Like Kepler who hit on the concept of gravity, then kicked it away, like Galileo who rejected even the moon’s influence on the tides, Descartes’ wide-open mind boggled in horror at the idea of ghost arms clutching through the void – as unprejudiced intelligence was indeed bound to do, until ‘universal gravity’ or ‘electromagnetic field’ became verbal fetishes which hypnotized it into quiescence, disguising the fact that they are metaphysical concepts dressed in the mathematical language of physics.
