ABSTRACT
The period of Western man covers the last three and a half centuries and represents a transitional stage between the European tradition and a reorganized tradition whose appearance will bring it to a close. It is the age of quantitative technique. The individual enjoys neither pagan innocence nor naive religious faith. Religion no longer suffices to stabilize the inner dissociation and the individual develops intense personal ambitions. The development of thought is a process of adaptation to the environment, in which the structure of thought is developed so as to conform better to the structure of the environment, thus giving man control over it. This process of adaptation had proceeded more or less at random until 1600. About 1600 Kepler and Galileo simultaneously and independently formulated the principle that the laws of nature are to be discovered by measurement, and applied this principle in their own work. The centuries since 1600 may well be regarded as the age of quantity.
