I just looked up the relevant passage in Human Accomplishment. Bear in

mind that Murray is a statistician, and the following remarks come after a

big bookful of data, analysis, charts, and graphs. (To be exact, they come

on pages 434-5 of the hardback edition.)

“If the question is how much art and science has been produced relative to

the people who had a chance to produce it, the West has been on a downward

slide since the end of the Renaissance… It may seem absurd to argue that

science and technology declined in any sense during any part of 19C or 20C.

Those two centuries saw more progress in the well-being of mankind, by

orders of magnitude, than any other two… [Paraphrasing some arguments of

Gunther Stentand John Horgan. No one would argue that anatomy or

geography were subjects without limits, for example. But anatomy and

geography differed from disciplines such as physics or chemistry only in

their expanse, not in their ultimate bounded-ness. Everything there is to

know about chemical reactions, for example, can be known. Once known, that

field will be as closed to new discoveries as anatomy is now…”

Actually, Murray’s science & technology graphs suggest a peak around the

1830s or 1840s, with a long slow decline thereafter. The graph for “Western

Literature” shows a similar profile. “Western visual arts” has been pretty

much a flat trace since the 1600s, which agrees with my own vague and

uneducated impressions.