Sir Isaac Newton, when he saw the apple fall and deduced the law of gravitation, did not intend to precipitate another Fall of Man. He seems to have been quite unmindful of the evil reputation of the fruit in question. Nor would much harm have been done had not his discovery been one of those rare scientific ventures which are “good theatre.” Everybody has seen apples fall. Nobody can ignore gravity. The law was the best newspaper story of a scientific sort since Copernicus and Galileo dislodged the earth from the center of the universal stage. It gave Newton such prestige that his slightest word became Gospel. Much of this prestige was deserved. His laws were, and still are, mighty monuments of human genius. The trouble came from the implications that were drawn from them. The mechanistic hypothesis had long been in existence--no fruit of science, but both root and branch of an old mechanistic philosophy. Descartes had brought it up to date. So Newton adopted it in preference to any other philosophy. And his worship of that Idol of the Tribe, the economy of hypotheses, led him to arrange his laws so as to cause as little disturbance to Cartesianism as possible. The result was a world in which the Conservation of Energy was the only real God. Neither energy nor matter could be created or destroyed. Whatever went into anything, that or its equivalent came out. A “free” creature gives out more energy than it receives. Therefore to believe in freedom was to be crazy. Moreover, the “laws” did account very well for most of the known physical phenomena of the day. There were then no Becquerel rays, X-rays, actinium, radium, protons, electrons, quanta or ultramicroscopy to be dealt with. Accurate observation was in its infancy. Materialism was in the very air. Had not science won its first triumphs by looking at matter and ignoring everything else? Newton lived some two hundred years ago. His “closed system” of a universe in which all creative activity had ceased, though it gave us a life without a future, a life wherein everything had already as good as happened, a life that was really a moving death with its future behind it--this all fitted amazingly well with the static ideas of the age. It was a Calvin’s universe, unlit by the fires even of fanaticism. Prayer was futile. Initiative an illusion. Heaven and hell either non-existent or foredoomed. We were here but to turn the pages of a book printed long before we were born.