority, the conviction that the universe was governed by discoverable laws, and the conviction that the rational investigation of nature was a worthwhile and even noble activity. But the relationship was not simple. The philosophes were critical of much that the seventeenth century had produced, including its natural theology, its deference to great men, its continuing reliance on Latin, and its attachment to the mechanical philosophy of corpuscles in motion. They wanted a science that was usedful, a knowledge that was accessible, and a reason that was unconstrained by religious or political authority. The transformation of seventeenth-century natural philosophy into eighteenth-century Enlightenment science was itself a major intellectual event, and it is one of the central concerns of the Politics and Enlightenment. The eighteenth century also saw the spread of the new learning beyond the small circle of university and society natural philosophers. Public lectures, popular books, scientific demonstration shows, and encyclopedias brought the central ideas of the Scientific Revolution to a wide audience. The Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert, published between 1751 and 1772 in 28 volumes, was the most ambitious project of the European Enlightenment, and it was explicitly organized around the seventeenth-century science. The system of cross-references in the Encyclopédie was designed to allow a reader to follow the chain of natural causes from physics through chemistry through biology through physiology through medicine — a chain that depended on the seventeenth-century synthesis. The political consequences of this broader dissemination were significant. The idea that knowledge should be public, that authority should rest on evidence, and that reasoned public deliberation was the proper way to settle political questions — all of which were inherited from the Scientific Revolution — became central to the political culture of the late eighteenth century. The American revolutionaries, the French revolutionaries, and the parliamentary reformers of the nineteenth century all drew on this inheritance, sometimes explicitly and sometimes implicitly. The connection is examined in What Is the Connection Between Science and Democracy?.

The Road to the Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution, beginning in Britain in the late eighteenth century and spreading across Europe and North America in the nineteenth, rested on a set of technologies — the steam engine, the textile machinery, the iron and steel industries, the canal and railway systems, the precision-instrument workshops, the chemical industries — that depended, directly or indirectly, on the Scientific Revolution. The connection is not a simple matter of cause and effect. Most of the key industrial technologies of the late eighteenth century were developed by practical craftsmen with little formal contact with the world of natural philosophy. But the conceptual and methodological tools they used — the experimental method, the use of precise measurement, the habit of systematic variation of conditions, the application of mathematical analysis to practical problems, the culture of collaboration and publication — all came from the Scientific Revolution. The story is told in How Did Science Drive the Industrial Revolution?. Briefly, by the late eighteenth century, the practical exploitation of natural knowledge had become routine. Steam engines, designed by engineers who had read their Newton, powered the new factories. Chemical industries, founded on the discoveries of Lavoisier, Priestley, and Cavendish, produced acids, alkalis, and gases on a scale undreamed of in 1650. The precision-instrument industry, descended from the workshops that had built the telescopes, microscopes, and air pumps of the Scientific Revolution, made possible the kind of measurement on which modern engineering depends. The Industrial Revolution, in short, was the child of the Scientific Revolution — not in the sense that any single discovery caused any single invention, but in the sense that the entire culture of practical, quantitative, experimental investigation on which it rested was the legacy of the seventeenth century.

The Long Shadow of the Scientific Revolution

It is hard to appreciate how much of the modern world was made by the Scientific Revolution. The technologies, the institutions, the methods, and the assumptions that we now take for granted — the research university, the scientific journal, the patent system, the medical school, the engineering profession, the experimental method, the distinction between science and religion, the idea of a profession of expert advisors to the state, the idea of public knowledge — all have their origins in the seventeenth-century transformation of European natural philosophy. The Scientific Revolution’s legacy also has a darker side. The same knowledge that made possible the steam engine made possible the machine gun. The same techniques of measurement and standardization that made modern medicine possible made modern surveillance possible. The same methods of public demonstration that established the authority of science have been used, in our own time, to lend authority to claims that do not deserve it. The Scientific Revolution did not produce these consequences by itself, but it provided the conceptual and technological infrastructure on which they rest. For the broader history of the revolution itself, see An Overview of the Scientific Revolution. For the people who made it, see The Key Figures of the Scientific Revolution. For the discoveries that defined it, see The Major Discoveries of the Scientific Revolution.

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