English physicist Isaac Newton's 1686 Principia, the most famous and venerated publication in all of science. |
“In order to judge of his system it is necessary to note one or two salient points in his conception of the constitution of man and the universe. Happiness he acknowledges is ‘our being's end and aim’; and the only true science which leads to its attainment is sociology. As the doctrine of the material movements in the universe has been fixed by Newton's discoveries, so too the laws which regulate the movements in the social world must first be ascertained before we can hope to render mankind happy. To become such a social Newton was undoubtedly Fourier's ambition, and this is the fundamental law of his social Principia.”
“I designedly made Principia abstruse to avoid being baited by little smatterers in mathematics.”— Isaac Newton (c.1687), “Comment to William Derham” [3]