decreed a mechanism that worked automatically without further
interference. No wonder that the social philosophies that endeav-
ored to extend scientific methods to human affairs pointed to a
similar autonomous order as the highest wisdom for conducting
the life of man. Thus the Newtonian philosophy of nature was
made into what a later jargon calls "the ideology of the bourgeois
revolution."

This was the second time that Western society had turned to
a secular and scientific body of ideas to consecrate its highest
values and ground them in the nature of things--the first such
episode in modern times. In the thirteenth century it had found
in Aristotelian thought an admirable instrument for organizing its
entire culture in the service of its traditional religious ideals. now
Newtonian concepts proved equally available for giving force and
direction to aims that, if no less religious, were new and secular.
Here was a new harmony of knowledge and aspiration, a new
heavenly city buttressed by anew scientific truth.

It is valid question whether the Aristotelian science that made
central the understanding of life in general and of man's life in
particular did not provide a more adequate human wisdom for the
human animal than Newtonian mechanics, or indeed whether the
Platonic science of the Hellenistic world did not do better than
either in furnishing a spiritual wisdom for the spirit of man. But
Newton himself, as well as those who went on eagerly to construct
a new social wisdom on the basis of his philosophy of nature, and
even those who attacked him and them because they preferred the
older wisdom, would all alike have been amazed at the more recent
contention that natural science has nothing to do with "values,"
that it can and should itself remain "value-free," and that those
seeking a direction for human life have nothing to learn from our
best knowledge of the nature of things, Newton would certainly
have rejoiced that "Newtonian thought" signifies not only a neces-
sary stage in the development of mathematical physics but also
a gleaming pinnacle in the moral and religious life of Western
culture. Newton's mechanics is no doubt a fragile reed on which
to build a viable science of man and society. But who, amidst the
voluntarisms and irrationalisms of nineteenth century and

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