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This quiz consists of 5 multiple choice and 5 short answer questions through Chapter 5, Natural History and Physiology.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. In Chapter 1, who claimed that his "principle of least action" proved the existence of God?
(a) Leibniz.
(b) Malebranche.
(c) Newton.
(d) Pierre-Louis-Moreau de Maupertuis.

2. Newton had not made it clear whether the forces acting between the planets and between the parts of matter acted at a distance or through some intervening medium called a(n) ________.
(a) Witness.
(b) Fluid.
(c) Ether.
(d) Osmosis.

3. According to Chapter 2, for Newton, ________ consisted in "making experiments and observations and in drawing general Conclusion from them by Induction."
(a) Reason.
(b) Calculus.
(c) Analysis.
(d) Religion.

4. Who was the first person to identify a new air different from common atmospheric air,, in Chapter 4?
(a) Black.
(b) Newton.
(c) Lavoisier.
(d) Cullen.

5. Chapter 2 states that ________ had been created to deal with the problem of motion and that the new mathematical techniques discovered in the eighteenth century were all responses to the challenges of mechanics.
(a) Calculus.
(b) Statistics.
(c) Arithmetic.
(d) Geometry.

Short Answer Questions

1. In Chapter 4, what is the name of the group of financiers who obtained from the French government the right to collect taxes?

2. Who came out in support of vis viva in 1722 and concluded that "what was before only a dispute of words now becomes a dispute about real things"?

3. Who called natural history the "great root and mother" of all the sciences and made it the indispensable prelude to his experimental philosophy in Chapter 5?

4. In 1819, who gave a clue to the source of this pessimism when he wrote that "the power of our analysis is practically exhausted"?

5. As a mathematician and rigorous metaphysician, ________ believed that the universe in all past, present, and future states followed a "preestablished harmony" laid down by God at the time of creation.

(see the answer key)

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