Soon after the beginning of that century [the 17^th], a number of intelligent people in Western Europe began to see in a settled and steady manner what a few here and there had seen by fits and starts for the last hundred years or more; namely that the problems which ever since the time of early Greek philosophy had gone by the collective name of ‘physics’ were capable of being restated in a shape in which, with the double weapon of experiment and mathematics, one could now solve them. What was called Nature, they saw, had henceforth no secrets from man; only riddles which he had learned the trick of answering. Or, more accurately, Nature was no longer a Sphinx asking man riddles; it was man that did the asking, and Nature, now, that he put to the torture until she gave him the answer to his questions.

R.G. Collingwood, An Autobiography