This chapter is concerned with the 400 years from the rediscovery of De Rerum Natura in 1417 to the French Revolution of 1789, though there is not much said about the first century of this period. The ‘triumphs’ referred to in the title of this chapter are not wholly attributable to materialism, but it had a profound influence on the thinking even of those who disavowed it. Materialist thought is an important strand in the tumultuous centuries in Europe following the catastrophic, plague-ridden fourteenth century. The reintroduction of Lucretius’ poem into European intellectual society acted like a shot of adrenalin into the bloodstream of art, philosophy and science. The Protestant Reformation, the Renaissance and the subsequent release of science from the constraints imposed by the metaphysical teachings of the Church’s Aristotelian philosophy was followed by extraordinary leaps in the understanding of the world, the ultimate expression of which was Newton’s Principia (1687). Ironically, Newton himself was neither a mechanical philosopher nor a materialist.
In The Swerve, Greenblatt (2012) documents the profound influence Lucretius had on many important thinkers of the sixteenth century. The poem brought a new perspective into European thought, after 1000 years of being totally dominated by Christian teaching that was founded on the works of Aristotle and Plato as well as the Bible, and which identified these sources as the truth and not open to criticism.
Many of those who were entranced both by the beauty and the ideas of Lucretius’ poem were devout Christians who retained their religious convictions. Their capacity to hold what at first appears to be a paradoxical, if not contradictory, intellectual stance can be understood in the context of the interplay of two further traditions in Western philosophical and Christian thought. The first is a tradition of scepticism, mentioned in Chapter 1, which essentially challenges the grounds on which human knowledge of any kind claims to find support. The Greek Pyrrho and the Roman Stoic Sextus Empiricus are the two most famous classical sceptics, and their arguments were rediscovered in the same period as the re-emergence of De Rerum Natura. These ideas interacted with a longstanding strand in Christian thought that questioned the place of reason in religious belief, propounding the alternative view that religious belief was founded solely on faith. This stance came to be known as fideism. The upshot was that religion became detached from natural philosophy for many of the leading philosophers and scientists of the time, and all manner of speculations about empirical and metaphysical issues could be tolerated, provided they were not understood to challenge received religious doctrine.
One of the most influential of such thinkers was the French essayist Michel de Montaigne. His humanitarian open-minded attitudes are expressed in beautiful writings that were also a principal vehicle for the dissemination of Epicurean thought. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy gives this assessment:
If we trace back the birth of modern science, we find that Montaigne as a philosopher was ahead of his time. In 1543, Copernicus put the earth in motion, depriving man of his cosmological centrality. Yet he nevertheless changed little in the medieval conception of the world as a sphere. The Copernican world became an ‘open’ world only with Thomas Digges (1576) although his sky was still situated in space, inhabited by gods and angels. One has to wait for Giordano Bruno to find the first representative of the modern conception of an infinite universe (1584) … Montaigne, on the contrary, is entirely free from the medieval conception of the spheres. He owes his cosmological freedom to his deep interest in ancient philosophers, to Lucretius in particular. In the longest chapter of the Essays, the ‘Apologie de Raymond Sebond’, Montaigne conjures up many opinions, regarding the nature of the cosmos, or the nature of the soul. He weighs the Epicureans’ opinion that several worlds exist, against that of the unicity of the world put forth by both Aristotle and Aquinas. He comes out in favor of the former, without ranking his own evaluation as a truth.
(Foglia, 2014)
Montaigne’s teachings on life emphasise the Epicurean injunction to not fear death. The essays read as startlingly modern and express a sensibility of gentleness and humility at odds with the brutality and ruthlessness of his times, dominated as they were by wars of religion. It is reasonable to link that sensibility with his love of Lucretius, from whom, Greenblatt informs us, he quoted nearly 100 times in the Essays. He is surely right to detect a ‘profound affinity’ between the two writers. He describes Montaigne as sharing
‘Lucretius’ contempt for a morality enforced by nightmares of the afterlife; he clung to the importance of his own senses and the evidence of the material world; he intensely disliked ascetic self-punishment and violence against the flesh; he treasured inward freedom and content. In grappling with the fear of death, he was influenced by Stoicism as well as Lucretian materialism, but it is the latter that proves the dominant guide, leading him toward a celebration of bodily pleasure.
(p. 244)
Montaigne’s Essais was one of Shakespeare’s favourite books, and just as the literary qualities of Lucretius’ poem facilitated the dissemination of its Epicurean ideas, so the literary qualities of Montaigne’s essays helped disseminate the Epicurean perspective on the living of life.
Lucretius aroused the interest of many of England’s leading writers of the time, including Spenser, Donne and the philosopher important in formulating the scientific method, Francis Bacon. The playwright Ben Jonson had his own (self-)signed copy of De Rerum Natura. It is worth mentioning too that a slightly earlier thinker of great subsequent influence was, according to some scholars, deeply influenced by Lucretius, albeit with a vastly different outcome from the fruits of Lucretius’ influence on Montaigne. The following is taken from the abstract of a paper published in the journal History of Political Thought.
If he had [a classical mentor], it was surely Lucretius, the leading Roman critic of ancient political idealism – a figure so important to the Florentine that in the late 1490s he copied by hand in its entirety De rerum natura and that he drew on it throughout his subsequent career. Machiavelli’s republicanism is best understood as an appropriation, critique and reworking of ancient Epicureanism.
(Rahe, 2007, p. 30)
As evidence for the claim of the importance of Lucretius in late fifteenth-century Florence, Greenblatt tells us that the deeply puritanical Dominican Savonarola thought it worthwhile to attack and ridicule the ancient atomists in a series of sermons. Within a few decades of its re-emergence, De Rerum Natura was seen as a threat to the established intellectual order.
The mechanical philosophers did not share a single conception of the workings of nature. Amongst their number are the substance dualist Descartes, the devout Christian Boyle and the materialist Hobbes. What they did have in common was a commitment to largely abandoning the Aristotelian theory of the four elements, the Ptolemaic theory of geocentrism and the magical ideas of the alchemists. All thought much was to be gained by thinking of nature as analogous to a clockwork machine whose hidden parts acted by unseen contacts. Most were atomists but Descartes denied there could be empty space and thought it was entirely filled by corpuscles of matter. The key problems were to understand what happens when bodies collide, what is conserved in mechanical processes and whether there can be a vacuum. Explanations of natural phenomena in terms of essences, ends, forms and qualities was to be replaced by quantitative and often geometrical descriptions. Major advances in scientific experimentation and instruments were accompanied by the growing consensus that scientists needed to investigate the behaviour of matter in precisely defined circumstances not readily accessible in the natural world, and so needed to design highly elaborate experiments using specialised equipment for this purpose (for example, using the air pump to create a vacuum to find out if sound needs the air to be transmitted). All agreed with the Democritean doctrine that honey atoms need not be sweet nor gold atoms gold in colour, and that such properties could be appearances caused by the motions and interactions of their atoms.
Amongst the most important mechanists were Marin Mersenne and Pierre Gassendi, both of whom were heavily critical of supernatural practices popular at the time, and made important scientific discoveries. The latter managed simultaneously to identify himself as a follower of Epicurus, and serve as a catholic priest. He wrote a commentary on Book Ten of Diogenes Laertius. He seems to have stayed clear of the wrath of the authorities, perhaps because of believing aspects of man to be immaterial. He taught Molière and Cyrano de Bergerac, who popularised the new natural philosophy.
Robert Boyle was a seventeenth-century scientist regarded today as one of the founders of modern chemistry, and an early pioneer of the scientific method. Although he was not the first to formulate the hypothesis, he is perhaps most famous for Boyle’s Law, which states the inversely proportional relationship between the pressure and volume of a gas in a closed system maintained at a constant temperature.
Boyle was also a devout Christian, a Protestant, and made an endowment in his will for a series of lectures that came to be known as the Boyle lectures. The lectures were inaugurated in 1692 and their purpose was to defend the Christian religion against ‘notorious infidels, viz. Atheists, Deists, Pagans, Jews and Mahometans’. The will stipulated further that the lectures should not address ‘controversies that are among Christians themselves’ (see Bentley, 1838).
Before going on with the story of the lectures, there are two comments to be made. The first is that, at the conclusion of the century, then, an eminent scientist saw reason to endow a lecture series in the service of defending Christianity. It seems fair to conclude that Christianity was seen by Boyle to be under threat. Regardless of the reference to people of other religions, it is clear that materialist thought had entered the mainstream of intellectual discourse. As claimed above in the previous section, this was in no small measure due to Lucretius, and devout Christians saw the threat such thinking posed.
The second comment brings to light the great paradox of the age. Boyle’s passion as a scientist, and his success, depended on the materialist epistemology that found expression in the scientific method. The influence of the official science of the medieval Catholic Church, namely Aristotelian physics, had been abandoned. And yet, no tension was felt in him in maintaining a strong belief in god. Boyle’s attitude is an example, then, of the great division of the mind that permits science to be pursued as an investigation of the natural world, conceived as free from the presence of any supernatural force in one state of mind, while a relationship to god can be maintained in another state of mind.
It needs to be understood that Newton and Boyle would have denied they suffered from a ‘great division of the mind’. For them, natural philosophy is continuous with natural theology. However, their ‘intelligent creator’ god is very different from the god of the Old Testament. If god has become the Prime Mover, permitting the study of natural philosophy – in effect, science – to be conducted in the manner of a materialist atheist, with no reference to the supernatural, the expression ‘division of the mind’ does seem appropriate.
It would seem this was facilitated by a Protestant Christianity rather more than a Catholic one. The Reformation seems, in challenging and undermining the authority of the catholic authorities, to have granted licence to a much freer approach to the investigation of nature than had previously been possible. Earlier in the century Galileo had pursued scientific research while maintaining his Catholicism. But the findings that contradicted some biblical accounts of the nature of the world, and his being prepared to entertain Copernican ideas of a heliocentric universe brought him into conflict with the Catholic authorities, resulting in the threat of torture for heresy and a sentence of imprisonment at the pleasure of the Inquisition, which was quickly commuted to house arrest – detention in his own villa.
Returning to the story of the Boyle lectures, the first lecturer was Richard Bentley (1838), a brilliant young theologian and eminent scholar. The title page of the 1693 edition of the lectures reads
The Folly and Unreasonableness of Atheism demonstrated from the Advantage and Pleasure of a Religious Life, The Faculties of Human Souls, The Structure of Animate Bodies, and the Origin and Frame of the World, etc.
The last three of the eight lectures constitute ‘A Confutation of Atheism from the Origin and Frame of the World’, and address Newtonian Mechanics, the greatest scientific achievement of the age. Bentley engaged in a correspondence with Newton and there are passages from the letters that bear directly on the materialist tradition.
Bentley says that he is going to establish some propositions, one of which relates to gravitation and states
That such a mutual gravitation or spontaneous attraction can neither be inherent and essential to matter, nor ever supervene to it, unless impressed and infused into it by a divine power.
(p. 157)
The following passage occurs in the third of Newton’s letters to Bentley.
It is inconceivable, that inanimate brute matter should, without the mediation of something else, which is not material, operate upon and affect other matter without mutual contact, as it must be, if gravitation, in the sense of Epicurus, be essential and inherent in it. And this is one reason why I desired you would not ascribe innate gravity to me. That gravity should be innate, inherent, and essential to matter, so that one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum, without the mediation of any thing else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so great an absurdity, that I believe no man, who has in philosophical matters a competent faculty of thinking, can ever fall into it. Gravity must be caused by an agent acting constantly according to certain laws; but whether this agent be material or immaterial, I have left to the consideration of my readers.
(Bentley, 1838, pp. 211–12)
It is interesting to see the name of Epicurus used in this context. The champion of Greek atomism is present in the intellectual ferment of the time, and in the opinion of the pious Newton taken to be trying to defend an absurdity – if there is nothing but atoms and the void, then gravity would have to be innate to the atoms, and so, granting the reality of gravitation, action at a distance will simply have to be acknowledged and accepted. Newton believes there must be something more, but is not prepared to affirm that this extra must be something immaterial; he keeps an open mind on the issue. So Newton does not question his Christian beliefs, but is unprepared to endorse openly an argument for the existence of god on the basis of his theory of gravity. More than 200 years later another great scientist did in fact give an account of the something more. The phenomena of gravitation, and the apparent action of one body on another at a distance, were given an explanation by Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. The ‘something else’ was the gravitational field of space-time. The gravitational field is, of course, neither material nor divine. It would not have served Bentley’s purpose, then; there was no quick route to the demonstration of the existence of god. But it is also true, as discussed further in Chapter 5, that modern physics brought problems to traditional philosophical materialism.
To reiterate, it would seem that virtually all the great thinkers of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were familiar, to a greater or lesser extent, with materialist and atheistic ideas, and many of them first met these ideas in Lucretius’ poem. Its atomic theory was compelling to many, both in its content and in the beauty of the form of its presentation. It is also true that virtually all the great thinkers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries believed in god. At least virtually all of them declared themselves to be theists, it being imprudent to do otherwise throughout the period. But for those strongly influenced by the materialist tradition, authentically retaining a religious belief system involved some radical alterations at the psychological level. It has been described above how for many scientists the mind had to be divided into two parts, the scientific secular part and the pious religious part. The findings of the new science contradicted not only Aristotle but also the Bible – Genesis states that the earth was created before the creation of the sun, and in Psalms it is said that the earth cannot be moved. While it would be at least theoretically feasible to abandon the pagan Aristotle, holding beliefs counter to the teachings of the Bible was inevitably problematic. The authorities did not approve of any of the various attempts at resolution, but some provoked greater wrath than others.
Thomas Hobbes was vilified as an atheist, because the god he claimed to believe in was a material one. To the Christian, this is a heresy as bad as atheism proper, and of course suggests a familiarity with the teachings of Epicurus and hence familiarity with Lucretius. A minor episode in his story is that he is known to have failed in his mathematical project to square the circle. Failure was inevitable, of course – it is now known that the task of constructing a square of the same area as a given circle in a finite number of steps is impossible. But, in a metaphorical sense, the great thinkers of the age promoting science and the investigation of nature unencumbered by supernatural forces in nature and the looming presence of Aristotelian authority within, while at the same time seeking to uphold a religious doctrine with undeniable ontological claims, were all in an ultimately hopeless endeavour to square the circle.
The approach adopted by the great philosopher Spinoza was radically different, but brought even greater opprobrium. In contrast with the substance dualism of much medieval thought, which recognised just res extensa and res cogitans, extending things and thinking things, Spinoza believed there was just one substance, ‘God’, with infinite attributes, of which thought and extension are two.
It is perhaps necessary to give some justification for including Spinoza in this historical survey, as he was evidently neither atheist nor materialist. But the doctrine of the identification of the one and only substance as god, and the identification of god with nature, which became known as pantheism, was seen, not unreasonably, by the authorities as a step on the road to atheism, if indeed it had not already, in reality, reached that destination. Historically, pantheism can be seen to follow one path to nature worship, but it also points the way to another path of scientific exploration of nature unencumbered by any supernatural doctrine. The authorities were not amused.
Spinoza was a member of the Jewish community in Amsterdam, whose origins were in the Iberian Peninsula, from which they had fled to avoid persecution at the hands of the Inquisition. Spinoza was expelled from the Congregation of Israel in 1656. He was convicted of holding evil opinions – of believing horrible heresies – and his expulsion from the community was accompanied by a malediction that included these assertions:
Let him be cursed by the mouths of the Seven Angels who preside over the seven days of the week, and by the mouths of the angels who follow them and fight under their banners …
Let God never forgive him his sins. Let the wrath and indignation of the Lord surround him and smoke forever on his head … Let God blot him out of his book …
And we warn you, that none may speak with him by word of mouth nor by writing, nor show any favour to him, nor be under one roof with him, nor come within four cubits of him, nor read any paper composed by him.
(Spinoza, 1967, pp. xxiii–xxiv)
This gives the modern reader some idea of just how scared the religious authorities were of thought beyond the limits prescribed by the teachings of the sacred texts.
A further reason for including Spinoza here is that he was much admired by Einstein. When asked to write a short essay on ‘the ethical significance of Spinoza’s philosophy’, Einstein replied:
I do not have the professional knowledge to write a scholarly article about Spinoza. But what I think about this man I can express in a few words. Spinoza was the first to apply with strict consistency the idea of an all-pervasive determinism to human thought, feeling, and action. In my opinion, his point of view has not gained general acceptance by all those striving for clarity and logical rigor only because it requires not only consistency of thought, but also unusual integrity, magnamity, and – modesty.
(Jammer, 1999, pp. 44–5)
Spinoza made a major contribution to the liberation of science, beyond his pantheistic metaphysics. The focus in this survey has been on the irresistible rise, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, of modern ways of thinking over medieval ones. To the modern mind, a claim about what the world is like is only to be taken seriously if the evidence and reasoning behind it can be tested. The modern mind is reluctant to accept any claim just because an authority has stated it. In modern times, of course, much is learned by instruction from experts and teachers, but those experts are only trusted to the extent that they are seen to operate in a culture of critical thinking, experimentation and theory testing.
However, it is also important to remember that the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were violent times, and the traditional authority under threat was willing and able to guard its authority ruthlessly. When Descartes heard about Galileo’s experience, he decided not to publish his work Le Monde, knowing that it would receive censure from the Rome, and censure could lead to persecution. In the work, he was going to present his theory of the world, including the heretical heliocentric theory, with the equally heretical implication that the earth moves, as a story, a fable, not about the actual world. But he was not a person to risks attacks of the sort Galileo suffered, despite him having presented his theory as ‘merely’ a hypothesis.
The seventeenth century witnessed extreme social conflict, most notably the catastrophic Thirty Years’ War, responsible for up to 8 million fatalities. Superstition was widespread throughout European society, notwithstanding the advances in rationality amongst the intellectual elite, and this too was the source of murderous violence. The persecution of ‘witches’, which began in the fifteenth century and eventually fizzled out only in the late seventeenth century, is reputed to have seen the execution by burning or hanging of over 80,000 people, the greater number of them being elderly women. It is sobering to think that at almost exactly the same time that Descartes was getting frightened by the prospect of bringing the Church’s wrath on himself by publishing Le Monde, a person accused of being a witch – in this case, a middle-aged man – was being tortured and then burnt at the stake in Loudun, a small town in France, just fifty kilometres, as it happens, from Descartes’ birthplace.
In this social climate, most of those with doubts and criticisms of established authorities were effectively silenced by fear. Yet Spinoza’s (2007) Theological-Political Treatise is written in a fearless voice. It was published anonymously, to save Spinoza from the wrath of the secular as well as religious authorities, though his authorship was not a secret for long. Its publication in 1670 was a critical moment in this story. In this work, much of it taken up with an analysis of biblical texts, Spinoza attacks the irrationality of traditional beliefs, denies the possibility of miracles and mocks organised religion and the biblical prophets. It was considered extremely dangerous. From the perspective of the rise of materialism, however, there is something more important than these attacks on established religion per se, which are presented, after all, as the work of a profoundly religious theist. For the story of materialism and the advance of science and the scientific method, what is crucial about the Treatise is that it constitutes a two-fold assault in the epistemological battle concerning evidence and the grounds for knowledge. On the one hand Spinoza dares to cast a critical eye on the sacred texts and subject them to damning scrutiny; the doctrinal claims are shown to be devoid of rational evidential grounds. On the other hand, he argues for the need for social and religious authorities to safeguard the individual’s right to freedom of thought and freedom of speech, that ‘Every man may think what he likes, and say what he thinks’. In other words, Spinoza articulates explicitly the critique that is implicit in the rise of rise of the scientific worldview. (See Nadler, 2013.)
The eminent philosophical voice outside France and Germany of the eighteenth century is that of David Hume. Hume is the most important philosopher of the period in the history of materialism. For many he is amongst the most important philosophers ever. Hume is the great sceptic in philosophy, and his scepticism is based on a radical empiricism. Like Pyrrho, he believes that all knowledge derives from the senses, and the senses are, evidently, unreliable. It is, therefore, reasonable to withhold assent to any assertion of knowledge. However, while it would be questionable to identify him as a materialist, his scepticism was less thoroughgoing than that of Pyrrho and he tended to a materialist worldview over others.
For an extreme sceptic, to declare there is no god is as unwarranted an assurance as to declare there is a god. But not all sceptics are so extreme and Hume’s position can be misunderstood. It seems evident that Hume believed, for example, that his acquaintances were people who existed independently of him and had minds of their own. He believed the table at which he worked was a real object in the external world. Hume’s scepticism consists in his denial that he is able to provide certain evidence for these beliefs. Hume’s naturalism consists in his assertion that no philosophical arguments will prevent him having those beliefs in practical deliberation and everyday life.
There are important issues about the nature of knowledge at stake here. In contemporary analytic philosophy there is a much-discussed definition of knowledge as justified true belief. The issue then becomes what counts as justification, and in particular whether it requires certainty. Chapter 1 claims that the worldview of a society has a central role in maintaining a sense of social coherence and stability. To fulfil that role, it needs to be accorded a special status. It just does not seem feasible to say ‘we have this worldview and they have that worldview, and the one is as good as the other’. Our one has to be better – more accurate, or true, and the grounds on which it is based, its justifications, have to be held fixed. The established authorities hated the sceptics for questioning the certainty of standard justifications and inviting reasoned debate about them, as much as they hated the materialists for their denial.
Hume posed a dilemma for the authorities. He was, first of all, an exceptional person of undoubted intellectual abilities. He went to university at the age of eleven. Throughout his life he was both given and denied positions of authority. He was not appointed a professor of philosophy because of objections from the religious authorities, but he was later appointed Secretary to the British Embassy in Paris.
It would have been absurd to doubt his genius. But in addition, he did not fit the image of the infidel held in the minds of so many religious people. Far from being unpleasant, or immoral, he was the most charming of men. He maintained friendships with people of profoundly differing opinions, and was widely admired. That such an eminent and exceptional man could hold such outlandish views must surely have afforded those views additional credibility.
There are two arguments he presented that are of particular relevance to the history of materialism, but consideration of one will be set aside until Chapter 4. His arguments against the reality of miracles has become justly famous, or infamous, depending on one’s point of view.
Hume’s arguments that cast doubt on the occurrence of miracles are powerful, if not conclusive. He was not denying the possibility of miracles. What he was questioning was their probability, and his argument amounted to saying that ‘the balance of probabilities would always weigh against reports of religious miracles, so that accepting any such report would have to be a matter of faith rather than of reason’ (Gottlieb, 2016, pp. 217–18).
The core of the argument is this: a miracle is a violation of a law of nature. A law of nature has been established on the basis of compelling evidence. It is probable that the violation did not occur and we are obliged to look critically at the evidence for the violation. In an Introduction to Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Millican gives a striking illustration to make Hume’s case. He asks us to imagine he is worried about a very rare disease that affects only one person in a million, and that there is a test for the disease that produces positive results with 99.9-percent accuracy. That is, out of every 1000 people who test positive for the disease, 999 actually have it and one does not. He then imagines taking the test and getting a positive result. Ought you to conclude from this evidence that he probably has the disease? No, notwithstanding the positive result it is still very much more likely that he is the one in 1000 whose test result is wrong, than the one in a million who actually has the disease (Hume, 2007, p. l).
Reports of miracles are like positive test results for very unusual diseases. They must be treated with extreme caution, because however remote the possibility of error or deceit may seem, it may still be less remote than the possibility that a miracle has occurred. We should therefore adopt it as a maxim, Hume wrote, that ‘no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle unless the testimony be of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish’.
It can be argued that many of the great thinkers of the age asserted their religious convictions in bad faith, because it was prudent, and sometimes necessary, to do so in order to avoid persecution and ‘the instruments’. The ultimate triumph referred to in this chapter’s title captures this problem in a slightly different way. The treatise The System of Nature by Baron d’Holbach, published in 1770, is the first systematic attempt at an atheist materialist metaphysics and epistemology, together, inevitably, with a coruscating attack on the Church. The ironic fact is that d’Holbach published it anonymously. Materialism is only able to speak its name anonymously. Other pamphlets and books liable to bring their authors into conflict with the authorities he ascribed to people who were already dead.
d’Holbach was a figure in what Jonathan Israel (2002) identified as the ‘Radical Enlightenment’. Many of the more famous figures of the Enlightenment, such as Voltaire and Hume, held beliefs radically unenlightened by our modern standards, but d’Holbach was in many ways the first to state, from a philosophical point of view, not only the essential metaphysical and epistemological materialist stances, but also its accompanying free-thinking conception of social ethics. He advocated freedom of thought and religion, and the separation of Church and State. However, it is also important to note that he was wary of teaching these theories to the masses (Herrick, 1985, chapter 5).
The legacy of the fourteenth century included the ravages of the Black Death, the devastating plague that carried off as much as a third of the population of Europe and the work of Plutarch, the great Italian poet who translated Virgil and gave impetus to the Renaissance. The rediscovery of De Rerum Natura was at the dawn of the fifteenth century. By the French Revolution at the close of the eighteenth century science had freed itself from the Church, and the age of the persecution of free-thinking by the Church had taken a more psychological form. In Europe, the threat and use of torture had by and large stopped. Science and technology began a march of progress of ever-increasing rapidity, having become the research and development department of the soon-to-be global economic system of imperialist capitalism. Untethering the epistemological instinct from the constraints of received doctrine liberated a force of such power that it offered a world of extraordinary wellbeing, and at the same time threatened the human race with catastrophic destruction.