By the time of Newton’s death, the educated European outlook on the natural world had changed beyond all recognition from what it had been in 1500. The new ideology of natural knowledge was now one firmly, though not exclusively, associated with practical, operational capabilities. The greatest physico-mathematicians of the later seventeenth century, Huygens and Newton, both took an active interest in practical, non-contemplative matters. . . .

The major development of the two centuries . . . was, therefore, the rise to a position of prominence of a "natural philosophy" that was directed towards control of the world. European knowledge in 1500, as it existed in formal, official settings such as universities, placed a premium on abstract, contemplative understanding. This is not to say that there were no social implications of such a focus, but it is to say that those implications were mediated through such institutions (especially the Church) whose power did not noticeably involve ambitions to increase the means of control over the natural world itself. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, however, European nations began to spread their power to other parts of the world to an extent unprecedented in history. Consequently, valuations of knowledge began very gradually to shift towards those kinds of knowledge that could bring the world beyond Europe back home (as with geography and natural history), or that would enable a more effective reaching out to other parts of the world with the intention of material and cultural domination (as with such sciences as navigation or mechanics--or even with Matteo Ricci’s use of mathematics to impress the Chinese court). The rise of a Baconian rhetoric of utility during the seventeenth century, associated with the welfare of the state, mirrored closely these large-scale changes in European life. . . .

Concomitantly, while the sixteenth century had witnessed a form of intellectual endeavor that was dominated by humanism, and by the explicit aim of recovering the civilization of classical antiquity, the seventeenth century saw the appearance of a new ambition, exemplified by Descartes and Bacon, to forge ahead with professedly novel intellectual programmes. The sanction of antiquity remained an important rhetorical resource for many, but it now competed with claims of novelty that often justified approaches to nature by talk of "method" instead of talk about classical precedent. The evidence that such methods were efficacious was argued to reside in the practical achievements that the method supposedly enabled, whether it was Bacon’s inductive method leading to "works," or Descartes’s method leading to improved optical lenses (as in his essay "Dioptrics") or, as Descartes also hoped, to lengthen human lives.

All the same, the category of endeavour known as "natural philosophy" retained certain fundamental features right through all the changes that occurred during this period. From beginning to end, natural philosophy involved God, whether Thomas Aquinas’s medieval God of an Aristotelian universe or the God of the Newtonians, free to do whatever He wanted and continually, providentially aware of everything in the universe due to His omnipresence throughout all of (absolute) space--what Newton called God’s "universal sensorium." Natural philosophy bred very few genuine atheists in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, although matters changed in the eighteenth.