From the beginning of Chapter I - The New Science The new science, or the new experimental philosophy, arose in England as a fresh intellectual impulse, too subtle and too penetrating to be readily confined within the bonds of a definition. Its manifestations may be observed, its more obvious qualities may be studied, yet back of all these there is an elusive psychological problem that fairly challenges solution. As the waters of a stream are lost in the sea, where they are driven by unknown forces to break on unexpected shores, so new ideas entering the minds of men are lost to analysis only to reappear as new points of view, new methods of thinking, new attitudes toward life. Straightway men possessed of these new ideas set to work reforming human thought. Similarly, experimental philosophers in seventeenth century England, quickened by this new intellectual impulse, began to lay, broad and deep, the foundations for reconstructing the natural history of the world.