368 A SHORT HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



of such intellectual giants as Galileo, Kepler, and Newton, followed 

 as these were by the rapid increase of knowledge, both of nature 

 and of man, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, had 

 placed within the reach of all a vast amount of new facts touching 

 the familiar heavens and the familiar earth. Moreover, these 

 facts were mostly capable of some sort of rational interpretation, 

 i.e. of assignment to a place in some category of facts or phenomena 

 already understood and regarded as natural rather than super- 

 natural. In short, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries 

 the stock of human knowledge had been not only rapidly and im- 

 mensely enlarged and enriched, but at the same time more or 

 less successfully correlated with knowledge previously possessed 

 and valued. Some of this new knowledge, moreover, was so 

 different from the old as to seem like a fresh revelation. 



GRADUAL APPRECIATION OF THE PERMANENCE AND SCOPE OF 

 NATURAL LAW. While it had been easy hitherto to assume the 

 occasional suspension of, or interference with, the ordinary course 

 of events by supernatural or other unseen or unknown influences, 

 it gradually became clear that no such suspension or interference 

 could happen without upsetting what seemed to be the natural 

 and orderly sequence of events, what we now call " the order 

 of nature." Hence doubt arose in many minds whether such 

 suspensions or interferences do in fact occur, and whether fixed 

 and changeless law is not a fundamental phenomenon of nature. 

 The vastness and variety also of the heavens, no less than the 

 order conspicuous in a mighty system so nicely balanced and so 

 perfectly correlated as must be the cosmos explored and described 

 by Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton and their successors, 

 gradually dawned upon the human intellect, and profoundly 

 impressed mankind. 



Moreover, if the thoughtful turned from the contemplation 

 of the macrocosm the heavens and the revelations of the 

 telescope, to the microcosm man, the labors of Vesalius and 

 the Italian anatomists, and of Harvey and the microscopists, 

 served to show that here also law and order and a kind of mechan- 

 ical regularity and perfection held sway, while plants and the lower 



