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Descartes mechanical natural philosophy fostered a radical change in how natural philosophers gained new knowledge. The Aristotelian-medieval methodology accorded a very limited role for experiments in scientific investigation. This is because a strict distinction was made between natural and artificial things. Every natural thing behaved in accordance with its nature; acorns grow on oak trees, because that is what their nature dictates. Artificial things have an external source of change. The cogs and springs of a clock are constructed so that they no longer behave according to their respective natures (which is simply to fall towards their natural place at the center of the universe, rather than function as parts of a machine that tells time for humans). A thing cannot reveal its true nature under the artificial conditions of experimentation, because the experimental set up necessarily puts things under artificial conditions. To gain knowledge, things must be observed in their natural undisturbed state. Descartes' mechanical natural philosophy rejected the natural/artificial distinction along with its rejection of forms and teleology. Matter always obeyed the same set of mechanical laws regardless of its situation. Thus,under the mechanical natural philosophy experimentation was often a good source of knowledge about nature, and its adherents often became practitioners. [[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015)|p.181-182]]
The overthrow of challenge to the Aristotelian tradition, even in places where Cartesianism was rejected and the community maintained Aristotelianism, forced the academic community in Europe to reconsider and defend the Aristotelian mosaic in ways that had never before been encountered. Though the dialectical approach to scholarship throughout the medieval period saw scholars constantly questioning various aspects of the Aristotelian worldview, Descartes’ wholesale rejection of huge swaths of the mosaic and its central concepts were unprecedented. Theories like hylomorphism(that being is a compound of matter and form), which had been a given in the mosaic of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and had endured through multitudes of adjustments, reconciliations, and dialectic criticism, but had never before faced complete overhaul that Descartes's mechanical natural philosophy threatened. Although Descartes' theories would eventually be supplanted by those of Newton, he made the critical first steps to replacing the Aristotelian-scholastic mosaic.[[CiteRef::Hatfield (2016)]]
|Criticism=Descartes’ ideas saw widespread criticism in his time and shortly after from all manner of sources, including Scholastic vanguards, religious authorities, and other philosophers. One common early criticism was that his new views were threatening to the Catholic and Christian faith.[[CiteRef::Jolley (1992)]] In 1663, his works were placed on the Catholic Church's ''Index of Forbidden books'', and in 1671 his conception was officially banned from schools in the Catholic world. In the early modern period, theological propositions and natural philosophical propositions were not seen as belonging to separate domains, but rather formed parts of an integrated [[Scientific Mosaic|scientific mosaic]]. Aristotelian natural philosophy had been carefully adapted to render it consistent with Catholic faith. Descartes' novel natural philosophy introduced many inconsistencies that needed to be [[The Zeroth Law|reconciled]] before his theories could be [[Theory Acceptance|accepted]]. [[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015)|p. 190-196]]