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.
Not, not mine: it's somebody else's wound; I could never have borne it. So take the thing that happened, hide it, stick it in the ground; whisk the lamps away.
Every area of trouble gives out a ray of hope; and the one unchangeable certainty is that nothing is certain or unchangeable.
But the problem is to make the soul into a monster
I believe in nothing here, except a handful of people, a few ideas, and the fact that one cannot arrest movement.
Make tawba not just for sins you've committed, but also for obligations you haven't fulfilled.
How blessed and amazing are God's gifts, dear friends! Life with immortality, splendor with righteous, truth with confidence, faith with assurance, self-control with holiness! And all these things are within our comprehension.
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