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 grew gradually into a boundlessly curious and largely rigorous exploration not only of nature but also of the nature of nature. Tremendous advances in mathematics and most especially in mechanics, combined with the explosion into open conflict of the swelling struggle between science and religion over the authority to define the nature of nature, triggered a revolution in science. Science became material science, the science of things and of the mechanical, mathematically bound universe in which they were purported to 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 superstition 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, conceive of science in its modern form, which is to say as material science. In other modern lands material science may certainly have a foothold in the universities and especially among those working in mathematics and mechanics. Its methods are very conceivably gaining ground in biology and in alchemy, threatening the division of the latter into alchemy and chemistry. There is likewise also the potential for a split within psychology. The burgeoning science of economy would certainly see much that is admirable in the new science and at least some historians and linguists may be beginning to wonder about its applicability to their disciplines. Those in arcane studies would 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 research and endeavour. New science would be universally abhored by those in theological studies and by the religions as a false god. Outside of the most modern domains, however, science in any form would have but a tenuous hold on the popular imagination, with modern science being the least understood of all.