Physics at Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century Leiden: Philosophy and the New Science in the University

2 result of the attitudes characteristic of the small group of permanent residents at the schools, the academic scholars. This conservatism, however, was not everywhere equally efficacious. In the sixteenth century, the universities of northern Italy, Padua above all, had nurtured an intellectual ferment of considerable significance to the rise of the new science, and they continued to be penetrat...