Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
ing to Bacon, nature, once enslaved, “takes orders from man and works under his au-
thority”, and is thus put into bondage in order to expand human dominion over the phys-
ical universe.
The new science received a huge boost on the 10th November, 1619, at Nenberg on
the banks of the Danube, when René Descartes (1596-1650) received a vision of the
material world as a great machine. Descartes began to assert a fundamental distinction
between matter, which he called
res extensa
(or 'extended stuff'), and mind, which he
called
res cogitans
(or 'thinking stuff'). In essence, Descartes declared that the material
world we see and sense around us was devoid of soul, and that it was nothing more than
a dead, unfeeling machine which we could master and control through the exercise of
our rational intellect. For him, the only nonmechanical entity in the universe, the only
locus of subjectivity and soul, was the human psyche itself. Descartes taught that any
entity could be completely understood by studying how its component parts worked in
isolation—this was his famous reductionist methodology. His belief in mechanistic re-
ductionism was so extreme that he urged his students to ignore the screams of vivisected
animals, for such sounds were, after all, little more than the creakings and gratings of a
complicated machine.
The work of the great English scientist, Isaac Newton (1642-1727), seemed to val-
idate this emerging mechanistic world-view. Newton invented differential calculus—the
mathematics of change—without which modern science would be impossible, and for
which we owe him a great debt of gratitude. (In fact, Leibniz independently invented
differential calculus at the same time.) Newton's equations stunned his contemporar-
ies with their ability to precisely predict the trajectories of moving bodies such as can-
non balls and orbiting planets, and seemed to provide final confirmation that the world
was indeed no more than a vast machine whose behaviour could be precisely predicted
and explained by means of quantification, reductionism and systematic experimenta-
tion. The new scientific method that these great thinkers established was thus entirely
based on mathematical reason, and the key to its practice required the scientist to separ-
ate his mind from the rest of nature (which was considered to be an independently exist-
ing, objective reality) so that he could become an emotionally detached, strictly dispas-
sionate instrument for the collection of data and for the observation of mechanical pro-
cesses. Subjective impressions were eliminated, since these interfered with and invalid-
ated the method and its results. Phenomena had to be investigated by means of carefully
executed experiments in which all variables but the one under investigation were held
constant. The results of these experiments were considered valid only if they could be
replicated by other researchers, and if they could be used to make mathematical models
predicting the future behaviour of the phenomena, in order to gain complete mastery and
control over them.
