Late in the seventeenth century, the philosophically unified machinery of inquiry in which the wheels and cogs rotate as one was spiked. Newton was the saboteur, and thus he was the chief architect of modern science’s first great innovation. Rather than deep philosophical understanding, Newton pursued shallow explanatory power, that is, the ability to derive correct descriptions of phenomena from a theory’s causal principles, regardless of their ultimate nature and indeed regardless of their very intelligibility.
