Another obstacle to the acceptance of Newton’s work was the old false opposition between mathematics and physics that we have seen in a comment of Geminus of Rhodes quoted in Chapter 8. Newton did not speak the Aristotelian language of substances and qualities, and he did not try to explain the cause of gravitation. The priest Nicolas de Malebranche (1638–1715) in reviewing the Principia said that it was the work of a geometer, not of a physicist. Malebranche clearly was thinking of physics in the mode of Aristotle. What he did not realize is that Newton’s example had revised the definition of
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