plating a new way of perceiving the natural world--a way that would
enable them to understand and control the outside world ( Fosnot 1988, 2;
Kincheloe, Steinberg, and Tippins 1992; Leshan and Margenau 1982,
30-31).

With the coming of the Scientific Revolution, or the Age of Reason, in
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, nature was to be controlled,
"bound into service and made a slave" ( Capra 1982, 56). The basis of this
control was founded on the epistemological separation of knower and
known. This bifurcation legitimates the assumption that the human per-
ceiver occupies no space in the known cosmos; existing outside of history,
the knower knows the world objectively. Thus, knowers are untainted by
the world of opinions, perspectives, or values. Operating objectively
(without bias), the knower sets out on the neutral mission of science--the
application of abstract reasoning to the understanding of the natural
environment. Reason told the pioneers of science that complex phenomena
of the world can be best understood by reducing them to their constituent
parts and then piecing these elements back together according to laws of
cause-effect ( Kincheloe 1991, 27; Mahoney and Lyddon 1988, 192).

All of this took place within René Decartes' separation of mind and
matter, his "cognito, ergo sum." This view led to a conception of the world
as a mechanical system divided into two distinct realms: (1) an internal
world of sensation; and (2) an objective world composed of natural
phenomena. Building on the Cartesian dualism, scientists argued that laws
of physical and social systems could be uncovered objectively by research-
ers operating in isolation from human perception with no connection to
the act of perceiving. The internal world of mind and the physical world,
Decartes theorized, were forever separate and one could never be shown
to be a form of the other ( Lavine 1984, 125; Lowe 1982, 163; Kincheloe
1991, 27). We understand now, but could not have understood then, that
this division of mind and matter had profound and unfortunate conse-
quences. The culture's ability to address problems like the Plague undoubt-
edly improved, as our power to control the "outside" world advanced. At
the same time, however, Western society accomplished very little in the
attempt to comprehend our own consciousness, our "inner experience"
( Leshan and Margenau 1982, 31).

Sir Isaac Newton extended Decartes's theories with his description of
space and time as absolute regardless of context. Clarifying the concept
of cause and effect, Newton established modernism's tenet that the future
of any aspect of a system could be predicted with absolute certainty if its
condition was understood in precise detail and the appropriate tools of
measurement were employed. Thus, the Cartesian-Newtonian concept of

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