Time and again, when studying the history of scientific and philosophical thought in  the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries—they are, indeed, so closely  interrelated and linked together that, separated, they become ununderstandable—I  have been forced to recognize, as many others have before me, that during this  period human, or at least European, minds underwent a deep revolution which  changed the very framework and patterns of our thinking and of which modern  science and modern philosophy are, at the same time, the root and the fruit.