Abstract
Thus far I have focused on the human sensorium by attempting to discover in the first two parts what can be learned about it from Newton’s texts and, then in the third part, from the wider context there treated. Recall that at the end of Part II, four questions were posed that could not be answered from Newton’s texts; and although the wider context provided insight into how these questions might be answered, it seems that none of the four questions can be answered with absolute certainty. Nevertheless, if we are to understand Newton’s complete sensorium concept, answers are required for reasons that will become clear in the next section. Accordingly, before addressing the problem of the divine sensorium, each question will be considered here and a plausible and, insofar as possible, an evidence-based answer will be provided. But in attempting to provide such plausible answers, I will adopt a slightly different order from that in which the four questions were first posed.
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- 1.
See supra Pt.II.2.2, p. 57.
- 2.
See supra Pt.III.3.2, Fig. III.4.
- 3.
See supra Pt.III.3.2.
- 4.
See supra Pt.III.3.2, pp. 79, 85.
- 5.
See supra Pt.II.2.2, p. 84–5.
- 6.
I.e., the ocular or eyepiece.
- 7.
Newton, ‘An accompt of a New Catadioptrical Telescope’, reprinted in Cohen and Schofield (eds.), Isaac Newton’s Papers, p. 61. The early reflecting telescopes were based on lenses, not mirrors; but in the hands of Galileo and Kepler, they brought about telescopic astronomy; see Van Helden, Measuring the Universe. In the epilogue to his Optica promota (1663), James Gregory proposed a new type of reflecting telescope that is put to the eye and pointed straight at the object to be viewed. It included a concave objective mirror and a concave secondary mirror that reflects the light from the object glass through a small hole in the middle of the objective mirror into the ocular. In the same year Gregory commissioned a London optician to construct a telescope according to his design; and in 1674 Robert Hooke, who had ‘direct experience of the very type of reflecting optics that Newton had harnessed’, presented the first Gregorian telescope to the Royal Society; see Simpson, ‘Robert Hooke and Practical Optics’, pp. 44, 49. According to Newton, he got the idea of using mirrors from Gregory; see Newton, The Correspondence, vol. 1, p. 153.
- 8.
- 9.
See supra Pt.I.1.2, comment to Text X.
- 10.
See the full quotation supra Pt.III.3.2, p. 80 and n.106, which provides evidence that by c.1666 Newton had read Willis’s Cerebri anatome.
- 11.
See supra Pt.III.3.1, p. 71.
- 12.
Willis, The Anatomy of the Brain [1664 tr. 1681], p. 102 (italics mine). Note also that the phrase ‘middle of the brain’ may denote the brain’s ‘middle marrow’ or white substance (see pp. 93 and 130) and therefore refer only obliquely to the two containers or mechanisms, the corpora striata and corpus callosum.
- 13.
See supra Pt.II.2.2, pp. 50–1.
- 14.
See supra Pt.I.1.2, Text VIII, comment to Text IX, Text XI and Text XII.
- 15.
See supra Pt.I.1.2, Text XII.
- 16.
See supra Pt.I.1.2, Text VIII, p. 21 and n106; Text IX, p. 22; and Text XI, p. 25 and n.137.
- 17.
See supra Pt.I.1.2, Text IX, pp. 21–2 n.101.
- 18.
See Collins, God in Modern Philosophy, who assayed the varieties of theism from Nicolaus Cusanus to the mid-twentieth century.
- 19.
See Newton, Principia mathematica [1687], Bk. III, Prop. 8, in Cor. 5, p. 415. For Samuel Clarke’s paraphrase of this argument, see Kassler, Seeking Truth, p. 182. See also Newton, ‘The System of the World’ [1728], Principia mathematica (C-M), p. 566.
- 20.
See Newton, Principia mathematica (C-M), Bk. III, General Scholium, pp. 543–4, and Newton, The Principia, Bk. III, General Scholium, pp. 585–6.
- 21.
For the historical background to, and development of this version of the argument, which was later termed the ‘physico-theological method’, see McAdoo, The Spirit of Anglicanism, pp. 240–315, et passim.
- 22.
According to Collins, God in Modern Philosophy, p. 54, this variety of theism, which he termed ‘scientific’, was ‘the modern phenomenalistic substitute for two traditional arguments for the existence of God’, namely, the a priori, ontological argument which moves from principles, reasons or causes to their consequences or effects, and the a posteriori, cosmological argument which moves from sense-grounded propositions in order to prove an initial premiss that a being exists and is the sufficient reason of the cosmos.
- 23.
See supra Pt.I.1.2, Text VIII, comment to Text IX, Text XI and Text XII. Note the absence of the attribute, all-knowing (omniscient), which is present, however, in Newton, Principia mathematica (C-M), Bk. III, General Scholium, p. 545.
- 24.
See ibid., p. 546; cf. Newton, The Principia, Bk. III, General Scholium, p. 588: ‘We know him ... by the wisest and best construction of things and their final causes’. Note that in the latter the translators seem not to have attended to terminology in the several arguments from design published during Newton’s lifetime, for these do not use the term ‘construction’ either in the English or the Latin versions.
- 25.
See, e.g., supra Pt.I.1.2, Text XII, where Newton states that God is able to move bodies within his sensorium and thereby to form and reform parts in the solar system, including parts in the nervous system. According to Harrison, ‘Newtonian Science, Miracles and the Laws of Nature’, p. 549, Newton understood direct divine activity as interventions ‘from our limited perspective only’ and, as a consequence, for him, miracles have only ‘epistemological, and not ontological status’. In short, God’s interventions are unknown efficient causes.
- 26.
See, e.g., supra Pt.I.1.2, Text II, pp. 6 n.22, 7 n.31, 8 n.33 and Text IV, p. 13 n.63, where Newton identifies mediators as active principles or natural agents, that is to say, unknown material causes that produce effects such as cohesion, gravity, fermentation; see also Newton, Opticks (C-R), Qu. 31, pp. 390, 394, 399. Consequently, such effects imply a rational contriver.
- 27.
In terms of the laws that can be discovered and demonstrated, the prime instance would be Newton’s law of universal gravitation. But Newton attempted to discover other laws, including those which God has ‘imposed on us’ for moving our bodies; see supra Pt.II.2.1, p. 38 and see also n.34 below.
- 28.
OED 1: the world as an ordered and harmonious system (1690–1874).
- 29.
See supra Pt.I.1.2, Text XII.
- 30.
See supra Pt.I.1.2, Text IX and comment. For an earlier statement, see Newton, ‘De gravitatione’, p. 141: ‘created mind (since it is the image of God) is of a far more noble nature than body’ and ‘the analogy between the Divine faculties and our own is greater than has been perceived formerly’. For the Platonic privileging of mind over matter, see the passage quoted from Cudworth supra Introduction, p. xx; see also Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, p. 557: ‘the whole intellectual World ... [is a] more beautiful World than the material [World]’.
- 31.
The scriptural passages in Genesis 1:26 and 27 state that ‘God created man in his own image’ but do not specify in what way; hence, the imago Dei was differently interpreted. For some interpretations in Newton’s day, see Dockrill, ‘The Heritage of Patristic Platonism’, pp. 60–1, and Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy, pp. 184–9, 203, 230. According to the version of Samuel Clarke, Newton’s occasional mouthpiece, God made ‘intelligent Creatures ... so far like unto himself, as to endue them with those excellent Faculties of Reason and Will, whereby they are inabled to distinguish Good from Evil, and to chuse the one and refuse the other’; see Clarke, A Discourse, p. 62.
- 32.
See Bourke, Will in Western Thought, pp. 29 and 37, who also observed that with Locke, ‘the term “preference” comes into continued use, in speaking of a willed choice’. For an instance of this, see supra Pt.III.3.3, p. 95.
- 33.
See Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, p. 141.
- 34.
For a brief reference to the disposing power of divine and human intellect, see Newton, ‘De gravitatione’, p. 142, where he writes that intellect is infinite in God and ‘in a finite degree belongs to us also; particularly since we do not move our bodies by our own independent power but through laws [of motion] imposed on us by God’.
- 35.
Newton, Principia mathematica (C-M), Bk. III, General Scholium, p. 545 (italics mine). Cf. this version with Newton, The Principia, Bk. III, General Scholium, p. 587: ‘Every sentient soul, at different times and in different organs of senses and motions [sic], is the same indivisible person. There are parts that are successive in duration and coexistent in space, but neither of these exist in the person of man or in his thinking principle, and much less in the thinking substance of God.’
- 36.
- 37.
As noted supra Introduction, pp. xi–xiii, this interpretation is at odds with the general consensus of commentators, who have associated Newton with voluntarism.
- 38.
See Ryle, The Concept of Mind, pp. 62–9, p. 64. For an interpretation of God’s will as a thing-in-itself, rather than as a volition or antecedent intention determined by intellect, see Tamny, ‘Newton Creation, and Perception, pp. 50–3.
- 39.
The nature of Newton’s functional principle was missed by Burtt, perhaps because he used the term ‘duties’ not ‘functions’ when treating ‘God’s Present Duties in the Cosmic Economy’, Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science, pp. 291–7.
- 40.
For Locke, see Collins, God in Modern Philosophy, (‘Empiricism and the Neutralizing of God’), pp. 97–107.
- 41.
See supra Pt.I.1.2, Text VIII, and Text XI, p. 24 n.133.
- 42.
See Newton, The Principia, Bk. III, General Scholium, p. 589, and Newton, Ptincipia mathematica (C-M), Bk. III, General Scholium, p. 547 (‘rendered general by induction’).
- 43.
See supra Pt.I.1.2, Text VIII p. 20 n.103 and Text XI p. 24 n.133.
- 44.
See Newton, The Principia, Bk. III, Rule 1, p. 440; cf. Newton, Principia mathematica (C-M), Bk. III, Rule 1, p. 398. Note that Newton’s four Rules, which expound methodological principles, have been differently interpreted by commentators; see, e.g., Buchdahl, Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Science, p. 337, Holton, ‘Presupposition in the Construction of Theories’, pp. 89–93 and Shapiro, Fits, Passions and Paroxysms, pp. 49–50. Although Newton’s formulation is considered ‘classic’, the principles concerned with economy, uniformity and evidence were expressed long before Newton; see, e.g., Crombie, Robert Grosseteste, p. 317.
- 45.
See supra Pt.III.3.1, p. 70.
- 46.
The principle of economy does not have the same meaning as the principle of parsimony (Ockham’s razor), for this was a leading principle of nominalism, namely, that things not known to exist should not, unless absolutely necessary, be postulated as existing. Newton, however, cannot be classed as a nominalist, even though he did postulate a number of unobservables as real existents. For a brief discussion of this issue in relation to force, see Dijksterhuis, The Mechanization of the World Picture, pp. 480–3.
- 47.
Mandelbaum, Philosophy, Science, and Sense Perception, p. 81. See also Buchdahl, Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Science, p. 337, and Shapiro, Fits, Passions, and Paroxysms, pp. 40–8.
- 48.
Ibid. (italics mine).
- 49.
Ibid., p. 87. For an instance of this, see supra Pt.I.1.2, Text V and comment.
- 50.
Ibid., pp. 61–2. For the ‘first explicit recognition of the possibility of conjecturing the unknown from known phenomena’, see Lloyd, Polarity and Analogy, pp. 337–41, who attributed this recognition to a dictum, formulated by Anaxagoras of Clazomenæ, which was approved and applied to unobservable atoms by Democritus of Abdera. For an interpretation of the dictum as preserved by Sextus Empiricus, see Kirk, Raven and Schofield, The Presocratic Philosophers, pp. 383–4.
- 51.
See supra Pt.I.1.2, Text II; see also Newton, Principia mathematica (C-M), Bk. III, Rule 3, p. 398, and Newton, The Principia, Bk. III, Rule 3, pp. 441–2, p. 441.
- 52.
See Shapiro, Fits, Passions, and Paroxysms, pp. 4–5.
- 53.
See Buchdahl, Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Science, p. 337 (italics mine).
- 54.
A careful reader of Newton’s texts, supra Pt.I.1.2, will notice that they contain many overt analogical inferences, sometimes foreshadowed by a phrase such as ‘in like manner’.
- 55.
See Newton, Principia mathematica (C-M), Bk. III, General Scholium, p. 546, which is retained in Newton, The Principia, Bk. III, General Scholium, p. 589.
- 56.
- 57.
- 58.
In 1717 Samuel Clarke asserted that ‘Space void of body, is the property of an incorporeal substance’; see Alexander, The Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence, p. 47. But according to Alexander, pp. xxviii–xxix, he seemed to have changed his mind, because in the French edition of the correspondence, published in 1720, the editor stated that Clarke had asked him to warn readers that ‘when he speaks of infinite space or immensity ... he does not claim to take the term quality or property in the same sense as they are taken as those who discuss logic or metaphysic’; rather, ‘he means only that space ... [is a mode] of existence of the Substance which is really necessary and substantially [i.e., in substance] omnipresent’. For Clarke’s 1705 problematic conception of incorporeal substance as an unknowable substratum that underlies events, see Kassler, Seeking Truth, pp. 184–5.
- 59.
Although the terms ‘infinite’ and ‘uniform’ are also applied to space, yet there is a difference between the meanings of the term ‘uniform’ when applied to space and when applied to God, for which see supra Pt.I.1.2, Text XII, p. 25 nn.147 and 148.
- 60.
Ray, Time, Space and Philosophy, pp. 99–115.
- 61.
See ibid., p. 136.
- 62.
See Newton, Principia mathematica (C-M), Bk. III, General Scholium, p. 544. The translators of Newton, The Principia, Bk. III, General Scholium, p. 586, substituted ‘elegant’ for ‘beautiful’, though the former epithet is less congruous with Newton’s own arguments from design—see, e.g., supra Pt.I.1.2, Text XI (‘Order and Beauty’)—or in some other such arguments by contemporaries—see, e.g., Kassler, Seeking Truth, pp. 194, 196–8.
- 63.
For Newton’s brief critique of this supposition, see pp. 116–7 below.
- 64.
Halley, ‘Of the Infinity of the Sphere of Fix’d Stars’, p. 22, who, in this and the article following it, goes on to question the assumption of the infinity of the sphere of fixed stars. Note that by the term ‘sphere’, Halley probably meant region and neither the long-lived principle of nested or crystalline spheres, nor Kepler’s life-long belief that the fixed stars were arranged in a spherical shell. For the two latter meanings, see Van Helden, Measuring the Universe, p. 4, et passim, and p. 63.
- 65.
See Newton, ‘De gravitatione’, p. 138 (italics mine).
- 66.
Ibid., pp. 133–4 (italics mine).
- 67.
For two experiments devised by Newton to demonstrate how ‘true accelerations may be distinguished from relative [ones], and hence, the framework of absolute space identified, at least approximately, with that of the fixed stars’; see Hesse, Forces and Fields, p. 138. For a complication, see Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science, pp. 294–5. For Newton’s estimate of the distance of the region of the fixed stars and the problem it posed for the traditional Christian time frame, see Van Helden, Measuring the Universe, pp. 158–9.
- 68.
See Newton, The Principia, Bk. III, pp. 446, 450, 465–6, 471, 496, 502, 505, 525, 551–3, 556–7, 561. See also Jammer, Concepts of Space, p. 100, who pointed out that for Newton, the fixed stars ‘were really “fixed,” that is, not moving in space’. According to Van Helden, Measuring the Universe, p. 9, Aristarchus of Samos, in attempting to measure the sizes and distances of the sun and moon, utilised the fixed stars as the immobile reference frame against which all motions were plotted. That Newton was aware of this, see the first two paragraphs in Newton, ‘The System of the World’, Principia mathematica (C-M), p. 549.
- 69.
See Newton, Principia mathematica (C-M), Scholium to the Definitions, pp. 6–12, and Newton, The Principia, Scholium to the Definitions, pp. 54–61. Until the advent of non-Euclidean geometries, the dimensionality of space was understood as Euclidean.
- 70.
See ibid., p. 545, and ibid., pp. 587–8. Note that in the second version, the translation has: ‘God experiences nothing from the motion of bodies, the bodies feel no resistance from God’s omnipresence’. The choice of the words ‘experiences’ and ‘feel’ are unfortunate for two reasons: first, God is not the object of an action, i.e., he does not suffer (only God incarnate suffers); and second, bodies feel only if they have the property of sensitivity.
- 71.
See supra Pt.III.3.2, p. 80 and n.106.
- 72.
See supra Pt.III.3.1, p. 71 and n.106; see also p. 103 above.
- 73.
According to Jammer, Concepts of Space, pp. 22–3, since the Stoics maintained the existence of a void outside the material cosmos, it was ‘owing chiefly to’ their controversies that ‘the problem of space could no longer be considered as one simple question, but had to appear under the form of two different considerations: space and void’.
- 74.
See Jevons, The Principles of Science, p. 627, who also observed, pp. vii, 9, that the ‘great rule of inference’ affirms that ‘sofar as there exists sameness, identity or likeness, what is true of one thing will be true of the other’. For Jevons, pp. 581, 583, Newton’s Principia is ‘the true Novum Organum’ of scientific procedure, whereas Newton’s Opticks is the best model of experimental and theoretical investigation.
- 75.
For the lecture in question, see infra Appendix.
- 76.
Barrow, The Usefulness of Mathematical Learning, p. 163.
- 77.
Ibid., p. 168
- 78.
Ibid., p. 171.
- 79.
See supra Introduction, p. xv.
- 80.
See pp. 112–3 above.
- 81.
See Ray, Time, Space and Philosophy, p. 177 (italics mine). According to Newton, Principia mathematica (C-M), Bk. III, General Scholium, p. 544: ‘...and lest the systems of the fixed stars should, by their gravity, fall on each other, he [God] hath placed those systems at immense distances from one another’. See also Newton, The Principia, Bk. III, General Scholium, p. 586.
- 82.
See Cohen and Schofield (eds.), Isaac Newton’s Papers, ‘Letter I’, pp. 280–90, who also include the remaining letters, all in facsimile from their first publication in 1756. Bentley, who initiated the correspondence, wrote in regard to Sermon 7, which formed part of the first set of his Boyle Lectures read between 7 March and 5 December 1692.
- 83.
See Ray, Time, Space and Philosophy, p. 178 (italics mine).
- 84.
The quoted passages are from Cohen and Schofield (eds.), Isaac Newton’s Papers, ‘Letter I’, pp. 281–2, 284, 287.
- 85.
Ibid., ‘Letter IV’, p. 310. Newton’s description suggests that the ‘Hypothesis’ in question is that of Descartes.
- 86.
Ibid., ‘Letter III’, p. 305.
- 87.
Ibid., p. 306. By ‘several Systems’, Newton alludes to a plurality of worlds in infinite space, a conception that also would be incompatible with his celestial mechanics; for his stance on this matter, see Dick, Plurality of Worlds, pp. 143–7; see also p. 123 below. That conceptions of a plurality of worlds have had ‘complete sway’ up to the ‘present day’ (1920) was pointed out by Schlick, Space and Time in Contemporary Physics, pp. 67–75, who also provided a short demonstration of the incompatibility of Newton’s system with conceptions of multiple systems.
- 88.
This question is answered by Newton, Principia mathematica (C-M), BK. III, p. 530, and Newton, The Principia, Bk. III, p. 572: ‘I suspect ... that it is chiefly from the comets that spirit comes, which is indeed the smallest but most subtle and useful part of our air, and so much required to sustain the life of all things with us.’ The first clause may be original with Newton, but the remainder expresses a widespread view among certain physiologists who believed that some kind of chemical spirit in the air was necessary for life. But behind them all was the work of Robert Hooke, who in the early 1660s had been interested in respiratory physiology, an interest that led him to postulate in 1665 that a nitrous component in the air was an essential natural agent for combustion and respiration and in 1667 to collaborate with Richard Lower on cardiopulmonary experiments; see Lysaght, ‘Hooke’s Theory of Combustion’ and Brown, ‘Richard Lower’, p. 525.
- 89.
Newton, Opticks (C-R), Qu. 28, pp. 362–70, p. 369 (italics mine).
- 90.
Regarding the latter function, see Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations, p. 295, who pointed out that in Principia mathematica Newton had confined himself to observing that in order to prevent the collapse of the fixed stars, ‘God had set these stars at immense distances from one another’ (see p. 116 n.81 above), an expedient that would ‘hardly suffice through all the ages of time’.
- 91.
Ray, Time, Space and Philosophy, p. 240 n.2, see also p. 99.
- 92.
See, e.g., Aronson, Harré and Way, Realism Rescued, p. 84, who described Newton’s ontology as based on ‘forces, atoms and a (notorious) container version of the absolutist view of space and time’. See also Buchdahl, Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Science, pp. 549 n.5, 582, 584, 587–9, 595 and n.3, 647, 666–7, for Emanuel Kant’s opposition to the doctrine of absolute space ‘under the image of the boundless receptacle’ of ‘possible things’.
- 93.
Randall, quoted in Strong, ‘Newton and God’, p. 148. He also claimed that God constitutes both absolute space and absolute time and that these are his sensorium. Although it is widely held that these two absolutes constitute the ultimate structure of Newton’s mathematical universe, absolute time did not enter into the subject of this inquiry. According to Ray, Time, Space and Philosophy, pp. 102–3, Newton’s argument for absolute space ‘may be readily extended to give us a “Newtonian” argument for absolute time’. Although he did not provide that argument, his statement suggests that absolute time, for Newton, is space in one dimension. For a different suggestion, see infra Appendix, p. 151.
- 94.
See Hundert, Philosophy, Psychiatry and Neuroscience, p. 87.
- 95.
See supra Pt.I.1.2, Texts VIII, IX, XI, and XII.
- 96.
According to Van Helden, Measuring the Universe, p. 3, telescopic astronomy made it possible to subject to scientific scrutiny the traditional scheme of sizes and distances of bodies in the solar system. This scrutiny thus allowed the emergence of a new consensus based on direct measurements for the apparent sizes of the planets and the all-important distance between sun and earth; and it also helped make the solar system itself inconceivably large.
- 97.
For historical treatments of space in classical antiquity and in the period from the Middle Ages to the seventeenth century, Algra, Concepts of Space, and Grant, Much Ado about Nothing.
- 98.
For one critic, see infra Appendix.
- 99.
See Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos, p. 181 (italics mine). For Aristotle’s cosmos, see also Crowther and Barker, ‘Training the Intelligent Eye’, pp.454–6.
- 100.
See Jammer, Concepts of Space, pp. 17 (italics mine).
- 101.
See Davenport, ‘The Catholics, the Cathars, and the Concept of Infinity’, p. 265 n.5.
- 102.
Quoted in Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 318.
- 103.
Quoted in Davenport, ‘The Catholics, the Cathars, and the Concept of Infinity’, p. 271, who also pointed out that by conceiving God as an infinite container, Neckham and other scholastic theologians were required to scrutinise the conception of divine immensity, which had been introduced at the Fourth Lateran Council to mean that God is without or beyond all spatial dimension.
- 104.
See Kristeller, Renaissance Thought II, p. 95, who described Ficino’s Platonism as ‘a highly complex and unique system of thought that cannot be taken as a mere repetition of the thought of Plato or of the ancient Neoplatonists’.
- 105.
Quoted in Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos, pp. 190–1.
- 106.
See Newton, Principia mathematica (C-M), General Scholium, Bk. III, p. 545: God ‘is omnipresent not virtually only, but also substantially; for virtue [power] cannot subsist without substance’. For the scholastic tradition implied in this passage, see also Letvin, ‘Newton and Scholastic Philosophy’, pp. 70–5 (who focused on ‘virtually’, not ‘substantially’).
- 107.
See infra Appendix, pp. 146 and 150.
- 108.
Barrow, The Usefulness of Mathematical Learning, p. 164.
- 109.
Ibid., p. 165.
- 110.
Ibid., p. 176.
- 111.
Ibid., p. 177. For the meaning of this usage, see OED 1a obs.: Ability to receive or contain, holding power (1481–1702).
- 112.
Ibid., p. 182, which, perhaps, implies something like Plato’s receptacle (see p. 37 below).
- 113.
See p. 114 and n.69 above.
- 114.
In the 1713 edition of Principia mathematica, Newton supported this statement by citations to one ancient source, St. Paul, and a few other sacred writers. But in the editions that followed, the first of several ancients cited is Pythagoras, whereas the first of the sacred writers is St. Paul. Newton indicates that his source for the opinion of Pythagoras was Cicero, The Nature of the Gods; but in Bk. I, p. 81 of that source, a reader will discover that Velleius the Epicurean, one of the participants in Cicero’s imaginary conversation, sets up in order to criticise the supposed opinion of Pythagoras ‘that mind was present and active throughout the whole universe and that our own minds were a part of it’. This opinion, of course, is neither commensurate with that of St. Paul nor with the doxographical tradition concerning Pythagoras; see Kirk, Raven and Schofield, The Pre-Socratic Philosophers, pp. 214–38. Consequently, Newton’s citations to Pythagoras and St. Paul do not seem to be an instance of what Paolo Cassini had identified as Newton’s non-dogmatic principle of textual authority; see supra Introduction, p. x.
- 115.
OED a I.1: Free from empty spaces or interstices (c.1391–1881); i.e., as opposed to solids that are composites or dense bodies with pores.
- 116.
I.e., design as intention.
- 117.
Newton, Opticks (C-R), Qu. 31, pp. 375–406, p. 400; see also, pp. 403–4. In the process of forming compound bodies, there is no real coalescence of atoms; rather, they simply come into contact with each other and always retain their own shape and individuality. This, too, was the opinion of the ancient atomists; see Kirk, Raven and Schofield, The Presocratic Philosophers, p. 426.
- 118.
OED protoplast2: The first former, fashioner or creator (1600–1872).
- 119.
See Newton, ‘An Hypothesis explaining the Properties of Light’, Cohen and Schofield (eds.), Isaac Newton’s Papers, p. 180. Note the analogy to the water cycle.
- 120.
See supra Pt.I.1.2, Text II and comment.
- 121.
- 122.
See Newton, Optice, Qu. 23, pp. 322–48, pp. 343–4. There is no comment on this emendation in Koyré, ‘Les Queries de l’Optique’.
- 123.
I.e., attraction and repulsion; see supra Pt.II.2.2, p. 54.
- 124.
Quoted in Westfall, Never at Rest, pp. 647–8 n.59 (italics mine).
- 125.
See Lee (tr.), Plato Timaeus, p. 41: ‘as for the world—call it that or cosmos or any other name’, ‘we must ask ... whether it has always existed and had no beginning, or whether it has come into existence and started from some beginning’; and the ‘answer is that it has come into being; for it is visible, tangible, and corporeal, and therefore perceptible by the senses’.
- 126.
Ibid., p. 72.
- 127.
See Zaitzsev, ‘The Meaning of Early Medieval Geometry’, p. 541 and n.46. For a more accurate description of the ‘forms’ (paradeigma), see infra Conclusion p. 131.
- 128.
For the receptacle, see Lee (tr.), Plato Timaeus, pp. 67, 70–3, and the comparison, p. 69, between the receptacle and the ‘nurse’ or ‘mother’, i.e., the female matrix or womb.
- 129.
Ibid., p. 79.
- 130.
I.e., ‘determinate cause’, see ibid., p. 96. By introducing such relations, the demiurge makes the cosmos intelligible to the intellect, not merely perceptible by the senses (see p. 122 n.125. above).
- 131.
Lee (tr.), Plato Timaeus, pp. 79 and 66.
- 132.
Ibid., p. 51; see also pp. 43, 54–5.
- 133.
Ibid., p. 73. Afterwards the copy process is carried out by created divinities.
- 134.
Ibid., p. 43.
- 135.
Ibid., p. 43, see also p. 78.
- 136.
See p. 117 n.87 above.
- 137.
Quoted in Van Helden, Measuring the Universe, p. 63 (additions in square brackets mine). See also Schlick, Space and Time in Contemporary Physics, pp. 67–9.
- 138.
See Newton, Principia mathematica (C-M), Bk. III, General Scholium, p. 544, and Newton, The Principia, Bk. III, General Scholium, p. 586.
- 139.
See also Newton, Opticks (C-R), Qu. 31, pp. 375–406, p. 401, where he notes that the active principles that cause physical phenomena such as gravity, cohesion and fermentation are ‘general Laws of Nature, by which the Things themselves are form’d’.
- 140.
- 141.
Without this assumption, Newton’s teleological argument leads only to an intelligence which produces system, order and teleology in the cosmos, thereby leaving a dualism between supra-cosmic mind and the material to be shaped.
- 142.
See Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, p. 630. Note that the last six words echo some scriptural texts, for which see infra Appendix, p. 143 and n.19.
- 143.
Newton, Principia mathematica (C-M), Bk. III, General Scholium, p. 546; cf. and Newton, The Principles, Bk. III, General Scholium, p. 588.
- 144.
Newton, Opticks (C-R), Qu 28, pp. 362–70, p. 369.
- 145.
See supra Pt.I.1.2, Text XI.
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Kassler, J.C. (2018). IV Generalising to the Divine Sensorium . In: Newton’s Sensorium: Anatomy of a Concept. Archimedes, vol 53. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72053-1_4
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