Newton, Descartes, Galileo, and the Enlightenment

Very briefly, they advocated the notion that the natural world (which they regarded as a distal manifestation of the power of their deity) could be understood by rational and experimental means. This was in considerable contrast to the then-prevailing Western view that all natural phenomena were proximal manifestations of the deity and could only be understood, if at all, by mystical and spiritual means. They had some remarkable company for this view, which begins in late medieval times and continues into the Renaissance: Roger Bacon, Desiderius Erasmus, Leonardo daVinci and Galileo Galilei. But Galileo, Descartes, and Newton showed most convincingly the feasibility of this idea by doing it: and their work, together with that of thousands of scientists, writers, explorers, philosophers, engineers, artists, and musicians, coalesced into a new way of looking at the universe we now call the Enlightenment. Any intellectual history will treat this topic: one could do worse than start with Boorstin , which treats mostly Western scientific history.

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