SOURCE: "God and the Calling of the New Philosophy," in A Portrait of Isaac Newton, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1968, pp. 117-32.

In the following essay, Manuel examines the relationship between religion and science in seventeenth-century England, focusing on the psychological underpinnings of Newton's theology.

The World was made to be inhabited by Beasts but studied and contemplated by Man: 'tis the Debt of our Reason we owe unto God, and the homage we pay for not being Beasts…. The Wisdom of God receives small honour from those vulgar Heads that rudely stare about, and with a gross rusticity admire His works: those highly magnifie Him, whose judicious inquiry into His Acts, and deliberate research into His Creatures, return the duty of a devout and learned admiration.

Thomas Browne, Religio Medici

During the three decades of his fervid intellectual activity in Cambridge, an almost...