Abstract
Sir Isaac Newton was not a particularly Hobbyhorsical character. He even expressed the opinion that his system of philosophy was not Hobbyhorsical—as for instance in Rule One, from ‘The System of the World’, Book III of the Principia: ‘We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances’.1
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Notes and References
Isaac Newton, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687, 3rd ed. 1726), ‘De Mundi Systemate’, Liber Tertius, Regula 1: ‘Causes rerum naturalium non plures admitti debere, quam quae et verae sint et earum phaenomenis explicandis sufficiant’.
Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago and London, 1962, 2nd impr. 1963), p. 104.
Christiaan Huygens, Discours de la Cause de la Pesanteur (Leyden, 1690), Oeuvres Complètes de Christiaan Huygens, publiées par la Société Hollandaise des Sciences, 22 vols. (La Haye, 1888–1950), XXI, 471, quoted by Dijksterhuis, the Mechanization of the World-Picture (trans. C. Dikshoorn, Oxford, 1961), p. 480.
George Berkeley, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710), Section 103, ed. and intro. G. J. Warnock (London and Glasgow, 1962), 6th impr. October 1972, p. 116.
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), Book 2, Chapter 33 (‘Concerning the Association of Ideas’), of the 4th and subsequent editions of the Essay, ed. P. H. Nidditch, Clarendon edition of the Works of John Locke, Vol. I (Oxford, 1975), pp. 394–401. (Hereafter cited as Essay.)
The list of twenty Locke-invoking critics is given by R. S. Hafter, ‘Sterne’s Affective Art and Eighteenth-Century Psychology’ (PhD Dissertation, Brandeis, 1970), p. 72.
Other recent examples could be added to his list, e.g. Helene Moglen, The Philosophical Irony of Laurence Sterne (Florida, 1975). Hume’s three categories of association are mentioned by Hafter, pp. 156–7; they are from Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), Book I, Part 1, Section 4, ‘Of the Connection or Association of Ideas’, Everyman edition (London and NY, 1911), rpt. 1974, ed. and intro. A. D. Lindsay, 2 vols., Vol. I, p. 19. (Hereafter cited as Treatise.
John Passmore, Hume’s Intentions (Cambridge, 1952), revised ed. 1968, p. 108.
David Hartley, Observations on Man: his Frame, his Duty, and his Expectations (1749), Part II, Chapter 2 (Proposition 28), p. 146: ‘Association, i.e. Analogy, perfect and imperfect, is the only Foundation upon which we in fact do, or can, or ought to assent’. Hardey is using the word Analogy in its sense of argument by example, rather than by proportion.
Fred Gettings, The Book of the Hand: An Illustrated History of Palmistry (1965), p. 178, paraphrasing Paracelsus.
Kenelm Digby, A Late Discourse Made in a Solemne Assembly of Nobles and Learned Men at Montpellier… Touching the Cure of WOUNDS by the Powder of Sympathy, Rendred faithfully out of French into English by R. White (1658), p. 3.
Ephraim Chambers, Cyclopaedia (1713), article on ‘The Powder of Sympathy’.
Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771), ed. Lewis M. Knapp (1966), p. 18. The Doctor finds relief not from bad breath but from low spirits.
Richard Mead, A Mechanical Account of Poisons in Several Essays (1702), p. 15. Newton is referred to on p. 14 with reference to Bellini’s cohesion, ‘which is indeed, tho’ express’d in other words, the very same thing with the Attraction of the Particles one to another; This Mr. Newton has demonstrated to be the great Principle of Action in the Universe’.
Samuel Bowden, Introductory poem (‘To Dr. Morgan’) to Thomas Morgan’s Philosophical Principles of Medicine (1726), pp. xlv–xlvi.
Thomas Morgan, Physico-Theology (1741), p. 72.
Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man (1733–4) Epistle I, 11. 289–93, Poems, ed. John Butt (1963), 5th printing 1973, p. 515.
George Cheyne, An Essay of Health and Long Life (1724), Chapter vi, prop. 4, p. 149.
William King, An Essay on the Origin of Evil… To which is prefix’d A Dissertation Concerning the Fundamental Principle and Immediate Criterion of Virtue [by J. Gay] (1739). This is not John Gay the dramatist, but John Gay, Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge.
Richard A. Lanham, in ‘Tristram Shandy’: The Games of Pleasure (Berkeley, LA, and London, 1973) p. 57.
P. McReynolds, Introduction to Four Early Works on Motivation, ed. McReynolds (Gainsville, Florida, 1969), p. xvii. The reference is to Locke’s Essay, Book II, Chapter xxi (‘Of Power’), paras. 31 and 40.
S. T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (1817), ed. J. Shawcross (Oxford, 1907), pp. 82, 92.
Earl R. Wasserman, ‘Nature Moralized: The Divine Analogy in the Eighteenth Century,’ ELH, 20 (1953), 39–76.
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© 1982 Mark Loveridge
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Loveridge, M. (1982). Sterne and the Scientific Study of Man. In: Laurence Sterne and the Argument about Design. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-05600-2_4
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