New Philosophy—A European intellectual movement of the seventeenth century that directly led to the rise of modern science, New Philosophy owed much to Descartes' analytical, mechanistic view of the material world. The essential premise of New Philosophy is that knowledge is how something is made. The arcana naturae (secrets of nature) are to be exposed by experimenta lucifera (experiments of light), and the results of such experiments are to be validated by the reproduction of nature's effects with the help of mechanical apparatus.