Lenses and Waves

10 CHAPTER 1
revolution, that set up schemes to lay new foundations for natural inquiry.
Huygens did not have such a program and, as a result, his science seems to
lack coherence, unless a coherence is looked for on a different level of
seventeenth-century science. The essay therefore first forgets about
Huygens’ alleged Cartesianism to sketch the mathematician and his
idiosyncratic focus on instruments. He was not a half-baked philosopher but
a typical mathematician. A new Archimedes, as Mersenne foretold in 1647.
The incomparable Huygens, as Leibniz said in 1695 upon the news of his
death. 15 Then I ask anew how his Cartesianism fits into the picture. We may
have trouble getting a balanced idea of what he was doing, but it appears that
he was hardly aware of the size of the new ground he had been breaking. He
had, in fact, developed a new mathematical science of optics.
15 OC1, 47 and OC10, 721.