Renaissance Scientific Movement | Ron Millen (essay date 1985)
Ron Millen (essay date 1985)
SOURCE: "The Manifestation of Occult Qualities in the Scientific Revolution," in Religion, Science, and Worldview: Essays in Honor of Richard S. Westfall, edited by Margaret J. Osier and Paul Lawrence Farber, Cambridge University Press, 1985, pp. 185–216.
[In the following essay, Millen discusses the evolution of the concept of the occult and its effect, through the Renaissance, on the development of science.]
THE PROBLEM OF OCCULT QUALITIES
"Occult" has become something of a pejorative term among historians of the scientific revolution. According to the dominant view of seventeenth-century science, occult qualities were banished from nature by the new philosophy of mechanism. Even historians of science who have emphasized the hermetic component of the scientific revolution have not really come to grips with the issue of occult qualities in the seventeenth century. The persistence of occult modes of...
[The entire page is 12473 words long]
Navigate
