ABSTRACT
The scientific revolution that was already passing into history had itself by no means lacked historical consciousness. While indebtedness to scholastic subtlety was scarcely ever avowed by its leaders-one finds no trace of medieval debates about the possible motion of the earth in Copernicus and no explicit allusions to medieval kinematics in Galileo-inspiration rather than authori ... tative precedent was drawn from the Greeks. Not to insist upon Copernicus's open statement of the Pythagoreans' precedence (so well known that he was not infrequently stated even by his best supporters to have 'revived' their hypothesis), or Galileo's frequent invocations of Archimedes, or Harvey's Aristotelianism, there was a still more striking recognition of the prisci theologi by Newton and his followers. In the words ofJ. T. Desaguliers, 'The System of the Universe, as taught by Pythagoras, Philolaus, and others of the Ancients, is the same, which was since reviv' d by Coperni ... cus, allow' d by all the unprejudic' d of the Moderns, and at last demonstrated by Sir Isaac Newton.'3 No one in the seventeenth century could feel quite certain that science was treading wholly new paths, rather than retreading an old course. Yet, on the other hand, though the notion of a past Golden Age must entail a subsequent decline, there was an uneasy admission that so far as techniques were concerned, the barbaric Middle Ages had seen the appearance of the ocean ... going sailing ... ship and its magnetic compass, of the windmill, of gunpowder, of paper and printing.
