The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe

by Arthur Koestler

Kepler, Descartes, Barrow, Leibniz, Gilbert, Boyle, and Newton himself, the generation of pioneers contemporary with and succeeding Galileo, were all deeply and genuinely religious thinkers. But their image of the godhead had undergone a subtle and gradual change. It had been freed from its rigid scholastic frame, it had receded beyond the dualism of Plato to the mystic, Pythagorean inspiration of God the chief mathematician. The pioneers of the new cosmology, from Kepler to Newton and beyond, based their search into nature on the mystic conviction that there must exist laws behind the confusing phenomena; that the world was a completely rational, ordered, harmonic creation. In the words of a modern historian, the aspiration to demonstrate that the universe ran like a piece of clock-work … was itself initially a religious aspiration. It was felt that there would be something defective in Creation itself – something not quite worthy of God – unless the whole system of the universe could be shown to be interlocking, so that it carried the pattern of reasonableness and orderliness.