ABSTRACT
The two centuries after 1600 were literally revolutionary. The period began with the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century and closed with political revolutions in colonial America and monarchical France. The Scientific Revolution, and the revolutions in conceptions of human nature and society that followed in its wake, laid the basis for political revolutions that implemented their ideas. The Scientific Revolution outshines everything since the rise of Christianity and reduces the Renaissance and Reformation to the rank of mere episodes, mere internal displacements, within the system of medieval Christendom. The makers of the Scientific Revolution created the concept of consciousness as they created a radically new theory of perception that went with their new scientific epistemology. Descartes was the most important artisan of this project, creating a definition of consciousness that ruled philosophical and scientific thought for centuries.
