I use this outmoded expression because the term ‘Science’, which has come to replace it in more recent times, does not carry the same rich and universal associations which ‘Natural Philosophy’ carried in the seventeenth century, in the days when Kepler wrote his Harmony of the World and Galileo his Message from the Stars. Those men who created the upheaval which we now call the ‘Scientific Revolution’ called it by a quite different name: the ‘New Philosophy’. The revolution in technology which their discoveries triggered off was an unexpected by-product; their aim was not the conquest of
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