110 HISTORY AND SIGNIFICANCE OF SCIENCE 



agencies was another outcome of scientific knowledge. Men 

 came to assume that natural explanations must exist even in 

 cases where none had been discovered. The concept of natural 

 law gradually replaced that of supernatural interference. 

 The decline in the sense of the miraculous, which is so dis- 

 tinctive a feature of modern times, had set in during the 

 sixteenth century. Many old beliefs had perished by in- 

 difference, and the secularization of intellectual activity was 

 much in evidence even before the seventeenth century. The 

 Italian genius had borne the brunt of the initial advance 

 from the intellectual servitude of an earlier period. But a 

 succession of wars and disasters, during which the Church of 

 Rome set itself against intellectual progress and Italy be- 

 came the battle ground of nations, together with the malign 

 influences of the Counter Reformation, won the day. The 

 intellectual emancipation of Europe, through the develop- 

 ment of a scientific spirit, was thenceforth carried forward by 

 the northern and western nations. 



We have seen that, with the decline of the ancient learn- 

 ing, philosophical thinking became merely an adjunct to 

 the dominant theology and that this situation culminated 

 in the scholastic philosophy of Thomas Aquinas. The 

 story of the emancipation from this intellectual bondage is 

 the history of the rise of modern rationalism and of the im- 

 plications drawn from the facts of modern science. The 

 larger movements proceeded somewhat as follows: The 

 Reformation, despite its intolerance, emphasized the value 

 of individual opinion. Rationalistic tendencies were much 

 in evidence during the seventeenth century, as shown by 

 the contentions of the protestant clergy in their conflict 

 with Rome and by the philosophy of Descartes. The Deists 

 of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century in 

 England were not a powerful company intellectually, and 

 their attempt to formulate a natural religion gained scant 

 recognition; but they were a sign of the times. The more 

 significant fact is the extent to which their essential doctrines 



