Newton's Gift

It was of the greatest consequence for succeeding thought that now the great Newton's authority was squarely behind the view if the cosmos which saw in man a puny, irrelevant spectator of the vast mathematical system whose regular motions according to mechanical principles constituted the world of nature... The world that people had thought themselves living in - a world rich with color and sound, redolent with fragrance, filled with gladness, love and beauty, speaking everywhere of purposive harmony and creative ideals - was crowded now into minute corners in the brains of scattered organics beings. The really important world outside was a world of hard, cold, colorless, silent and dead; a world of quantity, a world of mathematically computable motions in mechanical regularity.