The New Science and English Literature in the Classical Period (Classic Reprint)

Download or read book The New Science and English Literature in the Classical Period (Classic Reprint) written by Carson Samuel Duncan and published by . This book was released on 2015-07-08 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Excerpt from The New Science and English Literature in the Classical Period The new science, or the new experimental philosophy, arose in England as a fresh intellectual impulse, too subtle and too penetrating to be readily confined within the bonds of a definition. Its manifestations may be observed, its more obvious qualities may be studied, yet back of all these there is an elusive psychological problem that fairly challenges solution. As the waters of a stream are lost in the sea, where they are driven by unknown forces to break on unexpected shores, so new ideas entering the minds of men are lost to analysis only to reappear as new points of view, new methods of thinking, new attitudes toward life. Straightway men possessed of these new ideas set to work reforming human thought. Similarly, experimental philosophers in seventeenth century England, quickened by this new intellectual impulse, began to lay, broad and deep, the foundations for reconstructing the natural history of the world. Scientific interest had existed in England long before the seventeenth century, of course, and can be called a new interest in that period only in the sense that it received a new impetus. This new impulse came from the influence of four men, two foreigners and two Englishmen, Galileo and Descartes, Bacon and Harvey. When Galileo made his telescope and saw the proof of the Copernican theory, there was introduced the fundamental new principle, - namely, the application of mechanical apparatus to the solution of the problems of natural philosophy. "Since that Galileo," wrote John Wallis, "and (after him) Torricelli, and others have applied Mechanick Principles to the salving of Philosophical Difficulties; Natural Philosophy is well known to have been rendered more intelligible, and to have made a much greater progress in less than a hundred years, than before for many ages." About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.