THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD 77 



In the fifteenth century, feudalism began to collapse and 

 to be replaced by capitalism. As Zilsel points out, in feudal 

 society the castles of knights and rural monasteries ^vere the 

 centers of culture. In early capitalism culture was centered 

 in the towns. This capitalism depended on the spirit of 

 enterprise of the individual, whereas in medieval society the 

 individual was dominated by the traditions of the group to 

 ^vhich he belonged. With the individualism of the new 



o 



society came the beginnings of invention and of scientific 

 thinking. 



In the sixteenth century, the "shaking of the dry bones" * 

 became much more evident; and, in one field of science after 

 another, individuals arose who departed from the traditions 

 of the ancients and began to create knowledge themselves. 

 Of these, by far the most gifted and original was Leonardo 

 da Vinci, one of those men of great genius who illuminate 

 an era. Leonardo was primarily a painter; although his ar- 

 tistic work was recognized as of the first rank, his greatest 

 interest seems to have been in mechanical invention. He 

 was the engineer for several princes of the time, but very 

 little of his work seems to have been adopted. The fact is 

 that Leonardo, like many inventors, had the primary ideas 

 for very many more inventions than he could develop. Even 

 today it would be difficult for one man, unless he were a great 

 organizer, to develop to practical success the large number of 

 inventions sketched in Leonardo's notebooks. A more prac- 

 tical, though far less gifted, man was Agricola, ^vho ^vrote a 

 great Avork on metals, in which he set forth the whole tech- 

 nology of mining. 



In the field of biological kno^v ledge, the first necessary step 

 was to get rid of the idea that the ancient writings of Aristotle 

 and Galen were authoritative. In the sixteenth century a 

 man arose who set himself against the ^vhole weight of au- 

 thority. Born in Brussels in the second decade, Andreas 

 Vesalius carried out his investigations on the anatomy of the 



* Ezekiel XXXVII. 



