Our thesis now is that the Portuguese seafarers and scientists of the 15th and 16th centuries made an important contribution to the rise of modern sc… - Reijer Hooykaas

In the first chapter of Genesis it is made evident that absolutely nothing, except God, has any claim to divinity; even the sun and the moon, supreme gods of the neighbouring peoples, are set in their places between the herbs and the animals and are brought into the service of mankind.

The Portuguese had undertaken their voyages towards the southern hemisphere in spite of the science of their day... they followed an irresistible urge, which went against their scientific and religious convictions.

Perhaps there is no literature in Europe that mirrors so clearly as the Portuguese, the painful conflict in the minds of people who, on the one hand, by their humanistic education, not only knew better but also more uncritically admired, ancient learning than their medieval predecessors, and, who, on the other hand, in the same epoch, were confronted with abundant proofs of the insufficiency and fallibility of that same Antiquity.