ABSTRACT
The seventeenth-century Scientific Revolution was founded to a significant degree on facts and theories drawn up by sixteenth-century scholars. It is therefore possible to speak of the sixteenth century as a period of preparation for that revolution. The mediaeval Aristotelian worldview therefore gained a new meaning, different from that given to it by mediaeval people themselves. Aspects that were initially of secondary importance came increasingly into the foreground. General intellectual currents like humanism and Neoplatonism placed a firm stamp on intellectual life, but mostly were quite indifferent to the study of the natural world. The Neoplatonism or Hermeticism of the Renaissance was more interested in the human soul than in the material world. For many people, natural history had more to do with history than with nature, and an educated physician probably regarded his trade as closer to classical philology than to the work of a land surveyor. To some degree astronomy stands apart from other fields of mathematics.
