There are three creative ideas which, each in its turn, have been central to science. They are the idea of order, the idea of causes, and the idea of… - Jacob Bronowski

Newton was born during Cromwell’s revolution in the troubled 1640s; he was eighteen at the Restoration in 1660; and he published the Principia during the intrigues which ended by bringing William of Orange to England in the revolution of 1688. These are the moments when the powerful or the forceful character feels the ferment of the times, when his thoughts quicken and when he can inject into the uncertainties of others the creative ideas which will strengthen them with purpose. At such a moment the man who can direct others, in thought or in action, can remake the world.

About 1660 therefore, Europe was in the course of a great revolution in thought. This was the Scientific Revolution, and it reached into all forms of culture. We sometimes speak as if science has step by step squeezed other interests out of our culture, and is slowly strangling the traditional ways of thinking. Nothing of the kind. The Scientific Revolution in the seventeenth century was a universal revolution. Indeed it could not have begun unless there had already been a deep change in the attitude to everything natural and super-natural among thoughtful men.

In Whitehead’s view, the Middle Ages were quite as logical in their speculations about nature as we are. It is not as rationalists that we have the advantage of them; our material successes stem from joining to their logic a ruthless appeal, at each bold deductive step, back to the hard empirical facts.