attention was the rearrangement of theological doctrine which followed the
organizational breakup of the church, it is not surprising here that theology
fuels science. This helps explain the upsurge of innovation; but the latter is not
itself a scientific revolution. Sustained discovery need not follow, as we see in
chemistry. Still less does the atmosphere of theological controversy tend toward
scientific consensus. We have already noted, in the conclusion of Chapter 9,
that European intellectual life from the late 1300s onward became dispersed
and fragmented; the landscape was populated by various scholastic factions,
Humanists, mystics, and occultists without a focal point for their controversies.
At first the Reformation made the situation worse. It multiplied religious sects
and systems of occultism; Copernicus, Paracelsus, and Servetus added to the
cacophony of oppositions. That is why a characteristic voice of the late 1500s
is Montaigne, proposing skeptical detachment from all intellectual positions;
for him, Copernicus was just another absurdity of this ideological chaos.
We seem as far as possible from the consensus on a body of knowledge,
and from the discovery-making techniques which would become the hallmarks
of modern science. Nevertheless, a new focus was beginning to crystallize in
the attention space. The Counterreformation was organizing and polarizing
opinion, above all with the burgeoning Jesuit educational movement providing
a new intellectual base. The mathematicians had launched their revolution of
discovery-making technique; and their network overlapped significantly with
astronomers and with general philosophical intellectuals. The medical physi-
ologists, too, were about to be pulled into the center of intellectual attention.
Soon after 1600 most of the chains, with the exception of the chemists,
came together. Astronomers, mathematicians, and physicists first formed a
self-conscious front. Descartes met Beeckman in 1618 and acquired an interest
in science. Stevin and Descartes both served in the army of Prince Maurice of
Orange; in the same alliance was the Huygens family, who acted as frequent
host to Descartes, and whose son Christian Huygens was encouraged in a
scientific career by their distinguished visitor. In Figure 10.1 we see this Dutch
circle of physicists and mathematicians connecting with the astronomical line-
age of Brahe, Maestlin, and Kepler; Kepler in turn is in contact with Galileo
and with the court circle in England. Galileo connects with the mathematical
lineage of Tartaglia, and also with the Jesuit thinkers in Rome. By the 1620s,
Mersenne had formed his circle of correspondence, linking together virtually
all the scientific actors and inspiring a new generation in mathematics, science,
and philosophy.
Somewhat apart from this math–physical science complex had been the
lineage of medical physiologists. The link was forged by Harvey, whose ex-
perimental method was probably influenced by contact with Galileo at Padua,
where the latter was professor of mathematics. When Harvey returned to
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