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This quiz consists of 5 multiple choice and 5 short answer questions through Chapter 2, Mathematics and the Exact Sciences.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. Who was France's greatest hero of the Enlightenment partly because he was from England, the source of free thought and liberty and partly because he had solved the riddle of the planets, showing that their motions obeyed the same laws as motions on earth?
(a) Newton.
(b) Swift.
(c) Boyle.
(d) Fontenelle.

2. In the early years of the Enlightenment, the strongest support on the Continent for Newton's philosophy came from ________.
(a) Germany.
(b) Italy.
(c) America.
(d) Holland.

3. What was the name of the philosopher who was the leading scientific experimenter in seventeenth-century England, who had agreed that he had never seen any "inanimate production of nature, or of chance, whose contrivance was comparable to that of the meanest limb of the despicabilist animal"?
(a) Robert Boyle.
(b) Swift.
(c) Galileo.
(d) Locke.

4. In the preface to his "Histoire" of the Paris Academy of Science, who argued in 1699 that the new "geometric spirit" could also improve works on politics, morals, literary criticism, and even public speaking?
(a) Leibniz.
(b) Newton.
(c) Fontenelle.
(d) Varignon.

5. In Chapter 2, what was the name of the shape of a chain suspended between two fixed points?
(a) Tractrix.
(b) Involute.
(c) Isoperimeters.
(d) Catenary.

Short Answer Questions

1. What was the name of the philosopher who could enthusiastically claim that "the works of Nature everywhere sufficiently evidence a Diety"?

2. According to Chapter 1, the noble Houyhnhnm in Jonathan Swift's ________ "thought Nature and Reason were sufficient guides for a reasonable animal, as we pretended to be, in showing us what we ought to do, and what to avoid."

3. The narrator reveals that vis viva was a measure of ________ to conserve his creation while "action" was a measure of his efficiency.

4. In a letter of September 21, 1781, who wrote to his mentor Jean d'Alembert that he feared mathematics had reached its limit?

5. According to the narrator in Chapter 1, what was the key to a correct method whose model was mathematics?

(see the answer key)

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