INTRODUCTION

What not to ask about science as it lies in the cradle of the ‘scientific revolution’ and in its early childhood, the age of enlightenment, is what ideas it supressed. To concentrate on this question would be to risk simplification in the complexity of the philosophy and natural science that was emerging in the seventeenth century. Ideas construct reality and their successful support by the important men of a period exercises pressure on other methods of perceiving the truth. Although little of what was believed to be scientific in the past would be reconcilable to our own construction of scientific reality, the claim of ‘science’ to ‘truth’ became firmly established by the eighteenth century. That science became equivalent to truth in a world which was primarily religiously oriented was a major shift in the Weltanschauung of an age and much more important than the ‘decline of magic’. In this sense, and indeed more so where science began to define human nature, it is justifiable first to ask who paid the price in political and cultural terms, and secondly to enquire whether science did in fact help to dislocate fundamental perceptions in its seemingly victorious advance.

Science in the seventeenth century has received much attention. Its opposite, ‘superstition’, has, like the ‘decline of magic’, more than equally found its historians. This convenient dichotomy, however, supports a two-class system in which only science is linked with the advancement of learning.