Introduction

Wellred

Core Argument

Modern natural science was born in the revolutionary epoch of the late fifteenth century, when royal power, supported by the burghers, shattered feudal nobility and established nation-based monarchies, thereby enabling bourgeois society. The peasant war in Germany prophetically revealed early class struggles, while the rediscovery of ancient Greek culture shattered medieval Church authority, unleashing an artistic flowering and the discovery of new worlds that laid foundations for global trade and manufacture. This greatest progressive revolution produced "giants" such as Leonardo da Vinci, Dürer, Machiavelli, and Luther—figures not yet constrained by division of labour, who participated actively in practical struggle.

Natural science won its existence through struggle, with martyrs like Servetus and Bruno, while Copernicus's work declared science's independence from theology. The first period of modern natural science focused on mastering immediate material, prioritising mechanics and mathematics, with Newton and Linnaeus bringing these to partial perfection. Yet this period's characteristic outlook was the absolute immutability of nature, denying all development and change. Natural science remained deeply enmeshed in theology, frequently resorting to a creator, standing below Greek antiquity in theoretical mastery.

The first breach in this petrified outlook came from Kant's 1755 work, which abolished the question of a first impulse by presenting the solar system as having come into being. Geology demonstrated that the earth possessed a history in time, while Mayer, Joule, and Grove established the transformation and constancy of physical energies. In biological research, systematic scientific expeditions since the mid-eighteenth century, alongside advances in paleontology, anatomy, microscopy, and cell theory, had accumulated sufficient material to make the comparative method necessary. Species became intermingled, anomalous organisms defied existing classification, and Darwin carried the theory of descent victoriously in 1859. The new conception of nature was thus complete: all rigidity dissolved, all fixity dissipated, and nature shown as moving in eternal flux.

Matter moves in an eternal cycle, completed over periods far exceeding terrestrial years. Every finite mode of matter—sun, nebular vapour, animal, or chemical combination—is transient. Only eternally changing, eternally moving matter and its laws are eternal. With the same iron necessity that it will exterminate the thinking mind on Earth, it must somewhere else and at another time produce it again.