Chapter 1.                      Part B 

            Of course, Science, in the modern sense of the word, was not suddenly made possible by one writer’s pronouncing how it could and should work. A few rare thinkers had already been using methods pretty much like what Bacon was describing, arguably, for centuries. They simply hadn’t been conscious of the steps in the method. However, Bacon’s book on how the real world could and should be studied did give the Medieval scholars, who lived mainly in their books, a new model to think about and discuss, one that was much more specific and material-world oriented than any of its predecessors had been. 

                          St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, architectural marvel of the Renaissance 

 
            But whether Bacon started a revolution or merely articulated what was already taking place in the minds of the curious and creative men of his time is not important for my case. What matters is that the method to which Bacon gave voice began, more and more, to get useful results. Navigation, architecture, agriculture, medicine, industry, law, warfare, even the routines of daily life began to be more and more frequently improved by the discoveries and inventions of Science.

         At this point, as Science began to affect people’s material lives, it inevitably began to affect their deeper ways of thinking. For many people, then and now, who were, or still are, trying to hang on to a traditional style of faith, some of the large-scale changes to the generally held ways of thinking that “everyone” had subscribed to for so long were not happy changes.

                                                                                                                                           Descartes 

         A younger contemporary of Bacon was the man whom many still see as the leading light of the Renaissance and its new way thinking, the sickly French parochial-school boy who became a sickly man with a mind like a razor: Rene Descartes. He spent years maneuvering to get a feel for what the religious leaders of his time would let him say, and only then did he publish his views on how thinking and learning should be done. 

         He separated Science from religion and morality. Under his model, Science can advance our ways of dealing with the physical world of the body, but religion, and the morality it implies, must still oversee the activities of our minds and souls. For the people of his time, the affairs of souls were seen as being much more important than those of our bodies or any other things made out of matter. Under his model, religion retains primary control over our decisions about what we should be doing with our lives, including how we should be using the findings of Science (3., 4.).

         Descartes devised a very clever maneuver that somewhat ameliorated the religious authorities’ scrutiny of those who studied the physical world and how the things in it worked, but he only delayed the inevitable. Sooner or later, human beings were going to have to deal with the logical conclusion that the two realms had to interact somehow in order for them both to involve, and make sense to, beings like us, who have issues and concerns in both realms, the sensory and the abstract.

         Describing all the ways in which Science sometimes eroded, sometimes blasted, the traditional beliefs of the majority of people would fill a whole encyclopedia. We can be content with looking closely at just three such ways. I chose these three because I believe they are paradigmatic, as did Freud. (5.)