Philosophy of Nature:Newton and Rise of the Mechanical Philosophy

'The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science'

E.A. Burtt (1925)

"While God was thus being deprived of his duties
by the further advancement of mechanical science,
and men were beginning to wonder whether the self-
perpetuating machine thus left stood really in need of
any supernatural beginning, Hume's crushing disposal
of the ideas of power and causality along another tack
were already disturbing the learned world with the
suspicion that a First Cause was not as necessary an
idea of reason as it had appeared, and Kant was
preparing the penetrating analysis which frankly
purported to remove God from the realm of knowledge
altogether.
 
In short, Newton's cherished theology
was rapidly peeled off by all the competent hands
that could get at him, and the rest of his metaphysical
entities and assumptions, shorn of their religious
setting, were left to wander naked and unabashed
through the premises of subsequent thought, unchallenged
by thorough criticism because supposed as
eternally based as the positive scientific conquests of
the man who first annexed the boundless firmament to
the domain of mathematical mechanics."

[..]

"No one in the learned world could be found
to save the brilliant mathematical victories over the
realm of physical motion, and at the same time lay
bare the big problems involved in the new doctrine
of causality, and the inherent ambiguities in the tentative,
compromising, and rationally inconstruable form
of the Cartesian dualism that had been dragged along
like a tribal deity in the course of the campaign."