The emergence of the mechanistic view.

It took a very long time and much valiant work (vide: Nicholas Copernicus and Giordano Bruno) to begin the liberation of science from the overarching control of the mystico/religious framework and the political needs of the Roman Church. This change started to really happen at the end of the 16th century with the appearance of a new attitude to the observation of what actually happens, followed up by a desire to experiment on and test what is being observed. But at this early stage the mystical framework still greatly influenced theory.

In A Short History of Science, Charles Singer notes Kepler's mystical adherence to the Pythagorean/Platonic solids and to the idea "that the arrangement of the world and its parts must correspond with some abstract conception of the beautiful and the harmonious" [Singer, 1941, p200].

Title page of the Dialogues on The Two Great Systems of the World by Galileo Galilei (3rd edition, 1641)

The 17th century was a most remarkable period in its extraordinary fecundity of quite revolutionary ideas. That the earth travelled around the sun was only now being established. Copernicus had really only found that the Ptolemaic system of the Medieval period had too many anomalies (the epicycles) to allow it to stand against observation any longer. It took Kepler and Tycho Brahe to get the really useful data that allowed Galileo to finally publish (much to his trouble) his great synthesis Dialogues on the Two Great Systems of the World Galileo conceived the world as reducible to measurement and mechanical principle. He was first to exploit the telescope and also instituted the use of telescopes and microscopes of high craftmanship as tools of investigation. That the heavens were vast and complex with a multiplicity of worlds was now mirrored in the startling multiplicity of matter and life in the microscopic world.

Francis Bacon in The Proficiencie and Advancement of Learning and Rene Descartes in his Discours on Methode laid down the principles of experimental science which we still follow. Firstly one should gather all the facts that are relevant to the matter being investigated. This selection of relevance is based on the work of one's predecessors with which one is familiar through study. Having gathered all the facts one forms them into an Hypothesis which links all the facts together. Then one tests the hypothesis by experiment, modifying the hypothesis as required by the results of its testing. It is this which finally allows the development of a Theory.

With Galileo's development of the science of mechanics came the attempts by biologists to explain the animal body as a machine. It becomes apparent to the experimental philosophers of the 17thC. that one might hunt out principles of a mechanical nature which applied alike to the motions of the heavens as they did to the earth and to living things. The world view of science becomes increasingly mechanistic. For example, in 1615, William Harvey discovered the process of the circulation of the blood and thus that the heart is a pump. The mechanical model of the heart as a pump stands as an early version of the process of using a working mechanical model to form a clearer picture of some part of the animal body. The classical microscopists, Malpighi and Leeuwenhoek, "discovered the corpuscles of the blood, the secretory functons of 'glands', and the fibrillary character of muscles, thus helping to complete details of the animal machine." (Singer, 1941, p243).