Jeff Russell

Thank you for the quote! One thing I didn't go into in the post, but was on my mind, is that Spengler seems to back-project a modernist atheism/agnosticism onto Newton that was, of course, totally false. I don't think Newton's interest in alchemy was widely-known back then, but these days, the quote you provide makes me think he must have had something like spirit/quintessence in mind as the likely agent.

Also, yes, thank you - I should have made more clear that modern professional scientists thoroughly known that Newtonian physics are only a model, and scientifically literate folks know that at least intellectually. When Spengler was writing, though, Special Relativity was still pretty new, and General Relativity was published between Volume 1 and 2, so those ideas were on the very bleeding edge of physics, so for him to recognize that at the time was pretty remarkable. Also, I think a perhaps more important point is that most folks who "know" that Newtonian physics is "only a model" know this intellectually, but still intuit how the world around them works in basically Newtonian ways, and it takes concerted mental effort to do otherwise.