212 DESTINY DISRUPTED
elaborated the atomic view of matter, which they took from Indian scien-
tists, and some had elaborated the mechanistic model of the universe,
which they had gotten from the Chinese.
The momentous thing was not so much the discoveries themselves as
the fact that in the West they persisted, they accumulated, and they rein-
forced one another until they brought about a complete and coherent new
way to view and approach the world, the scientific view, which enabled the
West's later explosive advances in technology. Why did all this happen in
the West but not in the East?
Possibly because Muslims made their great scientific discoveries just as
their social order started crumbling, whereas the West made its great scien-
tific discoveries just as its long-crumbled social order was starting to recover
and in the wake of a religious reformation that broke the grip of church
dogma on human thought, empowering individuals to speculate freely.
The Protestant Reformation was thus a key to the resurgence of Eu-
rope. But the Reformation also intertwined with another European devel-
opment of tremendous consequence, the emergence of the nation-state as
a form of political organization. The two were intertwined because when
Luther and the others defied the Church, they took refuge with one or an-
other of the monarchs of Europe, monarchs who had variously been strug-
gling with the pope for some time now over who had final power in any
given locale, the religious establishment or the secular one. The Reforma-
tion triggered an outburst of violence throughout Europe that ended with
the Peace of Augsburg (1555). There the contending forces agreed on a
landmark principle: that each monarch would have the authority to say
whether his state, big or little, would stay with the Church of Rome or
adopt one of the new Christian sects. Augsburg was only a ceasefire, it
turned out. The pressure burst out again as the Thirty Years' War, a kind
of civil war that raged all over Europe, basically over the issue of which re-
ligion was to prevail. When the conflict wound down finally, and a treaty
was signed at Westphalia, in 1648, the principle established at Augsburg
was confirmed. So along with empowering individualism, the Reforma-
tion ended up dismantling a Europe-wide ideology in favor of a system in
which church and state reinforced each other to promote nationalism.
Some of the first germs of nation-states formed in England and France,
whose monarchs had fought the sporadic Hundred Years' War from 1337