POWERS OF MIND by ADAM SMITH 418 pages. Random House. $10.
On a slow day Western history might be reduced to a tale of two apples. The first comes wrapped in art and myth: Eve took the bite and mankind got its eviction notice from Paradise. The second is baked in its own apocryphal jacket: Isaac Newton got his deep insight into gravity when struck by a falling fruit. Result: a new brand of physics that relocated us even farther from the godhead—and a reverse anthropomorphism that saw the human body as a machine. Today...
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