"The founders of modern science - for instance, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton - were mostly pious men who did not doubt God’s purposes. Nevertheless they took the revolutionary step of consciously and deliberately expelling the idea of purpose as controlling nature from their new science of nature. They did this on the ground that inquiry into purposes is useless for what science aims at: namely, the prediction and control of events. To predict an eclipse, what you have to know is not its purpose but its causes. Hence science from the seventeenth century onwards became exclusively an inquiry into causes. The conception of purpose in the world was ignored and frowned on. This, though silent and almost unnoticed, was the greatest revolution in human history, far outweighing in importance any of the political revolutions whose thunder has reverberated through the world."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Walter Terence Stace in Man against Darkness (1948)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Scientific_revolution
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Scientific revolution
73 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Scientific revolution →
Related Quotes
"In... "The Portuguese Discoveries and the Rise of Modern Science", Prof. Hooykaas supported the thesis "That the Port…"
"The modern origins of empirical scientific knowledge lie in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This time period…"
"Perhaps there is no literature in Europe that mirrors so clearly as the Portuguese, the painful conflict in the minds…"
"Concerning ourselves we speak not; but as touching the matter which we have in hand, this we ask;—that men deem it no…"
"[L]ong ago have those doctrines been exploded of the Force of the First Mover and the Solidity of the Heaven,—the sta…"
"Though Lavoisier generally gets credit for the authorship of this principle [ conservation of mass ], others had conc…"
"In Newton's time only two kinds of force were available for quantitative investigation. One was the force of gravity;…"
"During medieval times, men accepted Ptolemy's view that the earth was the natural center of the universe. ...[A]dapti…"
"The credit of first using the telescope for astronomical purposes is almost invariably attributed to Galilei, though …"
"Galileo had the experience of beholding the heavens as they actually are for perhaps the first time, and wherever he …"