ilya_prigogine_isabelle_stengers_alvin_tofflerbookfi-org

29
THE TRIUMPH OF REASON
then take some central unexplained fact as its startm!; point.
Physicians thus felt that they were authorized by Newton to
refashion the vitalist conception and to speak of a "vital
force" sui generis, the use of which would give the description
of living phenomena a hoped-for systematic consistency. This
is the same role that affinity, taken as the specificalJy chemical
force of interaction, was calJed upon to play.
Some "true Newtonians" took exception to this proliferation
of forces and reasserted the universality of the explanatory
power of gravitation. But it was too late. The term
Newtonian was now applied to everything that dealt with a
system of Jaws, with equilibrium, or even to all situations in
which natural order on one side and moral, social, and political
order on the other could be expressed in terms of an allembracing
harmony. Romantic philosophers even discovered
in the Newtonian universe an enchanted world animated by
natural forces. More "orthodox" physicists saw in it a mechanical
world governed by mathematics. For the positivists it
meant the success of a procedure, a recipe to be identified
with the very definition of science.3
The rest is literature-often Newtonian literature: the harmony
that reigns in the society of stars, the elective affinities
and hostilities giving rise to the "social life" of chemical compounds
appear as processes that can be transposed into the
world of human society. No wonder that this period appears as
the Golden Age of Classical Science.
Thday Newtonian science still occupies a unique position.
Some of the basic concepts it introduced represent a definitive
acquisition that has survived all the mutations science has
since undergone. However, today we know that the Golden
Age of Classical Science is gone, and with it also the conviction
that Newtonian rationality, even with its various conflicting
interpretations, forms a suitable basis for our dialogue with
nature.
A central subject of this book is that of the Newtonian triumph,
the continual opening up of new fields of investigation
that have extended Newtonian thought right down to the pres­
. ent day. It also deals with doubts and struggles that arose from
this triumph. Today we are beginning to see more clearly the
limits of Newtonian rationality. A more consistent conception