Page:The Function of Reason.pdf/54

 every other particle of matter; though at the moment of enunciation only planets and heavenly bodies had been observed to attract “particles of matter.” The verification, that two particles of matter, neither of them heavenly bodies, would attract each other, had to wait for nearly a hundred years to elapse. But there was a second meaning to Newton’s motto. It was an anti-Cartesian statement directed against the vortices. He was, quite correctly, pointing out that his law expressed a sheer fact, and was not accompanied by any explanatory considerations concerning the character or distribution of matter. The nemesis of the Newtonian physics was this barrier of materialism, constituting a block to any further advance to rationalism. The pragmatic value of Newton’s methodology at that stage of scientific history is not in question. The interesting fact is the clutch at dogmatic finality.

I need not waste time in pointing out how the finality both of the cosmological scheme and of the particular law in question has now passed into Limbo. Newton was weaving hypotheses. His hypotheses speculatively embodied the truth vaguely discerned; they embodied this truth in a definite formulation which far outran the powers of analytic intuition of his age. The formulae required limitation as to the scope of their application. This definition of scope has now been provided by recent formulae which in their turn will, in the progress of science, have their scope of application defined. Newton’s formulae were not false: they were