English physician, William Harvey (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

Some of the new beliefs were anathema to medieval thinkers—but the new beliefs worked. They enabled this “enlightened” subculture within society to solve problems (e.g., navigate the oceans, cure diseases, predict eclipses, boost production in industry and agriculture, and, especially, make increasingly deadly weapons). This new subculture within Europe’s nations was therefore able to increase its community of followers and its range of influence at a rate that the old Church and aristocracy, in the end, could not match. As was noted above, science continued attracting new followers because the miracles of science can be replicated; science works.

                                                                 

                         

                                Marie and Antoine Lavoisier (artist: David) (credit: Wikipedia) 

This scientific way of thinking was further employed by geniuses like Isaac Newton, William Harvey, Michael Faraday, Antoine Lavoisier, and others. Its gurus piled up successes in the hard market of physical results. Of those who resisted the new way, some were converted by reason, some went down in military defeats, some worked out compromises, and some just got old and died, still resisting the new ways and preaching the old ones to smaller and smaller audiences. The Enlightenment, as it is now called, had taken over.

Other societies that operated under world views in which humans were thought to have little ability to control the events of life are to be found in all countries and all eras of history, but we don’t need to discuss them all. The point is that the advancing worldview by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, around the planet, was the one we call scientific, or what is also called "the Enlightenment view".