Summary: Having established that society and the human mind follow the same divergent p

The reverence of modern man for rationalism, logic and empiricism has an impressive tradition, one that includes Plato and St. Augustine. Using logic, nothing seemed impossible in the time of the medieval Scholastics. Thomas Aquinas' Summa Contra Gentiles (1259) was considered to have countered all opposing criticisms of the church. The analytical logic of Aristotle, the syllogism and deductive reasoning, served in the Middle Ages as essential tools for the dominance of religion. Though religion was was supplanted by science, or "natural philosophy", the logical methods of both were closely related.

It is hardly surprising that in the hands of empiricists like Galileo, Francis Bacon, and Isaac Newton, these tools were sharpened and used for dethroning spirituality as the purpose of life. Where rational discourse had for so long been the servant of academics, aristocrats and priests, in the scientific revolution it became the master. Not only was there a revolution against spirituality, there was a parting of the ways, and religion had little subsequent influence on the rise of science.

The gulf between expectations and realities has been the subject of fascinating discussion in the modern corporate sector. Danny Miller's The Icarus Paradox, describes how business executives fly too high, fail to heed warnings to restrain their ambitions, and come crashing down. One example he gives is the decline, in the 1970s, of Control Data Corporation. This company succeeded in building faster computers than their larger competitors such as IBM, but overspecialization in computing speed led to weak overall performance. In situations such as these, senior executives frequently ignore advice to exercise caution. Miller recounts similar problems at Wang, Polaroid, ITT and others. Some, like Federal Express, staved off disaster by means of flexibility.

The natural philosophers of the late middle ages would not have turned the tables on th

John Duns Scotus was a Franciscan monk who taught philosophy and theology at Oxford, Cambridge and Paris, in the thirteenth century. The times were dominated by the medieval Church, an institution that would be undermined by its own success. Its leading academic division was made up of Scholastics, led by men like Scotus. His followers, dubbed Scotists, and their intense intellectual rigor defined the Age of Faith, relying on classical logic in their mission to enshrine spiritual belief as fact.

Time marched on however, and their methods were challenged by the logical empiricism of Renaissance inquiry—the early scientific method. Not to be outdone, the Scotists refused to concede that times were changing and campaigned vigorously against the new insistence on observation and experiment. After all, they had dominated religion, and thereby society, by harnessing the techniques of logic to those of religious belief. When their rational tools were recycled for use in investigating the physical world, the Scotists failed to adapt, and the authority of Scholasticism faded.