If Aristotle had surveyed the intellectual battlefields of the 1600s, he would surely have exclaimed, “Not again!” The atomists and other materialists, vanquished in fourth-century Athens, had returned and must be fought once more. It was just as Bacon said: the same arguments, going round in circles forever. And so it might have continued, had not something new appeared to break the cycle and to direct the investigation of nature onto a wholly new trajectory, along which profound disagreements about explanatory standards would become quite unknown.
