in no way "natural".................

For over a thousand years, Western man's approach to understanding the natural world could be summed up by two words:  Don't try.  This faulty, self-contained, self-satisfied system brooked no serious dissent, as Bruno and Galileo discovered.  The Aristotelian cosmos certainly did not stimulate inquiry.  Nor did it allow creative thought or real advance in our knowledge of the world, nor, ultimately, real improvement in the lot of the average human being.  The great medieval historian Johan Huizinga wrote, "The idea of a purposed and continual reform and improvement of society did not exist.  Institutions in general are considered as good or as bad as they can be; having been ordained by God, they are intrinsically good, only the sins of men pervert them. . . ."
     It did not much bother the average sixteenth-century European that no real social, intellectual, or scientific advance had occurred for a thousand years;  the human condition was universally assumed to be static.  Bacon's staggering genius lay in realizing three thing:  1) that there actually was a problem, that the state of medieval man was in no way "natural";  2) that the deductive system was at fault; and 3) that knowledge of the natural world could be continuously improved, and with it the welfare of mankind.  Improving the lot of mankind could necessitate replacing the old Aristotelian framework with an "inductive" system in which facts would first be gathered without preconception, then analyzed.

-William J. Bernstein,  The Birth of Plenty:  How The Prosperity Of The Modern World Was Created