In opposition to Mach and his fellow positivists, Dijksterhuis felt it to be his historian's duty to regard the advance of science as an essentially continuous affair, whereas his equally firmly held conviction that the mathematical treatment of natural phenomena constitutes the essence of scientific method almost forced him to conceive of the origins of early modern science as a decisive break with the past. The inner tension that resulted from this unresolved dilemma is palpable in Dijksterhuis' pioneering Val en worp. Yet in his magisterial The Mechanization of the World Picture, written a quarter- century later, it is present in no lesser degree, although hidden much more deeply under the surface.

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "In opposition to Mach and his fellow positivists, Dijksterhuis felt it to be his historian's duty to regard the advance of science as an essentially continuous affair, whereas his equally firmly held conviction that the mathematical treatment of natural phenomena constitutes the essence of scientific method almost forced him to conceive of the origins of early modern science as a decisive break with the past. The inner tension that resulted from this unresolved dilemma is palpable in Dijksterhuis' pioneering Val en worp. Yet in his magisterial The Mechanization of the World Picture, written a quarter- century later, it is present in no lesser degree, although hidden much more deeply under the surface." in the context of "Floris Cohen (1994), The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry, p. 66" to mean that wisdom is timeless.