In many ways the path to understanding something like rain or evaporation is more interesting than the final discovery. The struggle of thinkers to comprehend them is as intriguing as the final facts that eventually emerged. This chapter well illustrates the difficulties and the slow dawning. The same is certainly going on today in cosmology and quantum physics, and probably in climatology too. It is difficult to say exactly who or what started the revolution of thought that occurred in the seventeenth century, but much suddenly happened all at once.

The ‘new philosophy’ – Empiricism

England's greatest contribution to philosophy was probably Empiricism, a pragmatic philosophy, practical, hard-headed, no-nonsense, Anglo-Saxon, the exact opposite of rhetoric. Empiricism also had a strong association with British Protestantism, a movement that aimed to demystify the church itself and also the monarchy, which was still mystical and closely related to religious dogma. The Protestants said the monarchy had no divine right and was not somehow speaking for God: they were just ordinary people. Francis Bacon was one of the first to promote this line of thinking.

Although primarily a politician (appointed to England's high office of Lord Chancellor in 1621, five years after the death of Shakespeare) Francis Bacon's greatest interest lay in the search for scientific truth. Up until the seventeenth century, as shown in the previous chapter, science (if it could yet be called that) was (in the West) based on Aristotle's view that any truth could be reached simply by thinking, by argument and by discussion.