Few events have transformed the modern world as much as Europe's Scientific1 and Industrial Revolutions.
The origin of Europe's Scientific Revolution2 can be traced to the shift in emphasis during the Renaissance from authoritative truth - the truth God had revealed in holy scripture concerning mankind's origin and destiny - to factual, objective truth regarding the processes and laws governing the natural world. Interest shifted progressively from the next world to this; from concern with something effecting redemption or eternal damnation, to the actual manner of causation in the objective world. A new consciousness, a new humanism was brought to bear on the relations existing between man and the universe.
Scientists such as the Pole Nicolaus Copernicus, the Dane Tycho Brahe (1546-1601), the Italian Galileo Galilei and the German Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), with whose writings the Scientific Revolution is most identified, did not want to undermine scripture but to confirm it by revealing God's divine will and purpose in nature as well. Increasingly, what had been the shadow (nature) became the reality; what had been the reality (the soul) became the shadow.
Between the third and the fifteenth centuries Arabic, Persian, Chinese and Indian science and technology were probably more advanced than those of the West. From the sixteenth century onwards - first in science, then in technology - the balance shifted westward. Of incalculable importance in the progress of the West's Scientific Revolution was the fifteenth-century introduction of printing,3 which made available a vast store of new and accumulated knowledge. With printing, knowledge became fluid and mobile.
The new spirit of rational inquiry in sixteenth-century Europe had much in common with the earlier path-breaking work of
The Arab mathematician Abu Ali al-Hazen (c.965-1038) in optics and the Florentine architect Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-1446) in perspective geometry. With the aid of the new perspective drawing, one could not only depict the precise image of the human body; more important, one could begin to depict and eventually measure the entire globe.4 The fanciful maps of Marco Polo's day, which placed Jerusalem or Peking at the centre, were replaced by less theological and picturesque but much more accurate maps of the earth. In providing, visually and philosophically, a new view of the world, the arts and the sciences could be pursued more realistically. In the West, man and science became the measure of things, not God.5
Although the birth of modern science - the dominant intellectual passion of our age - is thought to have begun with the work of Copernicus (who published De revolutionibus orbium coelestium [On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres] in 1543) and Galileo (whose first decisive astronomical observations were published in 1610 in Sidereus Nuncius [The Starry Messenger]), their writings were dependent upon earlier contributions.6 Vital to the progress of scientific work in Europe was the translation and literary transmission of ancient Greek and Arabic scientific texts from Arabic Spain - including the works of Euclid, Archimedes, Hippocrates and Galen - which stimulated scientific inquiry and criticism. Although western Europe had had access to Greek and Arabic science and logic from the twelfth century (the reconquest of Toledo in 1085 had yielded an astonishing number of such literary treasures), it was not until the middle of the sixteenth century that the rediscovery of ancient science by the Europeans reached its climax.
In shifting the focus from the earth to the sun, the older Hellenistic, geocentric view of the universe was shattered; the cosmic certainties of the past were questioned. Copernicus stated that the earth was not the centre of the universe; it was one of the planets revolving around the sun. Kepler, using data compiled by Brahe, eventually reduced the Copernican system to mathematical exactitude. Only through mathematics could one hope to understand the universe. Later Galileo laboured to convince his fellow astronomers and physicists, by accurate observations with his telescope (he was the first to use a telescope to study the skies) that Copernicus was right. With Brahe and Keppler he demonstrated beyond any doubt the truth of Copernicus' theory. Galileo's reward was to lose his freedom and almost his life. In 1633, a year after he had published his Dialogo dei Massimi Sistemi (Dialogue on the Great World Systems), he was tried by the Inquisition and - threatened by torture and death - was forced to recant.7 It is not surprising that in the seventeenth century Italy should have lost its leading position in scientific innovation to France, England and the Netherlands.
The totally different view of the universe helped to overthrow the intellectual traditions not only of the Middle Ages but also of the ancient world. Church doctrine concerning the nature of the universe and man's place in it was challenged. In ignoring authority (scripture) and tradition, the moral component was taken out of science. The Church could no longer defend its actions by theological arguments. Where were the heavens, and the abode of God and the redeemed? Moreover, if the Church's view of the universe, which was based on Aristotle (384-22 BC) and Ptolemy (AD 87-165), was wrong, what was right?
The revolutionary nature of Copernicus' contribution was not immediately appreciated by either the Church Fathers or his scientific contemporaries - great conceptual leaps in scientific thought rarely are. It was not until 1616 (more than half a century after the publication of his work) that the Catholic Church placed his book on the Index of Prohibited Books. It was not used for teaching in most European universities for two hundred years.
The writings of Copernicus and Galileo - Galileo is often referred to as the father of modern mechanics and experimental physics - released a force of critical inquiry based on scientific observation and mathematical calculation, which would eventually remodel the whole of western scientific thought. The role of magic which hitherto had been considered a vital force in intellectual inquiry8 was reduced; empirical observations and experiments became the systematic and logical way of seeking truth. All of which required precise measurements. Indeed, the progress of mankind was thought to be dependent upon taking careful measurements. It was the method adopted by the English statesman and essayist Francis Bacon (1561-1626). Bacon had no training in science, yet in his Novum Organum (1620) he was bold enough to advocate a new scientific method based on inductive rather than deductive principles - pragmatic rather than abstract, experimental rather than theoretical or traditional. Everything should be verified or disproved by observation or experiment; investigation should take precedence over ancient dogma. Today he is considered the father of British pragmatism.
The stress placed on counting and measuring was assisted by the introduction of decimals in 1585, logarithms in 1614, the slide rule in 1622 and the first adding machine in 1645. In addition, a close link was forged between scientists and instrument-makers. At the beginning of the seventeenth century the telescope and the microscope were invented in Holland. Thermometers were devised. The pendulum clock brought accuracy to the measurement of time. The invention of the micrometer, the barometer and the air and vacuum pump (also in the seventeenth century), were followed by the eighteenth-century invention of navigational aids to help in finding latitude and longitude, such as the sextant (1730), the octant (1731), which replaced the astrolabe, and the chronometer (1735).
The new spirit of inquiry also brought changes to medicine as well as astronomy and mechanics. The observations and experiments of Andreas Vesalius (1514-64), whose On the Fabric of the Human Body appeared in 1543, and William Harvey (1578-1657), whose On the Motion of the Heart and Blood appeared in 1628, corrected the much earlier assertions of Galen (AD 130-201), who until then had been the authority.
The Frenchman Rene Descartes (1596-1650) made a major contribution to modern scientific thought with his Discours de la methode de bien conduire sa raison et chercher la verite dans les sciences (Discourse on the Method of properly guiding the Reason in the Search for Truth in the Sciences) published in 1637. Only thought, he maintained, was real: 'Cogito ergo sum' (I think, therefore I am). The fact that one exists and that all else must be doubted until proved was the starting point of his contribution. With mathematics, geometry and human reason, order would be imposed on the seeming chaos of the universe. Reason, not the intellectual authority of the past, was the only reliable guide to truth. Outside mathematical quantitative analysis and proof, nothing should be believed. For Descartes, the real world was a world of geometric symbols; counting was causation. Qualitative things, such as virtue, courage, beauty or love - things that could not be expressed in numbers - were largely ignored. With the aid of mathematics, universal, rational, invariant scientific laws (that, for some, would confirm God's divine purpose every bit as much as scripture had) could be formulated. All material phenomena would obey such laws. Reality was not beyond the grasp of logical analysis.
Descartes' analytical geometry, his logical progressions and his overwhelming reliance upon reason helped to undermine the religious and collective framework of medieval institutions. His Discourse on Method, which was placed on the papal Index of Prohibited Books, eventually provided the leaders of western society with a uniquely mechanistic, humanistic attitude towards life and work. It is this mechanistic outlook which has separated western man from other branches of the human race. Perhaps it is Descartes' separation of mind and matter, of assuming that mind must predominate over matter, which gave western man his peculiar powers.
Another giant figure in the story of western science was the Englishman Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727). In his Philisophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) published in 1687, he claimed to have established the universal, scientific laws concerning space, time and motion that his predecessors had sought. It was Newton who finally established absolute principles of motion and defined the forces of gravity. He felt that the world of nature worked to strict mechanical laws: mechanistic, mathematical, linear and predictable. He was the first to present 'the universe as one great unity operating according to rational, calculable, unalterable principles'. Although Newton was a devout Christian who believed in faith and revelation, he also believed that once having been set in motion, the universal clock did not need the unseen hand of God to keep it going. The soul of rationality no longer needed the Almighty.
Drawing upon the research and thinking of his predecessors, Newton was also the first to have understood the composition of light; the first to have built a reflecting telescope; and the first to develop a calculus. To his British scientific contemporaries, he left little to be said that needed saying about physics, optics, mathematics and astronomy.
Nature and nature's laws, lay hid in night: God said 'Let Newton be,' and all was light.9
Newton's 'light' continued to illuminate the British scientific world until the twentieth century.
Although the Scientific Revolution affected only a small part of society, the late seventeenth century was a high water mark in western scientific inquiry. New societies were formed in Italy, France and Britain to advance scientific research and knowledge. In 1662 the Royal Society of London was founded. Four years later, in 1666, the Academie Royale des Sciences was established in Paris. In 1675 the Royal Observatory was founded at Greenwich, primarily to resolve the problem of longitude and thus improve navigation - a pragmatic goal that Bacon would have approved of in an age of growing world trade and European expansion. Gradually, both abstract and practical science became respectable for the educated elite; it was needed by an increasingly commercial, industrial age and promised to be profitable.
This new, detached, mechanistic way of looking at the natural world also influenced alchemy. Chemical reactions could be explained not on a magical, but on a purely scientific basis. Science became divorced from magic. Robert Boyle (1627-1691) led the way when in 1661 he published The Sceptical Chymist in which he criticized Aristotle's theories about substances. Chemistry was founded as a separate science in the late eighteenth century when Antoine Lavoisier (1743-94) succeeded in measuring chemical reactions accurately.
While the publication by Karl von Linne (known as Linnaeus [1707-78]) of Philosophia Botanica, in 1751, which classified plants by genus and species, did something to restore the Almighty to His rightful place as the grand and perfect designer of nature, the secularization of western life in general, and science in particular, continued.
This transition to a largely secular, rational and humanistic perspective has resulted in the eighteenth century being called an Age of Enlightenment; the Italians called it illuminismo, the Germans Aufkldrung, the French siecle des lumines. Although contributions to the Enlightenment were made by writers throughout the western world, British and French writers (les philosophes) played the leading role. A varied group, their ideas ranged over a whole field of knowledge hitherto considered the province of the Church. The ultimate aim of all Enlightenment thinkers was to wrest from the Church the moral and intellectual leadership of western civilization. With the Enlightenment reason was enshrined; reason was the key to truth; the door to positivism and human perfectibility was opened. As Newton had discovered the unchanging, quantitative laws of nature, the Enlightenment claimed to have discovered the unchanging moral, social, psychological and political ideas that determine human action. Human beings were naturally good and could be educated to be better. Evil was not innate, as the Church held, nor was hatred, or racial or religious intolerance. Such things sprang from ignorance and outmoded irrational institutions. Education - knowledge not faith - was offered as the new dynamic, the panacea by means of which all political, social, economic and legal wrongs would be righted. Happiness was to be sought not in heaven but on earth.
Voltaire who published his 'Traite sur la tolerance' (Treatise on Toleration) in 1763, was one of the leaders of the Enlightenment. A prolific writer, he won both fame and fortune. Reason and tolerance were his guidelines. Opposed to the intolerance and superstition of Christianity, he espoused deism in which, following Newton's idea of a world machine operated by natural laws, God would have no direct influence upon the world he had created. Ironically, the older Voltaire became, the more intolerant he was. Although Poles, Czechs, Hungarians played a significant role in the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, Voltaire fostered a negative image of eastern Europeans.
Other important Enlightenment figures and their works were: John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1690. Locke repudiated Descartes' belief that man is born with certain innate ideas. According to Locke man arrives knowing nothing and is the product of his environment. The wrong environment is the cause of most troubles. Charles Louis de Secondat Montesquieu (1689-1755), L'Esprit des Lois (The Spirit of the Laws [1748]) was the enemy of traditional religion, the champion of religious toleration and the supporter of reason. His work on government, especially the need for the separation of powers, was incorporated into the American constitution. Denis Diderot (1713-1784) published Encyclopedie, an encyclopedia of thirty-four volumes, between 1751 and 1772. He reflected the growing secularism of his age; knowledge and happiness were synonymous. Charged with atheism, errors and impieties, the work was promptly placed on the Vatican's Index of Prohibited Books. Following the Church, the French government revoked the licence that allowed it be printed. By a ruse, it was printed anyway, and played a leading role in spreading the ideas of the Enlightenment. In his life Diderot passed from Christianity to deism to atheism. Adam Smith (1723-90), who wrote An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), claimed (with the Frenchman Francois Quesnay) to have discovered the natural law of economic life which the French called laissez faire (leave alone). The natural law to Smith was the market economy and the exercise of individual economic self-interest. Marie Jean, Marquis de Condorcet (1743-94), who wrote Esquisse d'un tableau historique des progres de l'esprit humain (Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind [1795]), believed in the perfectibility of human nature, leading to enlightenment, virtue and happiness, and the equality of freedom and of rights. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was more cautious than his contemporaries. In an article 'An Answer to the Question, what is Enlightening?' (Essays and Treatises on Moral, Political and Various Philosophical Subjects [1798]), he asserted that he lived in an enlightening but not yet an enlightened age. His quotation 'Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made', had nothing in common with the idea of human perfectibility.
David Hume (1711-76), A Treatise of Human Nature: Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects (1739-40), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78), Le contrat social (The Social Contract [1762]), were the Enlightenment's most notable critics. Rousseau acclaimed the religion of feeling; his guide was emotion. In contrast to Smith, he believed that the individual should not be left to do as he pleased, but should be compelled to abide by the general will. Contrary to the spirit of the Enlightenment, he was prepared to use force to make men free. Thomas Malthus (1766-1834), whose book The Principle of Population was published in 1798, held that as population always tends to outstrip food supply, and is limited only by war, famine, disease and abstinence from marriage, the perfectibility of society sought by the writers of the Enlightenment was both invalid and unattainable.
The leaders of the Enlightenment have been called a group of 'terrible simplifiers'. Man in the twentieth century has not proved himself to be naturally good at all. For long periods of this barbaric century the opposite was true. However assessed, the imprint of the Enlightenment can be found in all the major revolutions since the French Revolution of 1789. The Enlightenment has influenced the course of justice, the relation of science and religion, and human nature generally. It has sustained western-style democracy throughout this century. The question is whether Enlightenment values will endure.
Meanwhile, the march of authentic, quantitative science continued unimpaired. Following upon the work of Hans Christian Oersted (1777-1851), Andre Marie Ampere (1775-1836), Georg Simon Ohm (1787-1854) and others, the scientific discoveries of Michael Faraday (1791-1867) provided a tremendous stimulus to the use of electrical energy. In biology the Frenchman Louis Pasteur (1822-95) discovered the germ theory of disease. In chemistry the Russian Dmitri Mendeleev (1834-1907), and the German Lothar Meyer (1830-95), in the 1860s independently provided a systematic foundation for the periodic law. The experiments conducted by an obscure Austrian monk, Gregor Johann Mendel (1822-84), during the 1850s and 1860s led to the discoveries of the basic principles of heredity and subsequently to the science of genetics. Because they were untimely, his published findings were ignored for many years.
Until the end of the nineteenth century, western scientific thinking continued to be developed in the mechanical, atomistic framework outlined by Descartes and Newton. Theirs was a deterministic world of objective reality. Yet Newton's fixed and immutable world had already been challenged by his fellow Englishman Charles Darwin, with his theory of evolution, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859). To Darwin, natural laws were as valid in the natural sciences as the laws of planetary motion and the law of gravity were in the physical world. Humans were not unique in their relation to the cosmos; rules governing other species also governed them.
Albert Einstein (1879-1955), with his theory of relativity (1905),10 based on perception and value judgments, as well as his new concepts of time, space, mass, motion and gravitation, was to shake the Newtonian world - which had assumed motion, gravity and time to be absolute - to its foundations. Einstein maintained that the universe might have begun as a great thought; it certainly was not a great Newtonian machine. Scientists could no longer be considered as custodians of absolute truth, which could be found by atomizing knowledge in a mechanistic way. Truth did not reside in the realm of concepts linked with each other. It was much more relative and interdependent than either the Cartesian or the Newtonian approach had made it out to be. According to Einstein there was no final, absolute truth; there was only flux. The real world allowed for probabilistic but not absolute statements. Once viewed as inherently orderly, nature came to be viewed by some scientists as disorderly. The supreme confidence of scientific rationalism gave way to the chaos theory.11
Einstein also added to the pioneering work of the German physicist Max Plank (1858-1947) in quantum physics ('Energy is emitted in minute, discrete quantities called quanta'). By treating matter and energy as exchangeable, which physicists had always regarded as inconvertible, Plank and Einstein helped to lay the basis for splitting the atom. Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1922 not for his theory of relativity, but for his work in quantum physics.
Werner Heisenberg (1901-76), in his 'Uncertainty Principle' ('the observer alters the observed by the act of observing') added further doubt to the absolute nature of science. Scientific truth, according to him, was the changing relation between subject and object. Heisenberg was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1932. For the first time since Copernicus, the fundamental faith of western man in science and the scientific method, and especially scientific truth - the belief that the universe is not chaos but possesses an underlying order, a linear kind of certainty - was questioned.
The more science was questioned, the more society sought absolute truth elsewhere. The late twentieth century revival in religious fundamentalism cannot be explained any other way. To the faithful, the major religions of the world offer a greater degree of certainty than western science. Unlike so-called 'scientific truths', the absolute truths of religion are unchanging. Religion is not 'the opium of the people', as Marx held, but a necessary antidote to the uncertainties of life. Man may never know the absolute, may never find the true meaning of life, but he cannot help seeking it. For a Christian, life is fulfilled in following Christ, who said, 'I am the way, and the truth, and the life' (John 14-16). Only religion tells us what we ought to do, not what we can do. Blaise Pascal, scientist and mathematician (1623-62), was one of those who feared the forthcoming division between science and religion. Like Aquinas and Luther before him, he stressed faith in God above reason: 'the heart has its reasons of which the reason knows nothing.' Until more recent times, his message was largely ignored; secularism swept all before it.
The coming of the atom bomb and other weapons of mass destruction has caused many people to have second thoughts about the role of science. The scientific work on atomic particles and radioactivity12 has placed the world in deadly peril. Hence the new stress placed upon religion and faith.
By the beginning of the nineteenth century, changes in technology13 were taking place on such a wide front that writers used the term the Industrial Revolution to describe them. Although the Industrial Revolution was long in forming, it is generally thought to describe the changes taking place in England between the years 1760-1830.14 These sprang not so much from novelty in machines or power as from new magnitudes in what was already known. From England the revolution spread to western Europe15 (to the coalfields of the German Ruhr and northeastern France), and to many other parts of the white-settled world.
The nub of the Industrial Revolution, through a whole series of improvements in technology, was an enormous increase in western man's productive power. The outcome was the substitution of mechanized industry for agriculture and the traditional crafts, iron and coal for wood, steam for water and wind (as well as for animal and human muscle), the factory for the cottage, and the urban for the rural scene.
The revolution in industry was much more than a revolution in technology. It also meant a vast increase in wage-labour, new forms of economic and social organization, the growing power of the market and the seemingly limitless use of inanimate energy (steam, electricity, water, petroleum and diesel oil). The sum of these changes - though one can argue that none of them was essentially new or revolutionary - produced a civilization different in kind from that which had preceded it. Never before had wealth been obtained on this scale except by seizing it from others. Unquestionably, the increased wealth enhanced the economic and military power of the West.
Prompted by these developments (which were certainly not as orderly as they appear), western Europe's relative retardation in the industrial arts underwent marked change from the late eighteenth century onwards. For part of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, while the French led in science, the British led in technology. In the late nineteenth and the early part of the twentieth centuries, the Germans excelled in both.
In the eighteenth century, Britons became inventors and innovators on a scale previously unequalled. By inventing capitalintensive, labour-saving devices, the British could compete with the great reservoirs of cheap labour that existed in Asia. Tinkering with machines became fashionable. Britain's supply of rich deposits of coal and iron, the output of which seemingly multiplied overnight,16 its improved road, canal and railway transport systems, its growing supplies of credit and money, its joint stock organization (one might add its mechanistic system of double-entry book-keeping, which it had inherited from the East), its protection of property by law, its political stability, its class structure and social mobility, its expanding labour and capital, its increasingly ambitious and talented middle class, its stable government, its Protestant ethic, its active dissenting religious minorities, its unrivalled navy, its natural harbours, its rapidly growing numbers after 1830, and its ever-growing profitable domestic and foreign trade - all these things fostered its lead as the workshop of the world.
Other contributing factors helping to explain Britain's predominance were the abundant harvests England enjoyed between 1720 and 1750, the introduction of new crops and agricultural practices, and the more profitable use of land (the enclosure movement). Even in Britain where the agricultural sector shrank in comparison with the expansion of the manufacturing and the service industries, agriculture remained one of the pillars of the economy.
By 1850 Britain led the world in steam power, industrial and manufacturing production, coal, iron, textiles, shipping and railways. Britain also was the state where Adam Smith's philosophy of the free market in land, labour and capital had taken root. In emphasizing the wealth of nations rather than that of empires or city-states, Smith expressed a new way of looking at economic life. For the time being, the social abuses which his policy of laissez-faire implied were disregarded.
Whatever the cause of Britain's advance, the technical changes in the hundred years after 1760 were marked as much by their variety as by their fundamental nature. In that century, the ancient skills of the craftsman gradually gave way to first a British and then a European and world technology, dependent on metal, machines, fossil fuels and trained engineers.
The curious thing is that while some scientists were stimulated by the growing problems surrounding the rapid development of western forms of production (the Royal Society in London had a committee to investigate technical advances; the French Academie gathered tools and machines), the majority of those who made Britain's Industrial Revolution were practical men, largely unaware of what was going on in the scientific world. The Industrial Revolution was as concrete as the Scientific Revolution was abstract; one was an intellectual phenomenon, the other was empirical; one was largely an achievement of the upper classes, the other of the common people. Such is true of John Kay (1704-c.64), a Lancashire textile machinist who, in 1733, patented the first of the great textile inventions, the flying shuttle; James Hargreaves (c.1722-78), who invented the spinning jenny in 1764, was a weaver; Richard Arkwright (1732-92), who invented the water frame in 1769, was the son of a barber and wigmaker; Samuel Crompton (1753-1827), who in 1779 devised what is essentially the spinning machine in use today, was a spinner; Edmund Cartwright (1743-1823), who in 1787 mechanized the weaving process,17 was a country vicar.
This reliance upon practical rather than scientific men did not apply to textiles alone. Neither Thomas Newcomen (1663-1729), a mechanic, nor James Watt (1736-1819),18 a builder of instruments at Glasgow University, whose names are linked with the development of steam, were scientists as such. Richard Trevithick (1771-1833), another important figure in the development of steam, was a blacksmith and a wrestler. Similarly unschooled were Abraham Darby (c.1678-1717) and Henry Cort (1740-1800), who improved the smelting and refining of iron ore, John Wilkinson (1728-1808), one of the great ironmasters, and Henry Maudslay (1771-1831), who in 1794 invented one of the first lathes for cutting metal. Thomas Telford (1757-1834), who spanned the English landscape with iron bridges, was born a shepherd. James Brindley (1716-72), who laid out a network of hundreds of miles of canals all over England, had no scientific background. Trevithick launched the first steam-powered locomotive in 1804. George Stephenson (1781-1848) followed with his 'Rocket' in 1830. It ran at the unheard-of speed of 16 miles per hour. By 1850, 6,000 miles of railway line covered Britain. In half a century the speed of a locomotive increased ten or more times. Pictures of iron bridges and railways began to grace the drawing rooms of a new, prosperous urban middle class.
In contrast to earlier societies and civilizations, the pioneers of Britain's Industrial Revolution were prepared to work with their hands. In all pre-modern societies the idea of an elite working with their hands was unacceptable. To this day, the elite of Africa, Latin America and Asia shun manual labour. In the East, the Buddhist appears with his beggar's bowl. The early western religious orders - Franciscan, Dominican, Carmelites and Augustine - were all required to live by alms. This did not apply to the Benedictine Order, whose chief principal of conduct was laborare est orare (to work is to pray). In the West, it was the Benedictine Order's stress on the work ethic that prevailed. Whether we are dealing with Richard Trevithick or Henry Ford (1863-1947), we are dealing with a peculiar kind of people who were prepared to soil their hands tinkering with machines. The mandarin class of China, who cultivated long fingernails as a symbol of their elitism, were no match for the pragmatists of the West. A small point, but important to anyone who seeks to understand the origins of the West's industrial power.
It was these largely self-educated, pragmatic tinkerers (most of whom set out to solve a practical problem rather than obtain immediate gain), who set in motion a movement that was to change the world. The contribution of head and hand - the scientific and industrial revolutions - are really inseparable; yet it is interesting that the practical men rather than the intellectuals should have had the impact they did. The outcome of their joint efforts - especially when steam shipping and steam railways linked the continents - was to create an integrated economic unit of the major countries of the world. The shape of the world system was altered for good. Under western command, the supply and demand of commodities was regulated to serve western interests. 'Free trade' simply meant freedom for the most powerful to inflict their rule on the rest. It still does. Another consequence of these developments in industry and trade19 - especially with the rise of Germany and America - was to change the balance of power not only between Asia and Europe, but among the western powers themselves. The outcome was the First World War of 1914-18.
The essential distinction between western technology of today and that of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is the extent to which progress in technology has come to depend on progress in the sciences. From the second half of the nineteenth century onwards, empiricism gave way to exact science. Scientific developments have created many modern industries. In chemicals and electricity (as a source of energy to supplement steam), in the development of the internal combustion and the diesel engines,20 Germany played a leading role. Major British contributions were synthetic dyes (with France), electrical energy (with Germany and France), the Bessemer steel converter, the Gilchrist-Thomas basic steel process and the Parsons' steam turbine. Among many other inventions, the US contributed the ring-spinning frame, the typewriter and the telephone, electric lighting, the first aircraft, the first mass-produced car, the first general-purpose computer and the first transistor; in the twentieth century America would challenge Europe for preeminence in both science and technology.
Science and technology have become the social forces of our time, deciding whether a nation will be rich or poor. The technically advanced nations dominate the world. In the thirteenth century it seemed that all things were possible to faith; today, as a result of fundamental discoveries in physics and biology, all things are thought to be possible to science. In this age of antibiotics, molecular biology, birth control, genetic engineering, nuclear fission, jets and rockets, automation, lasers, space travel, television and computers, we take it for granted that science can solve all problems, provide all answers. We refuse to acknowledge its limitations.
We prefer to disregard science's transient nature, its errors (as the history of science makes abundantly clear) and its inability to answer the ultimate questions concerning the meaning of man and the universe. We think that all that is needed for us to increase our knowledge and our mastery of the world is to train more scientists - scientists to help us add to our material resources; scientists to help us shape our minds. With the right science and technology we will reach Utopia; the age-old curses of want, injustice, ignorance and evil will be banished.
When men of science find out something more,
We shall all be happier than before. . .
Said Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953), tongue in cheek. In contrast, the words of Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892):
This truth within thy mind rehearse, That in a boundless universe Is boundless better, boundless worse
Echo both the cheer and the chill of the scientific age.
The rational, absolute universe, which was the object of the Scientific Revolution, is still a vision. Reality is that we live in an irrational world, where reason, objectivity and the mechanistic view of life are becoming suspect. (In June 1995 the New York Academy of Sciences organized a conference of more than 200 scientists, physicians and humanists to consider 'The Flight From Science and Reason'.) The power of faith, passion, mysticism, intuition and instinct, which some scientists thought had been banished, are becoming centre-stage again. They are joined there by a growing gender, cultural and race ideology which accuses the founders of modern western science - Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Brahe, Bacon, Newton and Descartes - of being 'eco-villains'.
Critics of objective science argue that most scientists see what the Zeitgeist (the spirit of the time) tells them to see. Science is not so much a value-free, objective search for the truth, as a Baconian process of experimental testing. In his intellectual judgments the scientist, in saying what is important to science and what is not, is never free of the influence of faith and passion. His appreciation of scientific data depends ultimately on the belief that truth exists, which is an act of faith. The more original his work, the more likely that faith, passion and emotion will intervene. All the great steps in science have started with a vision.21 'The most beautiful thing we can experience', wrote Albert Einstein in his book What I Believe, published in 1930, 'is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science,' which is tantamount to saying that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the universe vastly superior to that of man or objective science; that man cannot live by science alone. True, materialism by itself will not serve, but how can those outside the scientific community decide what the spiritual, ethical and moral framework of science should be?
Perhaps some kind of holism, a new unity of subjective and objective knowledge, both mystical and rational, will emerge. The narrow geometrizing Cartesian attitude towards life never did extend beyond a relatively small group of influential intellectuals in the West. Most people in the West and the world still think of knowledge - objective and subjective - as integrated and interdependent.
Superficially at least, the western impact in the world, in the Greco-Roman tradition, has been practical and material, mental and intellectual. What the West has excelled in these past 200 years has been scientific knowledge and economically productive technology. It has excelled in these things because primarily they came to be the things it honoured. With their aid all things were possible. Whether these changes in world history were themselves dependent upon novel elements (not least the discovery of the New World), or upon universally applicable elements that other civilizations can follow, is unclear. If the western scientific and industrial revolutions were facilitated by western expansion and colonization - that is, not by ordinary and continuous events, but by an extraordinary sporadic phase of history - then it behoves us not to use nineteenth-century western economic growth and development as an example which twentieth-century Africa, Asia, and Latin America can follow.
The West became rich not because it industrialized; it industrialized because it was already relatively rich. Much of the high tide of human progress in the West over the past two centuries cannot be disassociated from the discovery of new sea routes to Asia, which brought wealth through trade, and the discovery of the New World, which made possible the cultivation of vast, new, fertile regions of the earth, the tapping of enormous new mineral deposits, and the introduction of new forms of transport, communications and power. These things did not come about because of western racial superiority or greater western intelligence, but because the West developed different values and passed through a different historical experience from the people of other continents; an experience that gave full rein to curiosity, inventiveness and acquisitiveness.
No one can say with complete assurance that the circumstances which saw the rise of the West have not passed, and that the old slower cycle of change might reassert itself. With the rise of religious fundamentalism in the twentieth century, no one can say that the trend towards secularization - which was stimulated by the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the Industrial and Scientific Revolutions - will continue. Surely, we know enough to realize that our confidence in science is rooted in our belief in progress, which is of relatively recent origin. The question remains: whether that 'Great Discontinuity of History' - the Industrial Revolution, if not the Scientific Revolution - will prove to be one of the great mutations in history, an ongoing, universal process, or a 'Great Abnormality', a historical moment dependent on special circumstances; a phenomenon difficult, if not impossible, to repeat. Only those who follow in the human concourse will know.
World History
