The Recipient of Thought

The history of science reveals that scientific knowledge and method did not spring from a fully-bloomed blossom for which the minds of the ancient Greeks did any more than language and culture emerged fully formed in the minds of The Homo sapiens sapient. Scientific knowledge is an extension of ordinary language into greater levels of abstraction and precision through reliance upon geometric and numerical relationships. We speculate that the seeds of the scientific imagination were planted in ancient Greece, as opposed to Chinese or Babylonian culture, partly because the social, political, and an economic climate in Greece was more open to the pursuit of knowledge with marginal cultural utility. Another important factor was that the special character of Homeric religion allowed the Greeks to invent a conceptual framework that would prove useful in future scientific investigation.