Over het ontstaan van de twee culturen in Negentiende-eeuws Europa

The separation between nature, as the domain of scientific laws, and culture, as the domain of human values, is potentially already present in the seventeenth century. The idea of a benevolent purpose in nature, the so-called physico-theology, for a long time helped to accommodate the findings of science to moral and aesthetic thinking. The "Darwinian revolution" destroyed the notion of a universe tailored to human needs. It brought about a large-scale revision of the relation between man and nature, and therefore had a tremendous cultural impact. As a result, however, the spheres of science and of culture have grown far apart. This also explains why Darwinism has been the last of the scientific revolutions to really change man's conception of his own place in the world.