THE POPULARIZATION OF SCIENCE in nineteenth-century America is inseparable from the democratization of Western society in the early modern era. The contempt for labor that characterized the medieval attitude was gradually replaced by a new spirit whose roots go back to at least the twelfth century and which accompanied the rise in economic im portance of the skilled craftsman and mechanic in a modernizing economy. The new importance of the artisan-mechanic to the economy forced a reconsideration of the proper relationship between the artisan and the scientist. The association of knowledge with its applications-its utility-was interwoven with a growing self-conception that the produc tions of the craftsman and the mechanic made possible a grasp of regular ities and order in nature hitherto not even so conceptualized. Advances in techniques and in the material conditions of life were accompanied by corresponding changes in the perception and conceptualization of nature and society. (1) The artisan achieved a new and elevated status of digni ty and place. He worked in close collaboration with scientists, and fre quently the distinctions between them were blurred and undefined. (2) Taking their cue from the work of the artisan and his methods, the new men of science now raised the possibility that nature could not only be understood but could be altered to meet the needs of man. In the words of Paolo Rossi: A new view of labor, of the functions of technical knowledge and of the significance of artificial processes through which nature was altered and transformed clearly makes its way into the work of artists and experimentalists of the fifteenth century and into the treatises of engineers and technicians of the sixteenth century. ... It was now argued that some of the methods employed by technicians and artisans to modify and alter nature might also be useful for acquiring a real knowledge of natural utility. Indeed, it was boldly asserted in an explicit disputation with the traditional philosophies, the newer methods might have the distinct merit of exhibiting nature in motion. (3) This close link between craftsman and scientist was exemplified in practice. Craft skills were utilized by seventeenth century scientists for the
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