ABSTRACT
It has been often remarked that history is made rapidly when the great man and his opportunity appear simultaneously. In the case of Newton there is no question about the reality and importance of precisely such a coincidence. That the subsequent history for nearly a hundred years of mathematics, mechanics, and astronomy (in considerable part, too, of optics) presented itself primarily as a period of the fuller appreciation and further application of Newton’s achievements, and this a century studded with stars of the first magnitude in each of these fields, can hardly be accounted for otherwise than by supposing that the field had been ripe for a mighty genius and the genius at hand to reap the harvest. Newton himself on one occasion remarked, “If I have seen farther [than other men], it is because I have stood upon the shoulders of giants.” It is indeed true that his forerunners, especially men like Galileo, Descartes, and Boyle, were giants—they had prepared the way for the most stupendous single achievement of the human mind—-but that Newton saw farther was, of course, not merely due to his place in the line. For him to invent the needed tool and by its aid to reduce the major phenomena of the whole universe of matter to a single mathematical law, involved his endowment with a degree of all the qualities essential to the scientific mind—pre-eminently the quality of mathematical imagination—that has probably never been equalled. Newton enjoys the remarkable distinction of having become an authority paralleled only by Aristotle to an age characterized through and through by rebellion against authority. However, we must not pause over these encomiums; Newton’s supremacy in modern science, the most successful movement of thought that history so far records, stands unquestioned.
