"With the completion of Euclid's Elements... For the first time in history masses of isolated discoveries were unified and correlated by a single guided principle, that of rigid deduction from explicitly stated assumptions. ...Not until 1839, in the work of ...D. Hilbert, was the full impact of Euclid's methodology felt in all mathematics. Concurrently with the pragmatic demonstration of the postulational method in arithmetic, geometry, algebra, topology, the theory of point sets, and analysis which distinguished the first four decades of the twentieth century, the method became almost popular in theoretical physics in the 1930's through the work of P. A. M. Dirac. Earlier scientific essays in the method, notably by E. Mach in mechanics and A. Einstein in relativity, had shown that the postulational approach is not only clarifying but creative. Mathematicians and scientists of the conservative persuasion may feel that a science constrained by an explicitly formulated set of assumptions has lost some of its freedom... Experience shows that the only loss is denial of the privilege of making avoidable mistakes in reasoning. ...Objection to the method is neither more nor less than objection to mathematics. ...If the Pythagorean dream of a mathematized science is to be realized, all of the sciences must eventually submit to the discipline that geometry accepted from Euclid."