Biology Reference
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that the scholastic natural philosophy that this new science was about to
replace had been party to the errors of Catholicism. Having been similarly
dependent upon the traditions of “received authors,” the Aristotelian natu-
ral philosophers were not merely wrong. Like their papist sponsors, they
were unregenerate scientists:
But as they are, they are great undertakers indeed, and fierce with dark
keeping; but as in the inquiry of the divine truth their pride inclined to
leave the oracle of God's word and to vanish in the mixture of their own
inventions, so in the inquisition of nature they ever left the oracle of
God's works and adored the deceiving and deformed images which the
unequal mirror of their own minds or a few received authors or principles
did represent unto them.
26
The significance of Bacon's eagerness to contrast the new science with
all things Catholic is highlighted by the fact that this polarity was clearly a
historical contrivance. Opposition to science had not typically come from
the religious sector. If the emergence of modern science was a reactionary
event, as Stephen Toulmin points out, it “was a reaction against a reaction
against the Middle Ages,” one that “originated not from any direct opposi-
tion to medieval thought” but instead “from a secondary reaction against
the secular and literary skepticism of the humanists.”
27
But Bacon would
have gained little by making Renaissance humanists the enemies of science.
Only by having a Catholic scholastic enemy could it become an actor in the
Protestant drama that was reshaping England.
B
acon
anD
the
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uRitan
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ovement
By linking science with purified Christianity, Bacon gave it a decisive role in
the new social order that the Reformation was bringing to power in England.
If science was doing the true work of the church by opening up the topic of
God's work, then its practitioners were fellow laborers in the church's min-
istry and in the revitalization of civilization that the Protestant movement
envisioned. This has prompted the sociologist Joseph Ben-David to argue
that it was the crafting of this distinctive role for science that put England on
the leading edge of the broader scientific movement that was already unfold-
ing in Europe.
28
In saying this, Ben-David summarizes a main conclusion
drawn from a vast scholarly enterprise devoted to understanding the dis-
tinct causes of science's sudden prosperity in seventeenth-century England.
Bacon's importance in this view comes from the leading role his messages
