According to a renowned French scholar, the growth in the size and complexity of human populations was the driving force in the evolution of science. Early, small communities had to concentrate all their physical and mental effort on survival; their thoughts were focused on food and religion. As communities became larger, some people had time to reflect and debate. They found that they could understand and predict events better if they reduced passion and prejudice, replacing these with observation and inference. But while a large population may have been necessary, in itself it was not sufficient for science to germinate. Some empires were big, but the rigid social control required to hold an empire together was not beneficial to science, just as it was not beneficial to reason. The early nurturing and later flowering of science ______________________ to support original thought and freewheeling incentive. The rise in commerce and the decline of authoritarian religion allowed science to follow reason in seventeenth-century Europe. [3점]

* germinate: 싹트다, 발아하다