Newton

Sir Issac Newton (1642-1727), accepting the view that nature is composed of “particles and bodies,” express the wish that all the phenomena of nature could be explained “by the same kind of reasoning derived from mechanical principles, for I am induced by many reason to suspect that they may all depend upon certain forces by which the particles or bodies … are either mutually impelled towards one another and cohere in regular figures, or are repelled and recede from one another.” Accordingly, Newton refined the earlier formulations of the laws of motion in his great work Principia, a work which had enormous influence for generations to come. Although Newton still spoke of God as the one who created the machine of nature, it became increasingly unnecessary to refer to God when explaining the phenomena of nature. The whole drift of the new scientific method was toward a new conception of man, of nature, and the whole mechanism of human knowledge.

 As the universe was now viewed as a system of bodies in motion so now all other aspects of nature were described as bodies in motion. Man himself and human thought also were soon to be viewed in mechanical terms. If all things consist of bodies in motion, this mechanical behavior, it was thought, must be capable of mathematical description. Thus, again, observation and the use of mathematics emerged in the Renaissance as the ingredients of the new method of scientific thought. With this method, it was assumed that new knowledge could be discovered. It was the view of the Renaissance scientist that medieval thinkers had simply worked out explanatory systems for what men already knew but had provided no method for discovering new information.