70 THE ANATOMY OF SCIENCE 



that principle. (The Dark Ages are, in this respect, not inappropri- 

 ately so termed. ) Accepting a cosmology in which the world is base, 

 and in itself of no importance, a man will in any case feel far more 

 concern to purify his soul than to acquire the "vain knowledge" of 

 which he supposes himself incapable. Science could then be reborn 

 only as, in fact, it was— in a world that had acquired a deep new in- 

 terest in man, in human life, and in the terrestrial habitat of man; that 

 had acquired, too, a deep new faith in human capacity for knowl- 

 edge. Langer obsers^es that long before science could produce cul- 

 tural change it had in part to be produced by such change: 



... it was far less the information men acquired that undid their 

 religious beliefs than the change of heart which prompted such re- 

 search. The desire to construct a world-picture out of facts super- 

 seded the older ambition to weave a fabric of "values," . . . 



The principle of intelligibility so reborn is of course in perfect 

 harmony with the spirit of the Renaissance: not simply measure, man 

 is to be also measurer of all things. Moreover "man" is not some fa- 

 bled sage of antiquity, but modern man. The newfound confidence of 

 man in himself was buttressed by the recovery of ancient learning. 

 The ancients, so long supposed to have attained perfection of possible 

 knowledge, were then found to have di£Fered sharply among them- 

 selves. This previously unsuspected disagreement seemed amply to 

 sanction the disagreement of modern man with previously accepted 

 ancient doctrine. Such sanction was crucially important to many, 

 and not least to Copernicus. One need then no longer be content to 

 patch the Ptolemaic system to ixiaintain a predictive device and to 

 "save the phenomena." Kepler's laws are born of the effort not simply 

 to describe and predict but to understand the mechanics of the heav- 

 ens. With new faith in the possibility of new progress in human un- 

 derstanding, science takes a new turn. 



The idea of progress. The idea of progress that we take so much 

 for granted is a very considerable novelty. A few in antiquity con- 

 ceived at least the limited idea of a continuously progressive science. 

 Discussing a newly discovered mathematical theorem on the volumes 

 of regular solids, Archimedes (quoted by Sambursky) says: 



I am persuaded that it will be of no litde sei-vice to mathematics; for 

 I apprehend that some, either of my contemporaries or of my suc- 

 cessors, will, by means of the method when once established, be 



