Intellectual Curiosity and the Scientific Revolution: A Global Perspective

Toby E. Huff “Intellectual Curiosity and the Scientific Revolution: A Global Perspective” Kindle, 2010,  319 pp.

Here’s another book to join the genre of a convincing explanation of why the West has experienced a scientific and economic domination in the world beginning in the seventeenth century.  In the present instance of this book, author Huff goes on to explain why the other great cultures in China, the Ottoman Empire and Mughal India failed to keep up.  The invention and importantly the acceptance of the printing press along with the escape from the Pope (the reformation & literacy) are among the items which had a dramatic effect in the West.

The seventeenth-century in Europe witnessed an extraordinary period of discoveries and innovations beginning with the Dutch invention of the telescope in 1608 which Galileo then perfected.  On the other hand, even though the telescope was soon introduced to China, Mughal India, and the Ottoman Empire, those civilizations did not respond as the Europeans did to this new instrument.  In Europe, there was an extraordinary burst of innovations in microscopy, human anatomy, optics, pneumatics, electrical studies, and the science of mechanics. Nearly all of those aided the emergence of Newton's revolutionary grand synthesis, which unified terrestrial and celestial physics under the law of universal gravitation.  These unique European developments suggest why the West experienced scientific and economic ascendancy of at least four centuries.

Between 1500 and 1700, the European understanding of nature changed dramatically. In astronomy, the ancient geocentric theory of the heavens was succeeded first by Nicolaus Copernicus’s heliocentric reform, then by Johannes Kepler’s elliptical orbits and Isaac Newton’s celestial mechanics. In physics, Aristotle’s qualitative explanation of motion and change was consigned to the dustbin of intellectual history by Galileo Galilei, René Descartes and Newton. In anatomy and physiology, the Roman physician Galen’s mistaken understanding of the body gave way to Andreas Vesalius’s anatomy and William Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood. New instruments—the telescope, the microscope, and the barometer and the air pump (which together showed that air has weight)—opened new worlds. And new forms of organization and communication—the scientific society, the learned journal—developed to encourage and sustain this bustling activity.

Huff goes on to argue that the legally autonomous corporation, a social institution that had no equivalent in the Chinese or Islamic worlds, played a key role in fostering science.  Also, the “infectious curiosity” that produced these new discoveries was either suppressed or just lacking in the other three civilizations.

My Notes:

Whatever glories ancient China, India, or the Islamic Middle East may have enjoyed in the past, their contributions to the making of modern science were minor.  The focus of this book is to explain why this occurred.

Pg. 3: The seventeenth century was one of the most dynamic and eventful centuries in the history of the modern world.  It can be called the great divide that separated Western Europe developmentally from the rest of the world for the next three and a half centuries.  The Newtonian synthesis brought forth for the first time an integrated celestial and terrestrial physics within the framework of universal gravitation. 

The idea that people are everywhere and at all times the same (uniformitarianism) overlooks the fact that human creatures are born into cultural settings that often have contrasting worldviews, epistemological assumptions, and moral underpinnings  Not all those cultural universes are equally encouraging of scientific inquiry, neither are they equally supportive of original ideas.

Pg. 4:  The author describes the invention & widespread use of the telescope in Europe as an example of Europe’s scientific ascendancy as other cultures either suppressed the use or just ignored it (lack of curiosity).  When Europeans began this ascendancy in the seventeenth century, it was a precolonial world, a world in which Europeans were perceived and treated as supplicants.  The rulers of China, Mughal India, and the Ottoman Empire all had the means of holding Europeans at bay and did so.  There is little meaning to the term European imperialism applied in this era outside of North & South America.  The age of European imperialism would not start until the nineteenth century.

Pg. 6:  Joseph Schumpeter described capitalism as a system that thrives on creative destruction: technological innovations and new kinds of enterprises create unique business opportunities, destroying the buggy-whip manufactures they replace.

Pg. 16  The unique Western system of education and the abundant fruit spawned by the scientific revolution created a level of human capital unmatched anywhere in the world until the end of the twentieth century. 

The Muslim world would not achieve the levels of literacy attained by England in the 1830s until the end of the twentieth century.  In fact, the printing press was banned in the Muslim world until the nineteenth century, except for a brief period among the Ottomans in the 1740s.  Similar lags in literacy prevailed in India and China.

Pg. 33:  Copernicus sun-centered universe and Vesalius new human anatomy stood as the northern and southern salvos marking the launch of the modern scientific revolution.  Both ideas were printed and distributed on the newly invented printing press.

Pg. 116:  The Mughal Dynasty ruling India was a line of Muslim sultans who ruled from 1526 to 1858.  Although they never converted more than a third of the population, they ruled for centuries until the empire was dismantled by the British in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.   

Pg. 147:  The three civilizations of China, India, and Islam compared to Europe reveals these three did not go through the same kind of profound reconstruction that Europe experienced in the medieval period.  Consequently, those civilizations lagged with respect to legal innovation, philosophical and theological innovation, scientific development, and ultimately economic development.  They also lagged in the development and promotion of representative democratic government and institutions. 

Pg. 149:  The theory of corporate existence that was worked out uniquely by twelfth and thirteenth-century Western legalists (but neglected by the Byzantines) created a whole new bundle of rights.  These included the right to own property, to have representation in court, to sue and be sued, to make contracts, and to be consulted when one’s interests were affected by actions taken by others, especially kings and princes.

Pg. 159:  By the end of the Sung Dynasty (960-1279) and the triumph of Neo-Confucian thought, it was assumed that the great ancestors of the past had actually achieved the perfection of moral and ethical knowledge so that the ideal of thought and education was to regain that lost wisdom, not to pioneer new thoughts.

Pg. 171:  The effects of the persecution of Galileo have been exaggerated.  The Church outside of Italy controlled neither the press, the dissemination of telescopes, nor the exploration of nature.  Neither could it suppress the anatomical or microscopic study of nature and the human body.  (Besides: in the 1990s Galileo’s excommunication was rescinded).

Pg. 212:  For centuries, it had been known that water could not be raised above thirty-four feet (which varies based on the weight of air, a fact unknown).

Pg. 226:  Some scholars have suggested that the air pump is one of the four most important scientific instruments of the seventeenth century.  The others include the telescope, the microscope, and the pendulum.

Pg. 254:  Planets as seen from the earth do appear to go backward because the earth overtakes other planets as it revolves around the sun.  (Hence, Ptolemy’s epicycles)

Pg. 296:  However one articulates the sources and origins of experimentalism in Western culture, it is clear that the Aristotelian version of naturalistic inquiry based on the search for the causes of things, and their explanation through logical analysis, was solidly ensconced in European universities from the twelfth century onward.

Pg. 310:  Protestant countries had near universal literacy in 1900, but no Catholic country reached full literacy, most falling far short. 

In 1950, when American and European literacy rates ranged from 80 to 90 percent, the Arab-Muslim Middle East was only 13 to 18 percent literate and China stood at about 20 percent, whereas in British India (1947), it was somewhere between 12 and 20 percent.