precedent for a single life’s work such as his, it might very well have seemed what Galileo assumed it to be: a self-standing anomaly, a onetime correction to the core of human knowledge—even, perhaps, its completion.
Put enough anomalies together, however, and that interpretation of a life’s work begins to shade in the direction that Descartes indicated. By the time Newton wrote in a letter to a friend in the 1670s that he had seen farther than his predecessors only because he was standing on the shoulders of giants, so many seemingly anomalous individuals had appeared in physics and astronomy that they were clearly no longer the exceptions but the rule. Through his choice of reference, Newton was indicating as much. He was paraphrasing the philosopher Bernard of Chartres, who in 1115 had written, “We are like dwarfs sitting on the shoulders of giants; hence we can see more and further than they, yet not by reason of the keenness of our vision, but because we have been raised aloft and are being carried by men of huge stature.” The cathedral then just beginning to rise in Bernard’s own village eventually commemorated this sentiment with lancet windows depicting New Testament preachers perching on the shoulders of Old Testament prophets, and it was this new interpretation of time that Newton, half a millennium later, was pointedly evoking: history as a cumulative enterprise, science as a cathedral of knowledge.
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