2024-11-18T23:15:41.552484 | 🔗
“The new mechanical philosophers, striving to create a science free of occult qualities, believed in matter without magic—inanimate brute matter, as Newton often called it. The virtuosi of the Royal Society wished to remove themselves from charlatans, to build all explanations from reason and not miracles. But magic persisted. Astronomers still doubled as astrologers; Kepler and Galileo had trafficked in horoscopes.18 The magician, probing nature’s secrets, served as a template for the scientist. “Do you believe then,” Nietzsche asked two centuries later, “that the sciences would ever have arisen and become great if there had not beforehand been magicians, alchemists, astrologers and wizards, who thirsted and hungered after abscondite and forbidden powers?” Excerpt From Isaac Newton James Gleick