the stage properties...................

     The world of medieval thought was deeply centered upon itself and the traditional myths of Christianity.  In spite of sectarian clashes, Christians of the prescientific era saw the earth essentially as  the platform of a divine, but short-lived drama - a drama so brief that there was little reason to study the stage properties.  The full interest centered upon man - his supernatural origins, the drama of his Fall from the deathless Garden, the coming of his Redeemer, and the day of his Judgment.

     Outside space was the Empyrean realm beyond time and blemish.  Inside were corruption and a falling away from grace which were the consequence of man's sin.  The atmosphere was not one to encourage scientific exploration.  Men were busied about their souls, not about far voyages either in space or in time.  They were contented with the European scene;  they were devout and centered inward.  It was indeed a centripetally directed society on an earth which itself lay at the center of the universe.  Sinful though man had proved to be, he was of enormous importance to himself.  The eye of God was constantly and undividedly upon him.  The Devil, passing to and from upon Earth, contended for his soul.  If  man was not in all ways comfortable, he was at least valuable to divinities, and good and evil strove for the possession of his immortal being.

     Then someone found a shell embedded in rock on a mountaintop; someone saw the birth of a new star in the inviolable Empyrean heavens, someone watched a little patch of soil carried by a stream into the valley.  Another saw a forest buried under ancient clays and wondered.  Some heretical idler observed a fish in stone.  All these things had doubtless been seen many times before, but human interests were changing.  The great voyages that were to open up the physical world had begun.  The first telescope had been trained upon a star.  The first crude microscope was turned upon a drop of ditch water.  Because of these small buried events, a world would eventually die, only to be replaced by another - the world in which we now exist.

-Loren Eiseley, as extracted from The Firmament Of Time