"The Scientific Revolution... roughly... from Copernicus to Newton, is now so deeply entrenched... that it is hard to believe that it was only given broad currency in Herbert Butterfield’s The Origins of Modern Science in 1949. Whereas 19th-century historians claimed that the great changes that catapulted Europe into the modern age were the Reformation and the Renaissance, Butterfield saw the major breakthrough in the twin advance of scientific conceptualization and factual discovery that began in the 16th century. ...Butterfield captured a major aspect of the historical shift that took place at this time, and I will stress... some of the reasons why his thesis still holds. We need only reread the famous aphorisms at the beginning of Bacon’s Novum Organum [Book I, Aphorisms 1-3] to be reminded that our way of viewing the world changed in the 17th century... The shift is clear: knowledge has become power to be used not to contemplate nature, but to improve it."
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William René Shea, "Response to Harrison", Herbert Butterfield and the Scientific Revolution: A Forum (September/October 2006) Historically Speaking Volume VIII, Number 1.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Origins_of_Modern_Science
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The Origins of Modern Science
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