Hindu Achievements in Exact Science: A Study in the History of Scientific Development c6.25

c6.25

Neither the laws of motion and gravitation (of the latter half of the seventeenth century), nor the birth of the sciences of modern chemistry and electricity during the latter half of the eighteenth could or did produce the superiority in any significant sense. There was hardly any difference⁴⁸ between Europe and Asia at the time of the French Revolution (1789). The real and only cause of the parting of ways between the East and the West, nay, between the mediæval and the modern, was the discovery of steam, or rather its application to production and transportation. The steam engine effected an industrial revolution during the first three decades of the nineteenth century. It is this revolution which has ushered in the "modernism" of the modern world in social institutions, science, and philosophy,³⁰ as well as brought about the supremacy of Eur-America over Asia.