Science

Initially science was simply reflection that deemed the ascription of the unknown workings of the stuff of existence and of existence itself to the gods as lacking sufficient curiousity and rigor. It soon grew into a boundlessly curious and largely rigorous exploration of the stuff of existence and of existence itself. Tremendous advances in mathematics and especially in mechanics, plus the explosion into open conflict of the growing struggle between science and religion over the authority to define the nature of the stuff of existence and of existence itself, triggered a revolution in science. Science became material science, the science of things and of the mechanical, mathematically bound universe in which they exist. Science became the study of the great machine of existence. Philosophy, previously the ultimate form of scientific endeavour, was cast out of science as groundless speculation at best and as obscurantist superstition at worst. And it was as obscurantist superstitution that religion and the gods were dismissed and consigned to the dustbin of history.

In the Land of Mists only the people of Lamordia, and by no means every last one of them, conceives of it in its modern form, which is to say as material science. In other modern lands material science certainly has a foothold in the universities and among those working inmathematics and especially in mechanics. Its methods are gaining ground in biology and in alchemy, threatening the division of the latter into alchemy and chemistry. There is likewise a growing split within psycology. Economists see much that is admirable in the new science and at least some historians and linguists are beginning to wonder about its applicability to their disciplines. Those in arcane studies regard it, at best, as a wayward child and, at worst, as a slanderous and unconscionable attack upon the legitimacy of their own field of reseach and endeavour. It is universally abhored by those in theological studies and by the religions as a false god.