The Scientific Revolution

Lesson 1: Sources of the Scientific Revolution

Magic and Science

Finally, a somewhat unexpected contributor to the scientific revolution was magic. Magic in the early modern period was based on ideas of correspondence connectiong diifferent things in different realms. The most famous correspondence was the microcosm-macrocosm analogy, whereby the human body and the universe were regarded as analogous–to take a crude example, the heart was the equivalent of the sun. Correspondences also worked in medicine–it was believed that herbs could cure ailments of the parts of the body they resembled.

Things which corresponded operated by "sympathy"–thus a change in one corresponding element could cause a change in the other, even though the two had no physical connection. Many astrologers viewed the influence of the stars on earthly events in this way.

Magic did not draw rigid distinctions between living and non-living things, and viewed various natural items as endowed with “occult” or hidden powers unexplainable in mechanical terms. For example, the mysterious powers of magnets were often discussed as "natural magic."

Magicians were often anti-Aristotelian, and opposed to the traditional natural philosophers of the universities. Document 6.2 from Oster’s Science in Europe shows how one famous magician, Cornelius Agrippa, correlated the planets and the parts of the body. Magic shared with "practical science" (and sometimes the boundaries between them were quite fuzzy) a concern for getting things done. Magical subdisciplines such as alchemy and astrology were aimed at practical results as opposed to abstract knowledge or mystic contemplation. Magic provided a means of support for many early modern scientists, particularly in the earlier phases of the scientific revolution.

The best known example is the support given to early modern astronomers, including the major innovators Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler, by rulers interested in astrological predictions to help guide their decision making. Alchemists, working in the discipline where the distinction between magic and science was the fuzziest of all, won support by promising to manufacture gold or other useful substances for their patrons.

Magic’s practicality often distinguished magical knowledge from the kind of knowledge cultivated by natural philosophers in universities. For example, a skilled natural magician was expected to be knowledgeable in optics, but not necessarily in optical theory of the kind studied in universities. Instead, the natural magician had practical knowledge of the tricks that could be played with light. Magic and science began to grow apart in the seventeenth century. Even scientists whose world view was shaped by magic, such as Kepler and Isaac Newton, shunned traditional magic as non-empirical and often based on wishful thinking.

Astronomers began to assert the usefulness of their science for navigation and map-making rather than astrological prediction. Magicians had always been religiously suspect, and separating science from magic was one way of asserting its religious acceptability.

The adoption of ‘mechanical" philosophies in the seventeenth century eliminated the concepts of correspondence and sympathy by reducing natural phenomena to the contacts of pieces of matter with other pieces of matter. (Ironically, Newton’s theory of universal gravity, which required that objects act on other objects over a distance, would be attacked by some as threatening a revival of magic.)

  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8