From philosophers of an earlier century--Francis Bacon
(1561-1626) and Rene Descartes (1596-1650)--they learned to question
everything, to seek new knowledge by actual experiment, to think
boldly. You must not blindly believe in God, they said, you must first
prove His existence. Or, if you will learn how the body is made, it
will not do to believe what Hippocrates or any other Greek authority
said about it; you must cut rabbits open and see with your own eyes
where heart and lungs are hidden beneath the coat of fur. Seeing and
thinking for oneself were the twin principles of the new scientific
method.
[Sidenote: Isaac Newton]
The new science found many able exponents in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, and of them all Sir Isaac Newton (1646-1727) was
probably the most illustrious. Coming from a humble family in a little
English village, Newton at an early age gave evidence of uncommon
intelligence. At Cambridge University he astonished his professors and
showed such great skill in mathematics that he was given a professor's
chair when only twenty-three years old.
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