ABSTRACT
It is not only by contrast with the economic growth and the expansive spirit of the Renaissance that the seventeenth century can seem, as it did to contemporaries, a time of retreats and calamities. Intolerance, oppression and the inhumanity of man to man were more evident than the gentler fruits of the spirit or the wiser voices of reason. Even where the general economic recession was least harmful, little was done to counter disease and famine. It is not surprising that the dominant theme in the life of the time was the search for order. One undisputed achievement was the growth of states and of the resources that they could command. Another was the development of the technology of war. The main result of the former was to increase the resources available for the latter. In one field of human activity, however, there was outstanding progress, affecting all areas of life. In the Renaissance period some of the barriers which stood between man and his understanding of the material universe had been identified and probed. In the seventeenth century they were overthrown. Seeking new answers to new questions, man came to an entirely new conception of the ideal as well as of the real world. The scientific revolution was in the first place an intellectual revolution.
