larly wish to find new ways in which Man might control 

 Nature, except in the case of discovering how to conquer 

 disease. Certainly, as century succeeded century in Euro- 

 pean countries with little change in human ways of life, 

 men little dreamed of developing vast new powers such as 

 science has given us in the past three centuries. But the 

 essential property of the human mind, rational thought, 

 made some men doubt the ideas accepted by the majority 

 of people, since it was evident that these ideas were often 

 irrational. The religious leaders did little to encourage any 

 clear thinking in any sphere, since they accepted the valid- 

 ity of the various religious texts without question, and were 

 largely concerned with enforcing religious rules upon the 

 people of all classes. Some few occupied themselves in en- 

 deavors to reinterpret the books of faith, thereby giving the 

 weight of their scholarship to the pronouncements of the 

 preachers, sufficient to convince the most intelligent of 

 rulers. None attempted to examine the incongruities of the 

 various religions, those holding one religion assuming that 

 they were correct in their beliefs, and that other people 

 accepting different religions were incorrect. Since nobody 

 could prove the validity of their position, a state of affairs 

 which still holds good for every religion today, there was 

 no possibility of deciding who, if anybody, was right and 

 who was wrong. 



During the seventeenth century, however, some in- 

 telligent men decided that it might be possible to reach 

 some definite conclusions on the outstanding problems 

 of knowledge by applying the experimental method of 

 approach previously advocated by Francis Bacon. They 

 also noted that several of the crafts and professions of 

 their time, e.g. metal extraction, glass making, medicine, 

 had accumulated bodies of empirical knowledge which 



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