This immensely influential work of Edwin Arthur Burtt, who influenced Koyre, and thus Kuhn, and virtually all philosophy of sciences, has many merits, but it is, not merely as a truism, not without great deficiencies.

The crucial deficiency is that it is the origin of this absurd humanist scholarss and students' aversion to "the mathematical". It is as if the mathematization of the world led to a false metaphysics, while those who condemn this very mathematization knows virtually nothing about mathematics. For them mathematics, instead of a general science of structural form and their relations, is a science of quantity and figures.

Another deficiency is its naivety as to the proposed solutions. A commen-sense Aristotelian form of metaphysics is, if not directly called for, implicitly suggested. Burtt finished the book in 1925, and in 1926 the probabilistic interpretation of quantum mechanics was put forward, unfortunately for him, so while many of his analyses and rejections to the Newtonian metaphysics is trenchant, valid and to the point, his proposed solutions are tremendously naive in hindsight. His critique of forms of "wild" idealism became quite unfounded, which is still unnoticed by many of his readers, especially those who do not continue the journey to engage with modern philosophy of sciences and tackle the real problems of metaphysics, but rather, being convinced by Burtt's rhetoric, becomes unrestrained in their frank ignorance.

The first and the concluding chapters are really worth reading, but the concluding chapter is for those with a critical mind who is responsible enough to force himself to learn modern science and contemporary mathematics before he participates in the stupid marches of those humanity scholars in their ignorance.