Based on the passage, Kepler’s obsessive attention to mathematical detail was directly driven by which of the following traits?
Passage:
To his academic rivals, Johannes Kepler’s intellectual temperament was a baffling paradox: while he pursued the celestial orbits with an almost mystical fervor, his notebooks reveal that his daily mathematical work was characterized by a dry, relentless pedantry. Where others sought elegant geometric harmonies in broad strokes, Kepler obsessed over the minute discrepancies in Tycho Brahe’s observational data, refusing to smooth over even the smallest arc-second of error. This meticulous stubbornness, which he himself termed a 'dogged adherence to the tyranny of numbers,' was not born of a grand philosophical vision, but rather of a deep-seated, native anxiety about the disorder of the cosmos. His contemporaries mistook this anxious precision for mere stubborn pride, yet Kepler’s own writings confirm that he felt entirely enslaved by the details he recorded, driven not by ambition but by an acute, lifelong dread of intellectual error.
- AA grand philosophical vision aimed at discovering elegant geometric harmonies in the celestial orbits.
- BA stubborn pride in the superior accuracy of his mathematical calculations over Tycho Brahe's observations.
- An inherent apprehension regarding cosmic disorder and a constant fear of committing intellectual errors.Answer
- DA mystical fervor that prevented him from feeling constrained or limited by the raw data he recorded.