Copernicus
Kepler
Galileo
Newton
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Barfield makes only scattered comments about mathematics.
In History in English Words, however, he offers the following concise
account of its place in the evolution of consciousness:
If . . . there is any truth in the
belief of the old Greek philosophers and of some modern historians that
the study of mathematics has its origin in the observed movements of the
stars . . . [is] it too fanciful to picture to ourselves how, drawn into
the minds of a few men, the relative positions and movements of the stars
gradually developed a more independent life there until, with the rise
in Europe first of trigonometry and then of algebra, they detached themselves
from the outside world altogether. And then by a few great men like Copernicus,
Kepler, Galileo,
Newton,
these abstract mathematics were refitted to the stars which had given them
birth and the result was that cosmogony of infinite spaces and a tiny earth
in which our imaginations roam today? When the Aryan
imagination had succeeded in so detaching its "ideas" about the phenomena
of the universe that these could be "played with," as mathematicians say,
in the form of an equation, then, no doubt, it was a fairly easy matter
to turn them inside out. (142-43)
See in particular "Experiment" (HEW
139-55), "Ideas, Methods, Laws" (WCT 115-30). |
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