ith and a certain naive belief in the willingness of others to learn and to change. His was not the first protest against the Catholic Church and its abuses, but he succeeded where others had failed because of his own charismatic conversion. He was one of the people and spoke their language (Luther 18-21).
The scientific revolution in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries offered a new view of the universe and a new way of investigating nature. Most important of all, it overthrew the medieval conception of nature as a hierarchical order leading to a realm of perfection:
Rejecting reliance on authority, the thinkers of the Scientific Revolution affirmed the individual's ability to know the natural world through the method of mathematical reasoning, the direct observation of nature, and carefully controlled experiments (Perry, Peden, and von Laue 31).
Reason was the cornerstone of the methods of Francis Bacon in addressing issues of science and politics. Reason was the method of RenT Descartes, though he still saw his faculties in this direction as
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