but this was due to the inadequacies of Aristotelians, not to
deficiencies in Aristotelian metaphysics itself. To this merely defensive point should be
added a twofold reply. For one thing, the anti-Aristotelian metaphysics propounded by
many seventeenth-century scientists were not in fact ones that anyone would now want to
accept, and for another, not all essential Aristotelian concepts were in fact universally
abandoned by scientists.