10 SCIENTIST 



but it is, of course, as far away from modern science as one 

 can get. Medieval society had many values which ours lacks 

 and will have a very hard time reestablishing. One of the 

 more deUghtful ways of acquainting oneself with these 

 values is to read Mont St. Michel and Chartres by Henry 

 Adams, who was incidentally a very modern Protestant 

 as well as the first medieval scholar in the United States. 



Toward the end of the fifteenth century, a number of 

 things began to happen which turned thoughtful men's 

 attention to the material world as an object of study. This 

 is not the place for even a brief review of the changes 

 that brought about the Renaissance and culminated in 

 the Reformation and the so-called "enlightenment." Sufiice 

 it to say that they involved every aspect of society from 

 art, which became much more naturalistic, to politics, 

 which became more democratic and pluralistic. The prin- 

 cipal point of interest to us is that these changes made it 

 psychologically and, at least to a limited extent, legally 

 possible to look at the world as it "really is" rather than 

 merely to accept the carefully worked out statements of 

 the medieval schoolmen. 



As soon as this was done, it turned out that there were 

 serious defects in the whole structure of the knowledge 

 built up on the basis of reason and revelation. Perhaps 

 the first big break was the discovery by Copernicus that 

 one could make a much neater, more beautiful picture 

 of the solar system by regarding the sun rather than the 

 earth as its center. 



Galileo struck much more violently at the old system 

 when he found a way to describe motion in terms of a 

 single set of principles. Hitherto, motion had been thought 

 of as a property of individual objects so that, in principle 

 at least, there were as many different sorts of motion as 

 there were objects. Actually this idea is not so absurd as 



