timelets

Whitehead writes about "the scientific outburst of the seventeenth century."

By this rationalism [of the Middle Ages] I mean the belief that the avenue to truth was predominantly through a metaphysical analysis of the nature of things, which would thereby determine how things acted and functioned. The historical revolt was the definite abandonment of this method in favour of the study of the empirical facts of antecedents and consequences. In religion, it meant the appeal to the origins of Christianity; and in science it meant the appeal to experiment and the inductive method of reasoning.

Whitehead, Science ..., 1925