Abstract
In the foregoing inquiry I hope to have shown why an evidence-based interpretation of Newton’s sensorium concept must follow the order of knowledge required by the method of reasoning from experience that he called ‘the analogy of nature’, otherwise there will continue to be guesses about, as well as misinterpretations concerning the meaning of his concept.
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Notes
- 1.
For some of these guesses, see supra Introduction, p. v nn.2 and 3.
- 2.
See supra Pt.IV.4.2, p. 110.
- 3.
Buchdahl, Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Science, p. 595. His answer assumes that readers contemporary with Newton would have had up-to-date knowledge about the human sensorium, but this is doubtful.
- 4.
See supra Pt.III.3.3, p. 93.
- 5.
Buchdahl, Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Science, p. 596 (bold mine).
- 6.
Ibid., p. 596.
- 7.
See supra Pt.I.1.2, Text XII, p. 25, n.141.
- 8.
See Newton, Principia mathematica [1687], Scholium to the Definitions, pp. 5–11, p. 5.
- 9.
See supra Pt. I .1.2, Text VIII, comment to Text VIII and Text XI.
- 10.
See Newton, Principia mathematica (C-M), Bk. III, General Scholium, pp. 543–7, p. 545; see also Newton, The Principia, Bk. III, General Scholium, pp. 585–90, p. 587, where, according to the translators, the second edition had ‘space, eternity, and infinity’.
- 11.
See Alexander, The Clarke-Leibniz Correspondence, pp. xxxii–xxxiii, who pointed out that solutions to the problem of space can be classed according to three questions about space: (1) the question of the ontological status mentioned above; (2) the question as to which concepts of space are most useful in physics; (3) the epistemological ‘or perhaps psychological’ question of how we come to acquire our knowledge of space. According to him, Clarke and Leibniz were concerned primarily with the first question; Newton, primarily with the second; whereas Kant was the first to seriously address the third question.
- 12.
Newton, ‘De gravitatione’, pp. 122–31, et passim (critique of Descartes), pp. 129–38 (Newton’s exploration of the problem of space). Although his polemic is focused chiefly on Descartes, he also indulges in some anti-scholastic polemic, as recently has been shown by Levitin, ‘Newton and Scholastic Philosophy’.
- 13.
Cassirer, The Problem of Knowledge, p. 27; for the Renaissance background to the problem of space, see also Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos, pp. 174–86,
- 14.
See Newton, ‘De gravitatione’, pp. 142–3.
- 15.
See ibid., pp. 133–4.
- 16.
According to Margenau, The Nature of Physical Reality, pp. 253–5, this is the ‘time-honored question’. Note, therefore, that this question was posed as a thought experiment by the ancient sceptic, Sextus Empiricus; see Stead, Doctrine and Philosophy in Early Christianity, XX, p. 310. For Newton’s copy of the 1621 Opera of Sextus; see Harrison, The Library of Isaac Newton, (No. 1503), p. 237.
- 17.
Biener, ‘De Gravitatione Reconsidered’, pp. 12–7.
- 18.
Ibid., pp. 13, 15.
- 19.
See Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 108; see also pp. 170–1, 428–42, et passim.
- 20.
Jammer, Concepts of Space, p. 95
- 21.
Ibid., p. 11; for a summary account of the representation of Epicurean positions in Lucretius, De rerum natura, see also pp. 8–11. For Newton’s copy of this book, see Harrison, The Library of Isaac Newton, (No. 1113), p. 196.
- 22.
Guicciardini, Isaac Newton, pp. 313–5.
- 23.
Ibid., p. 320.
- 24.
See Lee (tr.), Plato The Republic, [Pts. VII and VIII], Bks.VI and VII, especially the epistemology represented in the similes of the sun, the divided line and the cave, which, in short is that the intellectual eye, fixed on objects in the twilight world of becoming, only form opinions and seems to lack intelligence; whereas the same eye, fixed on objects illuminated by reality (i.e., paradeigma) in the world of being, understands and possesses intelligence (i.e., knowledge).
- 25.
See Tiles and Tiles, An Introduction to Historical Epistemology, pp. 16–23, et passim. Newton himself owned a copy of the 1626 Latin translation of Plato’s Republic, and he also owned a copy of the 1602 copy of Plato’s works in Greek and Latin as interpreted by Ficino; see Harrison, The Library of Isaac Newton, (Nos. 1324–5), p. 218.
- 26.
See Belkind, ‘Newton’s Conceptual Argument’, p. 274.
- 27.
Belkind, ‘Newton’s Conceptual Argument’, p. 271; see also pp. 276–80 for his interpretation of the doctrine of place. Note that Newton defined place as part of space, i.e., as the volume a body occupies within a larger volume that contains it. He thus rejects Descartes’s definition of place (as Belkind pointed out), as well as Aristotle’s definition summarised supra Pt. IV .4.3, p. 119.
- 28.
Ibid., pp. 290–1.
- 29.
See Ray, Time, Space and Philosophy, pp. 108–10, 146–50, 215–6.
- 30.
See Toulmin, ‘Criticism in the History of Science’.
- 31.
Leyden, Seventeenth Century Metaphysics, pp. 229–60, pp. 256–7. The context of his argument suggests that, for him, a ‘metaphysical foundation’ is synonymous with a ‘theological foundation’.
- 32.
I.e., not by miracles; see supra Pt.IV.4.2, p. 106 and n.25.
- 33.
See supra Pt. I .1.2, Text II, p. 26 and nn.147, 148.
- 34.
See Newton, ‘Tempus et Locus’, p. 123, §7 (italics mine). The translator from the Latin suggested that the manuscript dates from the early 1690s, but he provided no supporting evidence for this.
- 35.
See Stead, Doctrine and Philosophy in Early Christianity, I, pp. 180–1. Other articles in his collection consider whether the doctrine implies that God cannot have properties but can still exercise a plurality of functions and whether the doctrine is a problem for Christian orthodoxy.
- 36.
OED 1: Now applied only with reference to the Pythagorean or other Greek philosophies, in which numbers were regarded as real entities and as the primordial principles of existence; see also 1b (applied to the deity), where the first two citations are to the Platonists, Henry More and Ralph Cudworth (the different usage of Leibniz is given afterwards).
- 37.
For Willis’s conception, see supra Pt. III .3.2, p. 77. Note that in 1705 and 1712 Samuel Clarke, promulgated a different version of the doctrine of God as absolutely simple in opposition to the doctrine set down in Article 1 of the ‘Thirty-nine Articles’, subscription to which was part of the requirement for membership in the Church of England; see Kassler, Seeking Truth, pp. 205–6 and, for a response to Clarke, pp. 291–2.
- 38.
See Morris, Six Theories of Mind, who indicated, p. 16, that Aristotle was the earliest opponent of the substance conception of mind, even though ‘the substance approach continually creeps into’ his account.
- 39.
See Kirk, Raven and Schofield, The Presocratic Philosophers, p. 366, and, in particular, the variety of dualism evident in the fragments of Anaxagoras of Clazomenæ, pp. 363–6, who described mind, ‘like everything else,’ as ‘corporeal’, but claimed that mind ‘owes its power partly to its fineness, partly to the fact that it alone, though present in the mixture [of matter], yet remains unmixed’, i.e., pure.
- 40.
See Morris, Six Theories of Mind, pp. 12–20.
- 41.
See Kassler, Inner Music, pp. 44–8.
- 42.
See ibid., pp. 21–30.
- 43.
According to Yolton, Thinking Matter, p. 107, for those who found real causation only in God, ‘the result was that God was active in the world, either at the beginning or continuously’.
- 44.
See supra Pt. IV .4.2, p. 108.
- 45.
In the words of Morris, Six Theories of Mind, p. 42: ‘how could a mind existentially confined to its own states know a world different in kind from itself?’ For Edwin Burtt, the relation of ‘man’ to nature was a central problem for the science that developed from the time of Copernicus to the time of Newton; in addition to many references to this problem in the main part of his text, see Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern science, pp. 310 seq.
- 46.
In classical (Newtonian) physical theory, this gap occurs, because the measurement process is fully analysable in terms of the equations of motion alone, so that the interaction between object and observer is negligible; for an instance of the gap in applied physics, see Kassler, ‘Musicology and the Problem of Sonic Abuse’, pp. 328–9. But in the new physics (quantum and relativity), there is an unanalysable element in every measuring process that is due to the intervention of the observer on the object. Consequently, since the observer can no longer be regarded as an innocent registrar of his or her objective observations, predictions can never be exact and only probability values can be established.
- 47.
In Newton’s day, there were two rival definitions of the term ‘substance’: one as that in which properties ultimately inhere but which itself is not a property or quality; the other as that which is independent or self-sufficient, not requiring anything else in order to exist. Roger North followed the first definition, whereas Samuel Clarke followed the second. Therefore, they may be described, respectively, as epistemological and ontological realists; see Kassler, Seeking Truth, pp. 184–5 and nn.299–302.
- 48.
Morris, Six Theories of Mind, p. 38.
- 49.
See ibid., p. 27.
- 50.
Perhaps they belong to a class of hypotheses that Gerald Holton called ‘thematic’ and described as ‘precisely built as a bridge over the gap of ignorance’; see Holton, ‘Presuppositions in the Construction of Theories’, pp. 91–3.
- 51.
Margenau, The Nature of Physical Reality, p. 73.
- 52.
See Jammer, Concepts of Space, pp. 138, 138, 148.
- 53.
See Morris, Six Theories of Mind, p. 10.
- 54.
See Yolton, Thinking Matter, who traces aspects the immaterialist-materialist controversy in the eighteenth century.
- 55.
See Boring, A History of Experimental Psychology, who focused on the period 1860–1910, though with attention to preceding developments; see also Clarke and Jacyna, Nineteenth-Century Origins of Neuroscientific Concepts.
- 56.
Ibid., p. 275.
- 57.
The five theories conceived mind, respectively, as process, act, relation, substantive and function.
- 58.
See Morris, Six Theories of Mind, p. 28.
- 59.
Ibid., p. 46.
- 60.
Insofar as the divine sensorium is concerned, that part of Newton’s concept was not mentioned by William Paley in his book-length argument from design. In addition, in a single passage on the human sensorium, he made no mention of Newton, when he wrote: ‘if there be those who think, that the contractedness and debility of the human faculties which the expectations of religion point out to us, I would ask them, ... what advancement and improvement, the rational faculty ... may not admit of, when placed amidst new objects, and endowed with a sensorium, adapted as it undoubtedly will be, and as our present senses are, to the perception of those substances, and of those properties of things with which our concern may lie’; see Paley, Natural Theology, pp. 595–6 (italics mine).
- 61.
See Boring, A History of Experimental Psychology, pp. 36, 75–6, 82–5, 87, 101, 143–4, 668, 672–4, 714; see also Clarke and Jacyna, Nineteenth-Century Origins of Neuroscientific Concepts, pp. 92, 105–6, 125–6, 215–6, 330, 334, 403 n.97, 427 n.17. Neither source mentions Newton’s sensorium.
- 62.
Ibid., p. 105.
- 63.
See supra Pt.III.3.2, p. 82.
- 64.
Clarke and Jacyna, Nineteenth-Century Origins of Neuroscientific Concepts, pp. 103–6. Note that Procháska claimed to have modelled his procedures on certain aspects of Newton’s scientific procedure; that he was not alone in this claim; see supra Pt.II.2.2, p. 50 n.108.
- 65.
Ibid., pp. 116, 125. For an extensive treatment of Müller’s theories, see Boring, A History of Experimental Psychology, pp. 82–90, et passim.
- 66.
See Clarke and Jacyna, Nineteenth-Century Origins of Neuroscientific Concepts, p. 92. Nevertheless, in 1959 one well-known neuroscientist returned to the notion, but not the term, of a sensorium commune in the oblong marrow (medulla oblongata); see Kassler, Music, Science, Philosophy, pp. 290–1 and n.60.
- 67.
See Clarke and Jacyna, Nineteenth-Century Origins of Neuroscientific Concepts, p. 303 (italics mine).
- 68.
In the book cited in n.67 above, there is some evidence of these two tendencies, especially in regard to the ‘corpus striatum’, for this is the commentators’ usual term (even for Willis) and so indexed, even though, pp. 248, 263, two of the writers surveyed by them used the term ‘corpora striata’. For an instance of this problem, see also supra Pt.III.3.2, p. 84 n.123.
- 69.
See supra Pt. II .2.2, p. 57 and Pt.IV.4.1, pp. 99–104.
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Kassler, J.C. (2018). Conclusion. In: Newton’s Sensorium: Anatomy of a Concept. Archimedes, vol 53. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72053-1_5
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