The author... has known for that for several centuries freethinkers have led mankind. Only recently... new to him though perhaps long understood by o… - Lancelot Law Whyte

The capitalist and the quantitative scientist were working out the final consequences of the tendencies that had begun with Plato and Archimedes, borne fruit in Kepler and Galileo, and were reaching their culmination in Carnegie, Ford, and Zaharoff, and – as we shall see – in Heisenberg. Yes, it would be unfair, and perhaps libelous, to accuse recent leaders of the West of a mature consciousness of their own historical significance. (p. 150)

Faced by the dire nihilism of our time, we need a greater honesty... The Western search for unifying truth did not come to an end with Christianity, any more than with the physical theories of forty years ago.

Three centuries of increasingly intense application of the quantitative method had exhausted its guarantee of the progressive improvement of thought, because the regions where the method is adequate have already been explored. [...] It is scarcely possible to avoid the conclusion that a new method is now necessary to supplement the method of quantitative analysis. (p. 180)