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THE INFLUENCE OF SCIENCE ON THE CULTURAL OUTLOOK S. BASTERFIELD THE scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries wrought a great change in the outlook and mode of thought of the educated mind. While the Greeks were the real founders of science, their genius was mainly philosophical and mathematical; and though they were bold thinkers and speculators, they were not fully aware of the necessity for careful and thorough observation or experimentation . Not that observation and experiment were foreign to Greek science. Aristotle was a remarkably accurate observer in biology, though not much of an experimental physicist. Archimedes was both a mathematical and an experimental physicist of high quality. Furthermore , astronomers such as Hipparchus and Ptolemy were patient and persistent observers of the motions of the heavenly bodies, the interpretation of which gave them wide scope for the application of their unusual mathematical ability. It remains nevertheless true that, by and large, the Greek mind did not attain to scientific maturity. Its chief defect was its failure to recognize the need for complete and accurate observation of relevant facts in selected fields of inquiry, and for verification of deductions from principles too frequently assumed to be self-evident. Their nature philosophy was thus of a rationalistic type largely based on a priori principles, although taking some account of empirical data that appeared to fit into the accepted scheme. The Middle Ages, dominated largely by a theology which had incorporated elements of Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy and science, inherited this rationalistic attitude to the world of nature. The sphere of human knowledge was finite. Its content was partly revealed through the sacred writings of Judaism and Christianity, and partly achieved by reason working from what was already known from the writings of the great secular teachers. It was a closed system which could be elaborated in more detail but which could not be modified in its essential structure. There was no real provision for the accommodation of new facts which might accrue from the independent observation of nature unhiased by prepossessions of conservative and orthodox interpretations . It is not necessary here to analyse the conditions leading to the great revolution or to seek the causes of the growing intellectual discontent of the fifteenth century and the new craving for the experimental exploration of nature. The fact must be noted, however, that the scientific achievement of a century and a half from 1543 onward was 173 Vol XXIII, no. 2, Jan., 1954 174 UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY incomparably greater and more significant than that of the whole of the ancient and medieval periods. It is of especial interest to note how the problem of knowledge took on a new lease of life and how a new approach was developed. For centuries the main emphasis of the way of knowing had been on the process of deduction from accepted premises , usually in the form of a priori propositions, and mathematics was the prototype. With the rise of experimental science, the emphasis was directed, especially through the writings of Francis Bacon, to inductive reasoning or generalization from observational and experimental data with a resultant statement of principles which summarized and co-ordinated selected phenomena, thus making the world more intelligible. Inductive logic was hailed as the chief instrument of the natural sciences, the new organon, to replace the old Aristotelian logic condemned by the new philosophy as useless in the business of discovery . Bacon's exposition of the inductive method was doubtless timely, but greatly overrated, and he failed to realize that contemporary scientists were using methods which involved both induction and deduction in measures dependent on the type of problem being studied. Galileo, who was in many respects the greatest power in the whole movement, combined an experimental survey of the problem of falling bodies with a mathematical analysis that led him to his first fundamental generalization. It was the hypothetieo-deductive method of Galileo that really launched modem physics on its spectacular career, and it probably represents scientific method at its best. Descartes, the second distinguished exponent of method, as a mathematician , stressed the deductive process of reasoning from first principles intuitively discerned. He felt that all sound knowledge should be...

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