Had Kepler not succeeded in getting hold of Tycho’s treasure, he could never have discovered his planetary laws. Now Newton was born only twelve years after Kepler’s death, and without the planetary laws he could not have arrived at his synthesis. No doubt somebody else would have done so, but it is at least possible that the scientific revolution would have carried different metaphysical undertones if it had been fathered not by an English empiricist, but, say, a Frenchman with Thomist inclinations, or a German mystic.
