An introduction to mathematics, by A. N. Whitehead.

36 INTRODUCTION TO MATHEMATICS
sumed laws, supply the explanation to the
complex tangle of the course of events.
Finally, passing beyond the particular
sciences of electromagnetism and light, we
can generalize our point of view still further,
and direct our attention to the growth of
mathematical physics considered as one great
chapter of scientific thought. In the first
place, what in the barest outlines is the story
of its growth?
It did not begin as one science, or as the
product of one band of men. The Chaldean
shepherds watched the skies, the agents of
Government in Mesopotamia and Egypt
measured the land, priests and philosophers
brooded on the general nature of all things.
The vast mass of the operations of nature
appeared due to mysterious unfathomable
forces. "The wind bloweth where it listeth"
expresses accurately the blank ignorance then
existing of any stable rules followed in detail
by the succession of phenomena. In broad outline, then as now, a regularity of events was
patent. But no minute tracing of their interconnection was possible, and there was no
knowledge how even to set about to construct
such a science.
Detached speculations, a few happy or unhappy shots at the nature of things, formed
the utmost which could be produced.
Meanwhile land-surveys had produced ge