The makers of the scientific revolution were not heroic fighters against obscurantism, but thinkers who stumbled on truth almost despite themselves. Dismissing the popular notion that ‘science stood for freedom, the Church for oppression of thought’, Koestler presents the makers of the scientific revolution as shifty, at times cowardly figures, referring to them at one point as ‘moral dwarfs’. He is notably hard on Copernicus and Galileo, archetypal figures in the mythology of scientism, contrasting them with the astrologer and mystic Johannes Kepler – the true hero of the book.
