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Scientific Revolution: T]He Scientific Revolution
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[T]he Scientific Revolution took place in Europe, not in the Muslim lands, India or China. There were two chief reasons for this, one internal to Europe and one not. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Europe spawned the autonomous university.... which had a corporate legal existence that marked it off as a community where scholars were usually free to dispute as they saw fit. [#1] The survival of universities gave European scientists a supportive community not quite paralleled elsewhere in the world. ...[#2] Into this archipelago of intellectual liberty after 1450 came information from all over the world [stress added]."
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[T]he Scientific Revolution ... showed man to be merely a small part of a larger divine plan. Man no longer found himself at the center of the universe -- he was now simply a small part of a much greater whole. The French thinker BLAISE PASCAL (1623-1662), gave perhaps the greatest expression to the uncertainties generated by the Scientific Revolution when, in his Pensées, he wrote:
[T]he scientific revolution was ... a period during which new organizations and institutions were established for the study of the natural world. While the universities still tended to maintain the traditional natural philosophy, the new empirical, mathematical, and practical approaches were encouraged in the royal courts of Europe and in meetings of like-minded individuals, such as the informal gatherings of experimental philosophers in Oxford and London that occurred during the 1650s. The Royal Society of London was established on a formal basis in 1660 by attendees of those earlier gatherings. Although nominally under the patronage of Charles II, the Royal Society received no financial support from the monarchy. A similar French society, the Académie des Sciences de Paris, however, was set up by Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV's controller-general of finance, and its fellows were paid from the treasury. Whatever their precise constitution, the proliferation of collaborative scientific societies testifies to the widespread recognition that, as Bacon wrote, “knowledge is power,” and knowledge of nature is potentially extremely powerful.
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