This psychological change was essential to the birth of the new point of
view in science and philosophy. Yet alone it could hardly have produced
the new method of knowing. But positive changes in the habits and
purposes of life gave objective conformation and support to the mental
change. They also determined the channels in which the new spirit found
exercise. Newfound wealth, the gold from the Americas and new articles
of consumption and enjoyment, tended to wean men from preoccupation
with the metaphysical and theological, and to turn their minds with
newly awakened interest to the joys of nature and this life. New
material resources and new markets in America and India undermined the
old dependence upon household and manual production for a local and
limited market, and generated quantitative, large scale production by
means of steam for foreign and expanding markets. Capitalism, rapid
transit, and production for exchange against money and for profit,
instead of against goods and for consumption, followed.
This cursory and superficial reminder of vast and complicated events may
suggest the mutual interdependence of the scientific revolution and the
industrial revolution. Upon the one hand, modern industry is so much
applied science. No amount of desire to make money, or to enjoy new
commodities, no amount of mere practical energy and enterprise, would
have effected the economic transformation of the last few centuries and
generations. Improvements in mathematical, physical, chemical and
biological science were prerequisites. Business men through engineers of
different sorts, have laid hold of the new insights gained by scientific
men into the hidden energies of nature, and have turned them to account.
The modern mine, factory, railway, steamship, telegraph, all of the
appliances and equipment of production, and transportation, express
scientific knowledge. They would continue unimpaired even if the
ordinary pecuniary accompaniments of economic activity were radically
altered. In short, through the intermediary of invention, Bacon's
watchword that knowledge is power and his dream of continuous empire
over natural forces by means of natural science have been actualized.
The industrial revolution by steam and electricity is the reply to
Bacon's prophecy.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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