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Shows that science was bitterly contested during the early modern period. Rejecting the traditional picture of secularization, this work argues that science in the seventeenth century emerged not in opposition to religion but rather was in many respects driven by it.

How did we come to have a scientific culture - one in which cognitive values are shaped around scientific ones? Stephen Gaukroger presents a rich and fascinating investigation of the development of intellectual culture in early modern Europe, a period in which understandings of the natural realm began to fragment.

Stephen Gaukroger presents an original account of the development of science and our understanding of ourselves during a period which saw a fundamental shift in how the role of science was seen. At the core of the shift lies the aim of understanding human behaviour and motivations in empirical rather than theological and metaphysical terms.

How did science come to have such a central place in Western culture? How did our ways of thinking, and our moral, political, and social values, come to be modelled around scientific values? Stephen Gaukroger traces the story of how these values developed, and how they influenced society and culture from the 19th to the mid-20th century.