Edwin Arthur Burtt on Isaac Newton

“A student of the history of physical science will assign to Newton a further importance which the average man can hardly appreciate. ...the separation ...of positive scientific inquiries from questions of ultimate causation.”

“The history of mathematics and mechanics for a hundred years subsequent to Newton appears primarily as a period devoted to the assimilation of his work and the application of his laws to more varied types of phenomena. So far as objects were masses, moving in space and time under the impress of forces as he had defined them, their behaviour was now, as a result of his labours, fully explicable in terms of exact mathematics.”