The Scientific Revolution has often been presented as the moment of invention of a Western naturalism. In the words of Francis Bacon at the dawn of the 17th century, it was a "history of nature constrained and vexed", opposed to "nature unbound and free". The naturalism that emerged from the vast movement to refound scientific knowledge in the modern era was thus described in terms of a practice of objectification, of separating nature from artifice, of setting in order, controlling and mastering a nature deemed dangerous, through the tireless work of classification, categorization and engineering. To the theory of social orders, naturalists would have responded by putting nature in order, by defending its unity. Bachelard's 1938 thesis was entirely contained in these two formulas: "the scientific spirit must be formed against Nature" and "the scientific spirit must be formed by reforming itself". As early as 1948, however, Lucien Febvre proposed a different approach. He responded to Alexandre Koyré's criticism of his Rabelais by emphasizing the importance of these counter-cultures of science, and urged historians of science to make their narratives more complex.
Research into the history of science over the last thirty years has moved in this direction, shifting the framework of analysis by recontextualizing naturalist practices in the 17th and 18th centuries. They have done so by showing that it was undoubtedly necessary both to pluralize the naturalist cultures of the Moderns, by pointing out the tensions between different conceptions of nature (beyond the classic oppositions between plenism and atomism, mechanism and vitalism, etc.), and by demonstrating the effects of new instrumentation and intellectual techniques that equipped this "scientific revolution" - the microscope and automata opened up new reflections on the principles of the living. This research has led to a reassessment of empirical knowledge (observation, description, collection), as well as a better understanding of the devices used alongside measurement and quantification to produce the regularities of nature. They have also shown the insistence, if not the obsession, with the visible and visual representations to record, compare and objectify, and recall the still-vibrant importance of aesthetic issues in the classification process.
