Very few of us can now place ourselves in the mental condition in which even such philosophers as the great Descartes were involved in the days before Newton had announced the true laws of the motion of bodies.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the profound impact of Newton's discoveries on human thought, contrasting past and present understanding of motion.
James Clerk Maxwell highlights how the revolutionary principles established by Newton transformed not only the science of motion but also the very way philosophers and thinkers approached the world. Before Newton's revelations, even the great philosophers like Descartes operated under a different paradigm, illustrating the extent to which scientific advancements shape our intellectual framework and understanding of reality.
In practice
Using this quote in a lecture on the history of science to illustrate the shift in thinking brought about by Newton's laws.
Science appears to us with a very different aspect after we have found out that it is not in lecture rooms only, and by means of the electric light projected on a screen, that we may witness physical phenomena, but that we may find illustrations of the highest doctrines of science in games and gymnastics, in travelling by land and by water, in storms of the air and of the sea, and wherever there is matter in motion.
... that, in a few years, all great physical constants will have been approximately estimated, and that the only occupation which will be left to men of science will be to carry these measurements to another place of decimals.
What's the go of that? What's the particular go of that?
I have also a paper afloat, with an electromagnetic theory of light, which, till I am convinced to the contrary, I hold to be great guns.
If we betake ourselves to the statistical method, we do so confessing that we are unable to follow the details of each individual case, and expecting that the effects of widespread causes, though very different in each individual, will produce an average result on the whole nation, from a study of which we may estimate the character and propensities of an imaginary being called the Mean Man.
The student who uses home made apparatus, which is always going wrong, often learns more than one who has the use of carefully adjusted instruments, to which he is apt to trust and which he dares not take to pieces.
The Bat that flits at close of Eve_x000D_ _x000D_ Has left the Brain that won't believe._x000D_ _x000D_ The Owl that calls upon the Night_x000D_ _x000D_ Speaks the Unbeliever's fright.
If the other fellow can't tell you his story, you can never be sure he isn't trying to kill you.
Paracelsus At times I almost dream I too have spent a life the sages’ way, And tread once more familiar paths. Perchance I perished in an arrogant self-reliance Ages ago; and in that act a prayer For one more chance went up so earnest, so Instinct with better light let in by death, That life was blotted out — not so completely But scattered wrecks enough of it remain, Dim memories, as now, when once more seems The goal in sight again.
Smack in the centre of contradiction is the place to be.
It is impossible, in principle, to explain any pattern by invoking a single quantity.
Of the past 3,400 years, humans have been entirely at peace for 268 of them, or just 8 percent of recorded history.
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