How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity Read Online Free PDF Page A

motivated by and sustained by concerns for practical advances in technology, especially in England. 42 The problem with this view is that during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries few if any technological applications developed from the most significant scientific achievements. The lack of scientific applications was true not only of the more theoretical sciences, such as physics and astronomy, but even in more nearly applied sciences such as physiology. For example, it was several more centuries before Gabriel Fallopius’s identification of the tubes leading from the ovary, named after him, was of any medical significance. Nor did it matter, either to physicians or to lovers, that he coined the term vagina .
    True, this glorious era of scientific achievements also was marked by a great deal of technological progress. But the inventors and the scientists seem to have pretty much inhabited separate worlds. An example involves Denis Papin, one of the scientific stars. Papin claimed to have invented a better pump than the one Thomas Savery designed to drain British mines. To prove his point, Papin urged the Royal Society to test his pump against Savery’s, but the members did not find it a matter of interest. 43 It seems not to have occurred to Papin to take his pump and go demonstrate it to mine owners.
    Although there was not a direct linkage between innovations in science and technology, both stemmed from and reflected the aggressive pursuit of progress by a rapidly growing, increasingly educated, and achievement-oriented bourgeoisie.
    And, of course, advances in both science and technology occurred not in spite of Christianity but because of it. Contrary to the conventional narrative, science did not suddenly flourish once Europe cast aside religious “superstitions” during the so-called Enlightenment. Science arose in the West—and only in the West—precisely because the Judeo-Christian conception of God encouraged and even demanded this pursuit.

Part V
     

     
    Modernity (1750– )

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