tried to establish the existence of God by pure reason as for 
Newton to have taken the opposite tack (pp. 126­7): “Newton, 
though profoundly interested in theology, seems to have held 
that the physicist can give his undivided attention to 
investigating the laws which will enable him to predict 
phenomena, and can leave the deeper problems entirely out of 
account: he can make it his purpose to describe rather than to 
explain.”

     This was the Cartesian technique of separation that 
ensured that all the neglected aspects of experience would be 
rolled back into the unconscious. This strategy, which grew 
from lineal specialism and separation of functions, created the 
world of dullness, bathos, and mock-profundity that Swift and 
Pope and Sterne made fun of. Newton was quite eligible as hero 
for The Dunciad  and certainly got a place in Gulliver’s Travels .