timelets | Quote of the Day: Invention of the Scientific Method

The concept of a _controlled_ experiment in combination with a theory seems to be the critical component of this revolution in thought.

“The new task of contemporary science was no longer to frame itself as the passive contemplation of a beauty inscribed beforehand in nature; it was to do a job of work, namely the active construction of laws which would endow a disenchanted universe with meaning. Science was no longer a passive spectacle; it was an activity of the mind.

... thought was no longer a ‘seeing’, an orao, as the word ‘theoria’ suggests, but an ‘acting’, a work which consists in relating natural phenomena to each other, so that they form a chain of connections: and thus explain each other. This is what will come to be termed ‘scientific method’, virtually unknown as such to the ancients, and which would become the fundamental building block of modern science.
...
An example of this ‘acting’ is Claude Bernard, the great nineteenth-century French doctor and biologist, who published his celebrated Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine in 1865. He illustrates perfectly the theory of knowledge elaborated by Kant which replaced the ancient theoria.
Claude Bernard provides a detailed account of his discovery of ‘the glycogenetic function of the liver’ – the capacity of the liver to produce sugar. Bernard had observed, while carrying out tests, that there was sugar in the blood of the rabbits he dissected. He wondered about the origin of this sugar: did it come from ingested food or was it produced by the body, and, if so, which organ was responsible? He separated his rabbits into three groups: some were given food containing sugar; others were given food with no sugar; and the least fortunate were placed on a starvation diet. After several days, he analysed the blood of the rabbits, only to discover that, in every case, there was the same amount of sugar in their blood. This indicated that glucose did not derive from food, but was produced by the body.

The work of contemplation, the theoria, has changed completely since the Greeks: it is no longer a question of contemplation; science is no longer a spectacle but a job of work, an activity which consists of making connections between phenomena, in associating an effect (sugar) with a cause (the liver). And this is precisely what Kant, before Claude Bernard, had already formulated and analysed in the Critique of Pure Reason; namely the idea that science must define itself henceforth as a work of the associative faculty, or, to use his vocabulary, as a work of ‘synthesis’ – a word which in Greek means ‘to put together’, to ‘combine’; just as an explanation in terms of cause and effect connects two phenomena: in this instance, sugar and the liver."

-- Luc Ferry. “A Brief History of Thought.”