The sixteenth century of our era saw the disruption of Western Christianity and the rise of modern science. It was an age of ferment. Nothing was settled, though much was opened -- new worlds and new ideas. In science, Copernicus and Besalius may be chosen as representative figures: they typify the new cosmology and this scientific emphasis on direct observation. Giordano Bruno was the martyr; though the cause for which he suffered was not that of science, but that of free imaginative speculation. His death in the year 1600 ushered in the first century of modern science in the strict sense of the term. In his execution there was an unconscious symbolism: for the subsequent tone of scientific thought has contained distrust of his type of general speculativeness. The Reformation, for all its importance, may be considered as a domestic affair of the European races. Even the Christianity of the East viewed it with profound disengagement. Furthermore, such disruptions are no new phenomena in the history of Christianity or of other religions. When we project this great revolution upon the whole history of the Christian Church, we cannot look upon it as introducing a new principle into human life. For good or for evil, it was a great transformation of religion; but it was not the coming of religion. It did not itself claim to be so. Reformers maintained that they were only restoring what had been forgotten.
It is quite otherwise with the rise of modern science. In every way it contrasts with the contemporary religious movement. The Reformation was a popular uprising, and for a century and a half drenched Europe in blood. The beginnings of the scientific movement were confined to a minority among the intellectual elite. In a generation which saw the Thirty Year's War and remembered Alva in the Netherlands, the worst that happened to men of science was that Galileo suffered an honorable detention and a mild reproof, before dying peacefully in his bed. The way in which the persecution of Galileo has been remembered is a tribute to the quiet commencement of the most intimate change in outlook which the human race had yet encountered. Since a babe was born in a manager, it may be doubted whether so great a thing has happened with so little stir.
The quiet growth of science has practically recolored our mentality so that modes of thought which in former times were exceptional are now broadly spread through the educated world. This new coloring of the ways of thought had been proceeding slowly for many ages in the European peoples. At last it issued in the rapid development of science; and has thereby strengthened itself by its most obvious application. The new mentality is more important even than the new science and the new technology. It has altered the metaphysical presuppositions and the imaginative contents of our minds; so that now the old stimuli provoke a new response. This is exactly illustrated by a sentence from a published letter of William James. When he was finishing his great treatise on the "Principles of Psychology". he wrote to his brother Henry James `I have to forge every sentence in the teeth of irreducible and stubborn facts.'
This new tinge to modern minds is a vehement and passionate interest in the relation of general principles to irreducible and stubborn facts. All the world over and at all times there have been practical men, absorbed in `irreducible and stubborn facts': all the world over and at all times there have been men of philosophic temperament who have been absorbed in the weaving of general principle. It is this union of passionate interest in the detailed facts with equal devotion to abstract generalization which forms the novelty in our present society. Previously it had appeared sporadically and as if by chance. This balance of mind has now become part of the tradition which infects cultivated thought. It the salt which keeps life sweet. The main business of universities is to transmit this tradition as a widespread inheritance from generation to generation.
Another contrast which singles out science from among the European movements of the sixteenth century is its universality. Modern science was born in Europe, but its home is the whole world. In the last two centuries there has been a long and confused impact of western modes upon the civilization of Asia. The wise men of the East have been puzzling and puzzling, as to what may be the regulative secret of life which can be passed from West to East without the wanton destruction on their own inheritance which they so rightly prize. More and more it is becoming evident that what the West can most readily give to the East is its science and scientific outlook. This is transferable from country to country, and from race to race, where ever there is a rational society.