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 century was well advanced before this reaction became one of the dominating facts. Of course, scientific instruments were invented — the telescope, the microscope, and the thermometer, for instance. Also some slight reactions on technical procedure can be traced. But the instruments were used mainly for scientific purposes, and technical improvements were initiated from hints gathered from all kinds of chances, scientific knowledge among others. There was nothing systematic and dominating in the interplay between science and technical procedure. The one great exception was the foundation of the Greenwich Observatory for the improvement of navigation.

The antagonism between science and metaphysics has, like all family quarrels, been disastrous. It was provoked by the obscurantism of the metaphysicians in the later Middle Ages. Of course, there were many exceptions. For example, the famous Cardinal, Nicholas of Cusa, illustrated the fact that quite a different turn might have been given the history of European thought. But the understanding of the proper functions of speculative thought was hampered by the fallacy of dogmatism. It was conceived that metaphysical thought started from principles which were individually clear, distinct, and certain. The result was that the tentative methods of science seemed quite at variance with dogmatic habits of metaphysicians. Also science itself was not quite so certain of its tentative procedure. The triumph of the Newtonian physics