Reenchantment

  The book The Reenchantment of the World by Morris Berman is a classic as far as understanding how the modern materialistic-scientific culture developed.  An insightful analysis of the thinkers Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes, Galileo and Isaac Newton on the shift in how reality was perceived.   There was a shift from quality to quantity, from "why" to "how."    . M. Adams writes:  "the governing concern was to understand the world in a way that would give humans beings power to manipulate and control things and to remake the environment after their own liking..."

Berman highlights how modern science became the mental framework to see the material world.   He writes, ...we are confronted, then, with a structural totality, or historical gestalt, and that science and capitalism form such a unit."   It is important to understand the momentous shift that took place from the middle ages to the modern world.   This was the 'great transformation' to emancipate humanity from religious and natural limits.  In the process the human being became identified as a self contained individual motivated solely by economic motives.