Edgar Zilsel claims that science only emerged when capitalism emerged in Western society because "The whole process was imbedded in the advance of early capitalistic society, which weakened collective-mindedness, magical thinking, and belief in authority and which furthered causal rational and quantitative thinking."
These were the academically trained rational thinkers who were always members of the upper classes and what Zilsel calls "superior craftsmen".
Zilsel supports his argument with a case study of William Gilbert who, in 1600 and five years before Francis Bacon's The Advancement of Learning, published the first printed book (on magnetism) written by an academically trained scholar based almost entirely on actual observation and experiment.
Zilsel details the way in which Gilbert drew on the work of Robert Norman, a navigator and compass maker.
Zilsel also claims that the Renaissance artist-engineers and their like used "quantitative rules of thumb [that are] the forerunners of the physical laws of modern science".