I am posting selections from Book 3 of the Herasaga, along with a short introduction for each chapter. I will post one each week for the next month or so. Here is the intro to Chapter 3.
A key feature of the eighteenth-century French Enlightenment was its war against religion, which it called “superstition,” and its advocacy of the “new science” – that is, experimental science, as defined first by Francis Bacon and Galileo in the preceding century and practiced by the first modern chemists. But in his great book on “the progress of the human mind,” Condorcet added an important corollary: that the evidence-based method of science should also spread throughout social practices, leading to a more humane society. But contemporary science can no longer fulfill this role, since its concepts and methods stray far from the common-sense understanding of the world.