The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries witnessed such rapid progress—with astounding discoveries in mathematics, astronomy, and the natural sciences—that it led to a sort of philosophical disorientation. Given that church doctrine still officially defined the limits of permissible intellectual explorations during this period, these advances produced breakthroughs of considerable daring. Copernicus’s vision of a heliocentric system, Newton’s laws of motion, van Leeuwenhoek’s cataloging of a living microscopic world—these and other developments led to the general sentiment that new layers of
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