ABSTRACT
Merton investigated the whole web of social influence and relations impinging on science in seventeenth-century England. He found that interest in science, as evidenced by the number of biographees with predominantly scientific concerns in the British Dictionary of National Biography, rose conspicuously about the middle of the seventeenth century. "Puritan science" was open to a variety of nature philosophies, such as Hermeticism and Paracelsianism, and it envisaged a Utopian scientific enterprise, which, by providing an easily acquired method of empirical inquiry, would allow the participation of practically everyone in this intellectual endeavor. Lead to a very rapid expansion of knowledge and its application. The sociological analysis of the relationship between science and religion is carried an important step further, such that a relationship is established not only between religion and scientific practice and the institutionalization of science, but also between religion and specific scientific philosophies.
