Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Vesalius, Harvey, and their
fellow workers built up the scientific method. In the Middle Ages students had
mostly been satisfied to accept what Aristotle and other philosophers had said,
without trying to prove their statements. Kepler, for instance, was the
first to disprove the Aristotelian idea that, as all perfect motion is
circular, therefore the heavenly bodies must move in circular orbits. Similarly,
the world had to wait many centuries before Harvey showed Aristotle's error in
supposing that the blood arose in the liver, went thence to the heart, and by
the veins was conducted over the body. The new scientific method rested on
observation and experiment. Students learned at length to take nothing for
granted, to set aside all authority, and to go straight to nature for their
facts. As Lord Bacon, [21] one of Shakespeare's contemporaries and a severe
critic of the old scholasticism, declared, "All depends on keeping the eye
steadily fixed upon the facts of nature, and so receiving their images simply
as they are, for God forbid that we should give out a dream of our own
imagination for a pattern of the world." Modern science, to which we owe so
much, is a product of the Renaissance.
[21] Not to be confused with his countryman, Roger Bacon,
who lived in the thirteenth century. See page 573.
