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proclamation “Cogito Ergo Sum,” offered in his Discourse On
Method of 1637, standing as its cornerstone. Because of
his methodological skepticism, what would become known as
“Cartesian doubt,” he contended that that thusly accrued
rational knowledge was not simply unbreakable, but that it
was a universal “truth,” in accord, through Reason, with
the very laws of nature, “an intricate impersonal machine
directly ordered by mathematical law” (Tarnas 267). While
Descartes attempted to lay bare those “laws” – and thus the
“Truth” behind them – with his philosophical investigations
in the realms of physics and astronomy, it would ultimately
fall to Newton in England to elucidate those “laws” of
nature and the universe and enlighten humanity with them.
Possibly the most notable of these was that of gravity, “a
universal force […] that could simultaneously cause both
the fall of stones to the Earth and the closed orbits of
the planets around the Sun” (269), all from an apple
falling from a tree, or so the story goes. Of the
significance of Newton’s appearance to the scientific
world, Tarnas writes:
With an exemplary combination of empirical and
deductive rigor, Newton had formulated a very
few overarching laws that appeared to govern
the entire cosmos. Through his three laws of
motion […] and the theory of universal
gravitation, he not only established a physical
basis for all of Kepler’s laws, but was also
able to derive the movements of tides, the
precession of the equinoxes, the orbits of
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