ABSTRACT
This perhaps a little too playful one-liner invites a more-sustained comparison between those two modes of pursuing nature-knowledge, realist-mathematical science and the natural philosophy of kinetic corpuscularianism. Prominent in the comparison is what principally divided the two, to wit, the strangeness of the former in view of the latter, as manifest in three successive clashes between realist-mathematical science and natural philosophy of any kind. Prominent in the comparison is likewise what they held in common – the strangeness of an all-out violation of common sense and the sacrilege that, in view of many theological sensibilities at the time, was implied in both. All this together will prove to have yielded by midcentury a crisis of legitimacy of unprecedented proportions in Christian Europe.
