21 JUN 2014 by ideonexus

 Pseudoscience Preceded Science

Do you believe then that the sciences would ever have arisen and become great if there had not beforehand been magicians, alchemists, astrologers and wizards, who thirsted and hungered after abscondite and forbidden powers?
Folksonomies: history pseudoscience
Folksonomies: history pseudoscience
  1  notes
 
18 JAN 2013 by ideonexus

 Newton Was "Last of the Magicians"

Newton provides an example of how the idea of "science" had not yet fully emerged as something separate from religion in early Enlightenment thinking. In fact, during the seventeenth century, the word "scientist" was not commonly used to describe experimenters at all; they were called natural philosophers"^^ in an extension of the Puritan idea of the study of the Book of Nature. Science had also not fully emerged as a separate concept, but was sometimes thought of as a method or style of stud...
  1  notes

There was a great deal of belief in magic in Newton's writings.

07 JUN 2012 by ideonexus

 Newton Was the Last Magi

Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians ... Isaac Newton, a posthumous child born with no father on Christmas Day, 1642, was the last wonder child to whom the Magi could do sincere and appropriate homage... Why do I call him a magician? Because he looked on the whole universe and all that is in it as a riddle, as a secret which could be read by applying pure thought to certain evidence, certain mystic clues whi...
Folksonomies: history wonder
Folksonomies: history wonder
  1  notes

Last of the Babylonians, who looked at the Universe as riddle to be solved.

25 JUL 2011 by ideonexus

 The Parable of the Alchemist

And if again he descend to the consideration of those arts which are deemed curious rather than safe, and look more closely into the works of the alchemists or the magicians, he will be in doubt perhaps whether he ought rather to laugh over them or to weep. For the alchemist nurses eternal hope and when the thing fails, lays the blame upon some error of his own; fearing either that he has not sufficiently understood the words of his art or of his authors (whereupon he turns to tradition and a...
  1  notes

Alchemists blame themselves when their experiments bare no fruit, but in the effort, they explore the natural world.