Scientific thought at the Time
- Science during the impressionism movement thought art did not necessarily need to look realistic; and so this made artists recognize that what the eye perceived and what the brain understood were two different things.
- Artists as the time wanted to capture the details that showed or effected the lights in their canvases.
- They believed scientific reasoning was replacing faith and that the natural world was rational, mechanical, and dependable; that it operated according to mathematically-formulated scientific laws; that these laws could be discovered by using reason and the scientific method; that there was a one-to-one correspondence between the scientific description of reality and the world of nature, and that knowledge of an intricately designed nature demonstrated the existence of God. With regard to particular scientific knowledge, they believed that time, space, and matter were objective realities with an existence independent of man. Between 1871 and 1914, these assumptions were challenged, and many scientists had concluded that mechanistic models, and ideas of absolute time and space do not describe reality but are symbolic models of reality.