The reasons that made Britain the site for new departures in thinking about the self in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries are not far to seek. The impact of the new science was felt everywhere, but the combination of Baconian experimentalism and Newtonian analysis of palpable relations between things (as opposed to Cartesian deductive reasoning or the combination of mechanism and scholasticism put together by Leibniz) was a characteristically English mix. In addition, by the time Isaac Newton's Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy was published in 1686, many individuals were finding new opportunities for innovation and personal advance in the growing commercial economy, whose domestic and foreign markets (including those in the American colonies) opened up paths for individual initiative, and helped give an impetus to the new productive techniques that would soon make England the first home of modern industry. British politics posed new questions about the status of individuals too, first because England was in the seventeenth century what France would become at the end of the eighteenth, the home of revolution. The collapse of the British monarchy in the Civil War of the 16405, and the religious disunity that contributed so much to it, brought to the fore questions about the foundation of social life and the basis of political obligation whose answers could still be taken for granted elsewhere, and the struggle between the restored Stuart kings and Parliament that culminated with the royal defeat in the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 kept the questioning alive.