Abstract
As in the case of ancient atomism, the revival of atomistic doctrines in the seventeenth century gave rise to questions regarding the existence and properties of primordial entities. With their insistent emphasis on sensory experience as a foundation of physical knowledge, the English experimental empiricists were faced with various epistemological problems. The majority, such as Robert Hooke and Henry Power, believed that atoms could in principle be observed: hence their problem was not the nature of knowledge of the microscopic, but rather how our knowledge could be extended into that realm.1 Thinkess such as Henry More and Ralph Cudworth tended to the view that, even if we could observe atoms, it would not add to our knowledge of first principles.2 Newton, and to some extent Locke, were confronted with a more difficult problem. Simply stated it is this: are there justificatory principles by which to sanction inferences from what is observable to what in principle is unobservable? If the basis of natural knowledge is strictly confined to what is actually or possibly observable, how can any claims be established about the nature and existence of atoms? The following study will refer to these questions as the problem of transduction;3 moreover it will be concerned primarily to analyse Newton’s use of the phrase ‘the analogy of Nature’. In its best known context that phrase appears in the Rules of Philosophizing prefixed to the third Book of the Principia in 1713.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
For a detailed discussion of this approach with a full analysis of a range of texts see Laurens Laudan ‘The Clock Metaphor and Probabilism: The Impact of Descartes on English Methdoological Thought, 1650–65’, Annals of Science 22 (1966), 81–97. I am grateful to Charles B. Schmitt Laurens Laudan, Gerd Buchdahl and John Yolton for comments on an early draft of this paper. They are in no way responsible for its interpretatin.
See Henry More, Divine Dialogues (London, 1668)
Ralph Cudworth, The True Intellectual System of the Universe (London, 1678).
In his study Philosophy, Science and Sense Perception (The Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore, 1964), Maurice Mandelbaum has used the term ‘transdiction’ in designating this problem. To conform more with the usage of the terms ‘deduction’ and ‘induction’, I have decided to use the term ‘transduction’, i.e. ‘leading across’. In no way do I wish to imply thereby that the latter is a special type of ‘ inference’; rather, the term is used to designate a problem recognized in seventeenth-century natural philosophy.
Sir Isaac Newton, The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, translated by Benjamin Motte (London, 1729), vol. II, 203. I have altered the Latin of the statement of the rule in the interest of accuracy. The corresponding Latin is in the appendix to this paper. The original is found in Isaac Newton, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Cambridge, 1713), 357.
Another such integral element is homogeneity. Though never explicitly stated by Newton, this is a fundamental presupposition lying behind his identification of a quantity of matter with its vis inertiae, a proportionality questioned by Roger Cotes in a letter of February 1711/2. See Joseph Edleston, Correspondence of Sir Isaac Newton and Professor Cotes (London, 1850), 65–66.
This is the received view as developed in the writings of Basil Willey, The Seventeenth-Century Background (London, 1934)
M. Macklen, The Anatomy of the World: Relations between Natural and Moral Law from Donne to Pope (Minnesota, 1958)
G. P. Conger, Theories of Macrocosms and Microcosms in the History of Philosophy (New York, 1922).
For this topic see Earl R. Wasserman, ‘Nature Moralized: The Divine Analogy in the Eighteenth Century’, A Journal of English Literary History 20 (1953), 39–76.
See, for instance: Henry Pemberton, A View of Sir Isaac newton’s Philosophy (London, 1728), 24–25; Colin Maclaurin, An Account of Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophical Discoveries (London, 1748), 22
Gowin Knight, An Attempt to demonstrate that all the Phaenomena of Nature may be explained by two simple active Principles Attraction and Repulsion (London, 1748), 7
George Cheyne, Philosophical Principles of Religion: Natural and Revealed (London, 1715), 36 Willem Jacob Storem-van’s Gravesande, Phyices Elementa Mathematica sive Introduction ad Philosophiam Newtoniam (Editio Secunda, Lugduni Batavorum, 1725), Praefatio, and Liber I, Caput I, 1–7
Benjamin Martin, Pilosophia Britannica: or a New and Comprehensive System of the Newtonian Philosophy (Reading, 1747), 1–42. In his first lecture, Martin discusses Newton’s four rules in some detail. Thus when ‘we take survey of the visible world’, we conclude that all bodies ‘consist of one and the same sort of Matter or Substance’. He concludes that ‘Matter, thus variously modified and configurated, constitutes an infinite variety of bodies, all of which are found to have the following common Properties ’.
Thomas Rutherforth, A System of Natural Philosophy (Cambridge, 1748), Introduction. The first three rules are discussed the only means of making ‘knowledge real and universal’ Rule Three is seen primarily as an inductive rule.
Richgard Helsham, A Course of Lectures in Natural Philosophy, published by Bryan Robinson, 5th edition (London, 1777). The four rules are quoted in full in the Preface. Robinson notes that ‘This method and these rules, have been carefully observed by our author in these Lectures ’ (p. viii).
George Adams, Lectures on Natural and Experimental Philosophy (London, 1794), vol. II. In a lengthy lecture entitled ‘In the method of Reasoning in Natural Philosophy’ Adams concludes his discussion of the history of method by analysing Newton’s first three rules. Of the third rule he says that it allows us ‘by analogy to extend our conclusion to all other bodies, and thus make it universa: a way of reasoning, that is agreeable to the harmony of things and to the old maxim ascribed to Hermes (p 134). For this maxim see note 40 below, on Maclurin. Adams is drawing on Maclaurin’s treatise.
Tiberius Cavallo, The Elements of Natural or Experimental Philosophy (London, 1803), vol. I, 7. Quotes Newton’s four rules and connects them with the generality of the three laws.
William Nicholson, An Introduction to Natural Philosophy (London, 1805), vol. I. In his introduction he discusses intuition, demonstration, and probabilistic knowledge, saying of natural philosophy that it is based on analogy: ‘To give stability to this science, it is necessary to admit no probabilities, as first principles of analogy, but those which possess the strongest and most incontrovertible resemblance to truth. For this purpose, the following rules are adopted’: the first three rules are then quoted without comment.
Joseph Pristley, Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit, 2nd edition (Birmingham, 1782), sections I and II
Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, (Euvres Complètes de Condillac, tome troisième (Paris, 1803), chapitre XII, 327–358
Petrus van Musschenbroek, Elementa physicae (Lugduni Batavorum, 1734), 6, and Introductio ad philosophiam naturalem (Lugduni Batavorum, 1764), vol. I, 14; Roger Joseph Boscovicch, A Theory of Natural Philosophy (Latin-English Edition, London, 1922), sections 40–42. Boscovich is critical of the third rule on the grounds that induction does not support the transference of many physical properties to the parts of phenomena. The Theory was first published in 1758.
Brian Higgins, A Philosophical Essay Concerning Light (London, 1776), 18–19
James Hutton, Dissertations on Different Subjects in Natural Philosophy (Edinburgh, 1792), part III, 279–300
William Whewell, On the Philosophy of Discovery (London, 1860), chapter XVIII, 181–200, section 14. Whewell is mainly concerned in this chapter with the notion of vera causa as discussed in Newton’s first rule. He points out, however, that the third rule’s conception of universal laws in inconsistent with the stricture of the fourth rule that a ‘law may be inaccurate’. See also Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (London, 1840), vol. I, 416, where Whewell observes that the third rule is circular.
James Challis, ‘On Newton’s “Foundations of all Philosophy”‘, Phil. Mag. 26 (1863), 280–292. In this particular article Challis is attempting to base a theory of science on Newton’s third rule. These discussions are the most interesting in the literature I have examined. Most of these writers are concerned with the problem of generalizing properties of matter, rather than with Newton’s criterion for deciding essential qualities. Many other writers such as Halley, Stirling, Ferguson, Desaguilers, Wright and Worster mention or refer to the rule; these with the above references are more than sufficient to establish the widespread influence of this aspect of Newton’s methodology throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. I am grateful to Laurens Laudan for the references to Condillac and Musschenbrock, and to Peter Heimann for calling attentinn to Higgins.
This question is discussed with great vigour and in detail by James Hutton in his Dissertations on Different Subjects in Natural Philosophy (Edinburgh 1792), part III, ‘Physical Dissertations on the Powers of Matter and Appearance of Bodies’, and in his An Investigation of the Principles of Knowledge, and of the Process of Reason, From Sense to Science and Philosophy (Edinburgh, 1794), vol. II, section XII. Hutton makes it clear by referring to unnamed contemporaries that the problem of identifying matter with bodies or with some sort of unperceived theoretical enttty was a live issue in the late eighteenth century. His own position is unambiguous. Identifying matter with intensive powers he states: ‘Matter as a thing distinctly different from body has not been observed by us nor ever can be made the subject of our observation. Our immediate knowledge, or all external information comes necessarily from sensible and perceptible bodies, which being formed of matter must be distinctly different from it’, Dissertations, part III 306.
A similar distinction is made by the Newtonian Thomas Exley, Principles of Natural Philosophy: or, a New Theory of Physics, Founded on Gravitation, and Applied in Explaining the General Properties of Matter (London, 1829). Exley makes a distinction between ‘The theoretical constutution of matter’, section II, 6–45, and ‘The theoretical construction of bodies’. In Postulate I (p. 3) he states: ‘Let it be granted that an atom of matter consists of an indefinitely small sphere of repulsion, which is the central part of an indefinitely extended concentric sphere of attraction’; drawing on this postulate, Proposition I of section II states: ‘If matter be constituted, as in post. I., it will be capable of rest and motion, as will also the bodies consisting of such matter’. [Italics mine.] Exley’s distinction is really that between ordinary matter and ‘theoretical’ matter; since in Definition I of section I he defines matter as ‘that substance which we perceive by the senses’.
For a discussion of these theories see P. M. Heimann and J. E. McGuire, ‘Newtonian Forces and Lockean Powers: Concepts of Matter in Eighteenth-Century Thought’, Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 3 (1971), 233–306.
There is much literature on this, though more research is desirabe. The standard sources are: Kurd Lasswitz, Geschichte der Atomistik yom Mittelater bis Newton, vol. I (Hamburg and Leipzig, 1890)
J. R. Partington, A History of Chemistry, vol. II (London, 1961).
See also M. Boas [Hall], ‘The Establishment of the Mechanical Philosophy’, Osiris 10 (1952), 412–541
R. Hooykaas, ‘The Experimental Origin of Chemical Atomic and Molecular Theory before Boyle’, Chymia, 2 (1949), 65–80
11e Thomas S. Kuhn, ‘Robert Boyle and Structuall Chemistry in the Seveneeenth Century’, Isis 43 (1952), 12–36
Tullio Gregory, ‘Studi sull’Atomismo de Seicento. David van Goorle e Daniel Sennert’, Giornale Critico della Filosofia Italiana, Fasc I (1966), 44–63; W. Subow, ‘Zur Geschichte des Kampfes zwischen dem Atomismus und dem Aristotelismus im 17. Jahrhundert (Minima naturalia und Mixtio)’, in N. A. Figurowski et al., Sowjetische Beiträge zur Geschichte der Naturwissenschaft (Berlin, 1960), 161–191
E. J. Dijksterhuis, The Mechanization of the World Picture, trans C. Dikshoorn (Oxford, 1962), patt III, section V
Robert H. Kargon, Atomism in England from Hariot to Newton (Oxford, 1966).
For a discussion of this distinction in relation to Galileo, Gassendi, Descartes and leibniz see Ivor Leclerc, ‘Atomism, Substance, and the Concept of Body in Seventeenth-Century Thought’, Filosofia Della Scienza, No. 27 (Turin, 1968) (printed also in Filosofia, 1968).
Petrus Gassendi, Opera Omnia, Band I, Syntagma Philosophicum (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstat, 1964).
David J. Furley, Two Studies in the Greek Atomists (Princeton 1967) 24. The sentence is from Furley’s translation of Epicurus’s Letter to Herodotus. Furley’s treatment of the use of analogy in the atomic theory of Epicurus is important and throws light on Gassendi’s though.
Gassendi op. cir., Syntagma, caput VII, 273 and 279.
Gassendi, caput VII, 280–282.
J.E. McGuire and P. M. Rattansi, ‘Newton and the “Pipes of Pan”‘, Notes & Records of the Royal Society 21 (1966), 108–143.
MS. U. L. C. Add. 3965. 6. Fiolo 270r: ‘Atomos vero corpora solida esse voluerunt et figuris varÿs praedita, non mathematice sed physice tantum indivisibilia. Nam et atomum unumquemque ex pertibus innumeris minoribus constare sed quae non ex conventu conciliatae sunt, at arcte et sine poris et intestitÿs ab aeterno stipatae et adeo condensatae et in solidum compactae ut in solidum compactae ut nullis Naturae viribus ab invicem avelli et separari possinit. Quae ex atomorum congressu conflantur iterum dividi posse et in atomos eodem resolvi propterea quod atomi non in solidum congrediantur sed se mutuo in puncto tantum mathematico contingant spatÿs reliquis inter se vacuis relictus: sed atomos ipsos ob soliditatem et plenum partium contactum ac densitatem summam nec dividi posse nec alteri nec ulla ratione comminui nec augmentum unquam sumere sed immutabilia rerum semina in aeternum manere, et inde fieri ut rerum species perpetuo conserventur.’
Works of the Honoruable Robert Boyle, ed. Thomas Birch (London, 1744), vol. II. Boyle states in his prefacee that he had formed his opinions before reading Gassendi.
See also Walter Charleton, Physiologia: Epicuro-Gassendo-Charttoniana: or a Fabrick of Science Natural, upon the Hypothesis of Atoms (London, 1654).
Boyle, Physiologia: Epicuro-Gassendo-Charttoniana: or a Fabrick of Science Natural, upon the Hypothesis of Atoms (London, 1654)., note 22, vol. II, 474.
Boyle, Physiologia: Epicuro-Gassendo-Charttoniana: or a Fabrick of Science Natural, upon the Hypothesis of Atoms (London, 1654), 460.
Boyle, Physiologia: Epicuro-Gassendo-Charttoniana: or a Fabrick of Science Natural, upon the Hypothesis of Atoms (London, 1654)., 460.
Boyle, Physiologia: Epicuro-Gassendo-Charttoniana: or a Fabrick of Science Natural, upon the Hypothesis of Atoms (London, 1654)., 465.
Boyle, Physiologia: Epicuro-Gassendo-Charttoniana: or a Fabrick of Science Natural, upon the Hypothesis of Atoms (London, 1654) 466.
Boyle, Physiologia: Epicuro-Gassendo-Charttoniana: or a Fabrick of Science Natural, upon the Hypothesis of Atoms (London, 1654)., vol. IV, 312.
Italics mine. Sir Isaac Newton, Opticks or a Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections & Colours of Light (based on the fourth edition, London, 1730, Dover Publications, 1952), 400.
Sir Isaac Newton, Opticks or a Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections & Colours of Light (based on the fourth edition, London, 1730, Dover Publications, 1952) 352.
Sir Isaac Newton, Opticks or a Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections & Colours of Light (based on the fourth edition, London, 1730, Dover Publications, 1952) 254–269.
Sir Isaac Newton, Opticks or a Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections & Colours of Light (based on the fourth edition, London, 1730, Dover Publications, 1952) 255.
Sir Isaac Newton, Opticks or a Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections & Colours of Light (based on the fourth edition, London, 1730, Dover Publications, 1952) 262. Henry Power expresses the same conception: ‘The Doctrine of Effiuxions, their penetrating Natures, their invisible paths, and unsuspected effects, are very considerable, for several Effusions there may be from diverse other Bodies, which invisibly act their parts at any time and perhaps through any Medium: a part of Philosophy but yet in discovery, and will, I fear, prove the Last Leaf to be turned over in the Book of Nature.’ (Experimental Philosophy, 58.) Power’s last sentence is taken directly from Sir Thomas Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica, edited by Charles Saye (London 1904), 218–219. It must be noted however, that like many of their contemporaries, Power and Browne were never entirely unambiguous about observigg atoms in principle.
Sir Isaac Newton, Opticks or a Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections & Colours of Light (based on the fourth edition, London, 1730, Dover Publications, 1952) 340
This phrase is employed by Newton repeatedly in his work. The greatest and most perceptive of Newton’s disciples. Colin Maclaurin in his An Account of Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophical Discoveries, referring to this Newtonian conception as used in the Opticks with respect to the ‘more hidden parts of nature’ observes: ‘he endeavours to judge of them [causes], by analogy, from what he had found in the greater motions of the system; a way of reasoning that is agreeable to the harmony of things, and to the old maxim ascribed by Hermes, and approved by the observation and judgement of the best philosophers. “That what passes in the heavens above is similar and analogous to what passes on earth below”‘; op. cit., note 9, 22. As we shall see, this observation accurately reflects the spirit of the third rule.
Joseph Edleston, Correspondence of Sir Isaac Newton and Professor Cotes (London, 1850), 155. The Scholium Generale of the second edition of the Principia Mathematica Philosophia Naturalis (Cambridge, 1713) reads: ‘In hac Philosophia Propositiones deducuntur ex Phaenomenis, & redduntur generales per Inductionem’ (484).
He read Johannes Magirus, Physiologiae Peripateticae Libri Sex cum Commentaris (Cantabrigiae 1642)
Daniel Stahl, Axiomata Philosophica sub Titulis XX Comprehensa (London, 1652).
See J. E. McGuire and Martin Tamny, Certain Philosophical Questions: Newton’s Trinity Notebook (Cambridge University Press, 1983), 3–25
Richard S. Westfall, ‘The Foundations of Newton’s Philosophy of Nature’, British Journal for the History of Science 1 (1962) 172. Newton probably also read Robert Sanderson’s Logic.
See G. L. Huxley, ‘Two Newtonian Studies’, Harvard Library Bulletin 13 (1959), 348–361. In any event coaching in traditional logic was an essential part of the curriculum in Newton’s day.
For contexts in which Newton uses this term, see letter to Cotes, op. cit., note 41, 155 and 156, and the Scholium Generale, Principia (1713), 484.
Philosophy, Science and Sense Perception, 77. Thinkers such as Newton and Descarts, though their philosophies differ in many respects, were concerned more with the way principles are established, and less with ‘verifying’ them or ascertaining their predictive powers. The Newtonians, however, pointed out that Newton’s gravitational theory predicted things not known before, and that its explanatory power covered phenomena hitherto unrelated.
Principia, op. cit., note 39, 484. In the preface to the first edition Newton uses this expression. Newton’s use of this verb will be discussed fully in section III below.
Correspondence of Isaac Newton, ed. H. W. Turnbull (London, 1961), vol. I, 209 (letter dated 6 July 1672). For Cotes, Correspondence of Newton and Cotes, 155 and 156.
Isaac Newton, The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, translated by Benjamin Motte (London, 1729), vol. II, 204.
For a full discussion of these early drafts of the Rule, see I. Bernard Cohen’s ‘Hypotheses in Newton’s Philosophy’, Physis Rivista Internazionale di Storia della Scienza 8 (1966), 163–184, and Chapters 6 and 7.
Vincent Wing, Astronomia Britannia (London, 1669). Trinity College Library, N. Q. 18.36.
U.L.C. Add. 4004, Folio 15r: ‘Ax: 100. Every thing doth naturally perserve in yt state in wch it is unlesse it bee interrupted by some externall cause, hence axiome 1st, & 2d, & 3d. A body once moved will always keep ye same celerity, quantity & determination of its motion.’
John Herivel, The Background to Newton’s PRINCIPIA: A Study of Newton’s Dynamical Researches in the years 1664–84 (Oxford, 1965), 55–64.
John Herivel, The Background to Newton’s PRINCIPIA: A Study of Newton’s Dynamical Researches in the years 1664–84 , 9–13. In the early propositions of Book I, Principia, Newton operates mathematically with the tangential and inertial components as if they were the same, though he clearly recognized that they are conceptually distinct.
For a somewhat different approach to the problems just discussed see Derek T. Whiteside ‘Newtons’s Early Thoughts on Planetary Motion: A Fresh Look’, The British Journal for the History of Science 2 (1964), 117–137
John Herivel’s reply, ‘Newton’s First Solution to the Problem of Kepler Motion’, BJHS 2 (1964–65), 350–351. Both scholars tend to under estimate the ontological presuppositions characterized above, which provided the framework for Newton’s mathematical analysis of motion.
N.Q. 16.200, Trinity College Library. For an analysis of this draft see Chapter 6; see also section III of the present chapter.
John Passmore, Philosophical Reasoning (London, 1961), 38
Frank E. Manuel, Isaac Newton, Historian (Cambridge, 1963), 44.
For a discussion of these thinkers see A. A. Luce, Berkeley and Malebranche (London 1934)
George Berkeley, Philosophical Commentaries, ed. A. A. Luce, note to entry 358, 388; Richard H. Popkin, ‘Berkeley and Pyrrhonism’, The Review of Metaphysics 5 (1951), 223–246
Richard H. Popkin, ‘Leibniz and the French Sceptics’, Revue Internationale de Philosophic, nos. 76–77 (1966), 228–247
Richard A. Watson, ‘The Breakdown of Cartesian Metaphysics’, Journal of the History of Philosophy I (1963), 177–197
Harry M. Bracken, ‘Berkeley and Malebranche on Ideas’, The Modern Schoolman 41 (1963), 1–15
Anita Dunlevy Fritz ‘Malebranche and the Immaterialism of Berkeley’, Review of Metaphysics 3 (1949–50), 59–80
Richard A. Watson, The Downfall of Cartesianism 1673–1717: a Study of Epistemological Issues in Late 17th-Century Cartesianism (Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, 1966). The main early anti-Cartesian writers in France were: Simon Foucher, Critique de la vérité où l’on examine en même-terms une partie des principes de M r Descartes (Paris, 1675); P. D. Hueti, Censura Philosophiae Cartesianae (Editio Quarta aucta et emendata, Paris, 1694); J. B. du Hamel Astronomia Physicae (Paris 1660)
Nicolas Malebranche, De la Recherche de la Vérité, ed. Genevieve Lewis (Paris, 1945), Eclaircissement vie: ‘Qu’il est très difficile de prouver qu’il y a des Corps’, 24–33.
Nicolas Malebranche, Dialogues on Metaphysics and on Religion, translated by Morris Ginsberg (London, 1923), 71–75, 167–168.
Beatrice K. Rome, The Philosophy of Malebranche (Chicago, 1963), chapter VI.
René Descartes, Philosophical Writings, translated and edited by G. E. M. Anscombe and P. T. Geach (London, 1966), 202. The Principles of Philosophy, from Latin text of 1644. See also (Œuvres de Descartes, edited by Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, vol. VIII, Pars Secunda, CCI, 324.
From Descartes, Philosophical Writings, 202.
For an interesting critique of Descartes’s position see Anthony Kenny, Descartes: A Study of Philosophy (Random House, 1968), 214.
See Henry More, A Collection of Several Philosophical Writings (London, 1712), 61–113.
Descartes, Philosophical Writings, 235.
Descartes, Philosophical Writings,236. Descartes is quit unambiguous about the unity of matte: ‘I do not see how any reasonable man can deny the great advantage of forming ideas about microscopic events (in minutis corpusculis), which elude our senses by their mere minuteness, on the pattern of sensibly observed macroscopic events (in magnis corporibus), instead of bringing into our explanation some new conception of things wholly dissimilar to sensible objects’ (236).
Alan Gewirth, ‘Clarness and Distinctness in Descartes’ in Descartes: a Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Willis Doney (Notre Dame, 1968), 264–277, and Richard Watson, op. cit., note 58 ‘The Breakdown of Cartesian Metaphysics’, 181–184.
Descartes, Philosophical Writings, 208.
Acta Eruditorum, April 1695, 145–157. Gottfried William Leibniz, Philosophical Papers and Letters, translated and edited by Leroy E. Loemker (Chicago, 1956), vol. II, 845, letter to Burcher de Voider (1643–1709) of 23 June 1699. De Voider, among other things, forced Leibniz to formulate some of his clearest statements on substance and the distinction between body and non-extended forces of which it was composed. See also Leibniz’s Specimen Dynamicum of 1695 (Philosophical Papers and Letters, vol. II, 711–738) and On Nature Itself (Ibid., 808–825).
For a discussion of this point with reference to the concept of phaenomena bene fundata see H. W. B. Joseph, Lectures on the Philosophy of Leibniz (Oxford, 1949), chapter 5. The point is clearly made by Leibniz in the following passage: ‘It is to be observed that matter, taken as a complete being is nothing but a collection or what results from it, and that every real collection presupposes simple substances or real unities, and when we consider further what belongs to the nature of these real unities, i.e. perception and its consequences, we are transferred, so to speak, into another world, that is, into the intelligible world of substances, whereas before we were only among the phenomena of the senses’; New Essays concerning Human Understanding, translated by A. G. Langley (New York and London, 1896), 428. Also the following passage: ‘But strictly speaking matter is nothing but a phenomenon founded in things like the rainbow or the parhelion, and all reality belongs only to unities’;
C. J. Gerhard, Die Philosophischen Schriften yon G. W. Leibniz (Berlin, 1875–90), vol. II, 268.
For a classic discussion of this aspect of Leibniz’s thought see Leibniz: the Monadology transaated by Robert Latta (Oxford, 1898), 21–39.
Philosophical Papers and Letters, vol. II, 845.
Philosophical Papers and Letters, p. 838. For a discussion of Leibniz’s theory of matter, see Bertrand Russell, A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz (Cambridge 1900), chapters VII and VIII.
I have used the Torino edition of 1958 edited by Paolo Broinghiar, with a preface by Adriano Carugo and Ludovico Geymonat. The Discorsi was first published in 1638. See also Opere, ed. naz., vol. VIII, 86
The translation is mainly based on Dialogues concerning Two New Sciences, translated by Henry Crew and Alfonso De Salvo (New York, Dover Publications, n. d.), 40–41. I have also consulted Thomas Salisbury’s translation, Mathematical Discourese and Demonstrations touching Two New Sciences (London, 1665), 33. I am grateful to James MacLachlan of the University of Toronto for calling my attention to this passage.
There is a discussion of this by Ernest Goldbeck: ‘Galileis Atomisiik und ihre Quellen’, Biblioteca Mathematica Zeitschrift für Geschichte der mathematischen Wissenschaften, series 3 (Leipzig, 1902), 84–102. The Galilean discussion of ‘atoms’ began in his Discorso intorso alle case che stanno in su l’acqua o che in quella si muovono (Florence, 1612). See Opere, vol. IV. The contribution of matter is discussed there almost as an afterthought.
U. L. C. Add. 4005.15 Folio 81r-v. For an analysis of this draft see Chapter 6. See Draft 2 in
Alexander Koyré, ‘Pour une Edition Critique des Œuvres de Newton’, Revue d’Histoire des Sciences 8 (1955), 19–37.
In his Wiles Lectures, delivered in Belfast, May 1965.
Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (London, 1687), p. 411. Hypothesis II was changed slightly in the third edition; see Alexander Koyré, Newtonian Studies (London, 1965), 265–266.
Isaac Newton, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematics (London, 1726), 389.
A. Rupert Hall and Marie Boas Hall, Unpublished Scientific Papers of Isaac Newton (Cambridge, 1962), 293.
‘Regulam voco Propositionem ominem quae ex Phaenomenss per argumentum Inductionss (stabilitur) colligitur & cum ysdem congruit.’ U. L. C. Add. 3965.13 Folio 420r.
Isaac Newton, Optice: sire de Reflexionibus, Refractionibus, Inflexionibus & Coloribus Lucis (London 1706), 171. A similar distinction between and a use of, these verbs is found in Descartes’s Regulae which Newton probably knew. In Rule XII we find him saying while dis cussing the properties of magnets: ‘Sed insuper ut quaestio sit perfecta, volumus illam omnimo determinari, adeo ut nihil amplius quaeratur, quam id quod deduci potest ex datis.’ (Italics mine.) Œuvres de Descartes, edited by Charles Adam and Paul Tannery (Paris, 1908), vol. X, 431. Also in Rule XII we find: ‘ . primo diligenter colligit illa omnia quae de hoc lapide habere potest experimenta, ex quibus deinde deducere conatur qualis necessaria sit naturam simplicium mixtura ad omnes iilos ’. There is no doubt that there are abundant scholastic precedents for this usage. Like Newton, Descartes is clearly not using ‘deduce’ in the sense of ‘formally deduce’. It is not unlikely that Newton was influenced by Descartes, since both were more concerned with the mode of establishing principles rather than with their explictt verification. A similar observation has been made of Galileo with respect to establishing principles by E. McMullin. See his Introduction in Galileo, Man of Science (Basic Books, New York, 1967), 13.
Opticks (1730), 211.
Optice (1706), 176.
Correspondence, vol. I, 209.
U. L. C. Add. 3970, Folio 479r-v.
Newton, Mathematical Principles (1729), 392.
Op. cit., note 50, 27. This was written just prior to the first version of Book I of the Principia. In February 1692–93 he used the same form of words in writing to Bentley in English: ‘That Gravity should be innate, inherent and essential to Mattte ’. There is no evidence that Newton ever reconsidered his view that vis insita was contrary to gravity in this respect. Quotation from the Bentley letter is from I. Bernard Cohen, Isaac Newton’s Papers and Letters on Natural Philosophy (Cambridge, 1958), 302.
U. L. C. Add. 4004 Folio 15r.
Correspondence of Newton and Cotes, 154–155.
U.L.C. Add. 3970.13, Folio 420r. ‘Hypothesin voco opinionem omnem quae nec phaenom-enon est, nec demonstratur, nec ex Phaenomenis per Argumentum Inductionss deducitur.’ On the justification for Newton’s tougher line on hypothesis, see I. Bernard Cohen, ‘Hypotheses in Newton’s Philosophy’, Physis Rivista lnternationale di Storia della Scienza 8 (1966), 165–184. Also see Chapter 7.
R. Boyle Works (1772), vol. IV, 72.
For two excellent discussions of Boyle and Descartes on analogy, transduction, and hypo-theticalism, see Laurens Laudan, ‘The Clock Metaphor and Probabilism: The Impact of Descartes on English Methodolgoical Thought, 1650–65’, Annals of Science 22 (1966, 81–97, and Maurice Mandelbaum, op cit., note 3, chapter II.
Henry Power, Experimental Philosophy, In Three Books: Containing New Experiments Microscopical, Mercurial, Magnetical, in avouchment and Illustration of the now famous Atomical Hypothesis (Introduction by Marie Boas Hall, Johnson Reprint of 1664 Edition, New York and London, 1966). Newton had Power’s book in his library.
Ralph Cudworth, The True Intellectual System of the Universe (London, 1678), 858.
Ralph Cudworth, The True Intellectual System of the Universe (London, 1678),856
Ralph Cudworth, The True Intellectual System of the Universe (London, 1678),, 858–859. Similar arguments are to be found in Henry More’s An Antidote against Atheism, in A Collection of Several Philosophical Writings (London: 1712), 53 and 97.
Hall and Hall, op. cit., note 88, 130–146. I have partially developed this theme in Newton in Chapters 3 and 5.
Op. cit., note 32, and Francis Oakley, ‘Christian Theology and the Newtonian Science: The Rise of the Concept of the Laws of Nature’, Church History30 (1961), 435–436.
Dictionary of National Biography (London, 1888), vol. 18, 271.
Joseph Glanvill, Sadducismus Triumphatus: or a full and plain Evidence concerning Witches and Apparitions, fourth edition (London, 1726). The 1681 edition was a re-edition of Philosophical Considerations touching Witches of 1666, the fourth edition of which in 1668 was entitled A Blow at Modern Sadducism . The quotations used in this paper are unchanged throughout these editions.
Joseph Glanvill, Sadducismus Triumphatus: or a full and plain Evidence concerning Witches and Apparitions, fourth edition (London, 1726, 24. I do not wish to imply that the phrase ‘analogy of Nature’ is original with either Glanvill or Newton. But Glanvill’s is the earliest English use of the phrase known to me. It can no doubt be located in the countless scholastic manuals used in the seventeenth century.
Joseph Glanvill, Sadducismus Triumphatus: or a full and plain Evidence concerning Witches and Apparitions, fourth edition (London, 1726 5.
John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding (London, 1690). The quotations used remain the same in editions published later in Locke’s lifetime.
John W. Yolton, Locke and the Compass of Human Understanding: A Selective Commentary on the ‘Essay’ (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1970).
Locke, Essay, 339.
Locke, 3.6.12, p. 213. Surprisingly, Locke scholars have scarcely commented on his adherence to the chain of being. A. S. Pringle-Pattison has a short footnote reference to it in his edition of An Essay concerning Human Understanding (Oxford, 1924), 341–342. What he says follows almost entirely A. C. Fraser’s footnote comment in his edition reproduced by Dover (New York, 1959), vol. II, 380–381. Both fail to see how these ideas provide part of the general framework of Locke’s Essay, and content themselves with saying that they are ‘more comprehensive speculation than is usual with him’, Fraser, op. cit., 380.
Locke., 2.1.15, p. 42.
Locke4.16.12, pp. 339–340.
Locke, 3.6.12, pp. 213–214.
Locke., 3.6.12, pp. 213–214. For a different interpretation of Locke’s use of analogy-based bypotheses, which places emphasis on his ‘hypotheticalism’, see Laurens Laudan, ‘The Nature and Sources of Locke’s Views on Hypotheses’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 27 (1967), 221–223.
George Cheyne, Philosophical Principles of Religion: Natural and Revealed (in two parts, London, 1715), Part I, 50.
See Chapter 5.
Cheyne Philosophical Principles, part II, 46. See also 38–39: ‘A Wise Man performs all his Works in Number, Weight, and Measure, and sure infinite Wisdom, Simplicity, and Unity, must accomplish all it’s Works and with the most Consumate Harmony, Proposition and Regularity, and this in the following parts of this Treattise we shall call the Analogy of Things’. These analogical schema were extended into political and social realms in the 1690s. There is no surer indication of the entrenchment of such reasoning in connection with providentialism as a means of justifying political and social events than the poems of Thomas Shadwell: A Congratulatory Poem on his Highness the Prince of Orange, his coming into England (London, 1689);
John Theophilus Desaguliers: The Newtonian System of the World the Best Model of Government: an Allegorical Poem (London, 1728). Nehemiah Grew in his Cosmologia Sacra: or a Discourse of the Universe as it is the Creature and Kingdom of God (London, 1701) also connects nature, religion, government and society by the use of analogy and Providnntialism. The New England Divine Jonathan Edwards writing early in the eighteenth century in developing his theory of reality from Newton’s doctrine of gravitation and the Cambridge Platonist doctrines of God and space, makes analogical connections which echo Cheyne. See his Dissertation on the End For which God Created the World, in Works (New York, 1881), vol. II, 201f. In Images and Shadows of Divine Things (Yale, 1948), the moral and religious worlds are reflected in the physical world. He holds like Cheyne that just as the planets are attracted to the sun so minds are attracted to God by ‘moral gravity’ or love.
Chyne Philosophical Principles, part I, 42.
Chyne Philosophical Principles., part II, A3.
Chyne Philosophical Principles., part I, 36.
Chyne Philosophical Principles. part II, 103–104. For evidence of Cheyne’s cautious attitude towards analogical reasoning see An Essay on Regimen (London, 1740), 226 Analogy provides only ‘dark hints’ and by it ‘we may very readily err in the details, and in the Eliciting and Application of a particular case; but not so readily in the general Law’. The chain of being is discussed by Maclaurin, Account, 15–19, in Lockean fashion as background to his discussion of Newton’s experimental philosophy: ‘ For tho’ all sorts and degrees are equally the objects of philosophical speculation; yet it is from those which are proportional to sense that a philosopher must set out in his enquiries, ascending or descending afterwards as his pursuits may require’ (18). The most elaborate use of the doctrine is found in Berkeley’s Siris in The Works of George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, ed. A. A. Luce and T. E. Jessop (Edinburgh, 1953), vol. V.
Sir Isaac Newton, The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, trans. Benjamin Motte (London, 1729), vol. II, 203.
Correspondence, vol. I, 376.
Opticks (1730), 125.
Opticks (1730), , Query 31, 376.
Mathematical Principles (1729), vol. II, 202. Rule I of the third Book which states: ‘We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances.’
See Chapter 7. See also David Kubrin, ‘Newton and the Cyclical Cosmos: Providence and the Mechanical Philosophy,’ J. H. I. 27 (1967), 326–346.
Hall and Hall, op. cit., note 86, 341. This passage is from an intended conclusion for the first edition of the Principia. It is by no means isolated; a similar passage was added to the closing paragraph of the third Book of the 1713 Principia. For an analysis of this and related materials see Chapter 7. In Les Métèores, Discours VII, Œuvres, vol. VVI, 321, Descartesl beginning with exhalations, arrives by a series of transmutations at ‘du sang, ou les sauterelles ou choses semblables’.
See Chapter 5. Though Newton had a notion of the conservation of matter, with respect to momentum it was not independent of active principles. The former had to be periodicalyy ‘recruited’. The sensibility of Newton’s thought regarding conservation seems to hark back to the ‘biological’ thought of such thinkers as Power and Glisson who moved from the material to the immaterial, partly because they had no conscious notion of a ‘state’ of matter. With respect to both matter and motion Robert Hooke had a relatively clear notion of conservation: ‘Both these Powers I take to be the immediate Product of the Omnipotent Creato, and immutable in themselve, without a like command of the same Power; and always to act in a regular and Uniform Geometrical or Mechanical Method; which Method by diligent Observation and curious Scrutiny may by natural and artifical Means be discovered, and, as I conceive, reduced under certain Rules, and Geometrically demonstrated.’ Robert Hooke, Postumous Works (London, 1705), 73. Hooke derived his ideas on conservation from Genesis, pp. 97, 172, 175. For him matter and motion are appearances of one ‘POWER’.
Johs. Lohne, ‘Newton’s Proof of the Sine Law and his Mathematicll Principles of Colors’, Archive for the History of Exact Sciences I (1961), 393.
Correspondence, vol. I, 366
Lohne, op. cit., 393.
See Chanter 7.
Is. Newton, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (London, 1687), 411. Translation mine.
As it stands the significance of the sentence is not easily established; however in conjunction with the first ‘Hypoth IV’, namely, ‘Things which agree as to all their known qualities with other kinds of things are not to be considered as new kinds of things’, we may be able to clarify what Newton was attempting to say. Both sentences seem to refer to analogical reasoning. Thus the ‘known qualities’ of matter, among others, includes extension impenetrabllity, etc., which comprise the known positive analogy. But imperceptible particles operate on the sensory organs, i.e. sight, smells, sounds, etc.: thus they are analogous with perceptible bodies in that they are solid. Given the causal theory of perception generally accepted in his time, through this analogy of effect, Newton could claim to have good grounds for supposing that imperceptible particles have at least other known essential qualities of gross bodies. Therefore they are ‘not to be considered as new kinds of things’. This sort of reasoning was employed by Newton in his general argument for the universalizing of gravitation. Similar presuppositioss for the argument by analogy from perceptible things is found in Lucretiusss De Rerum Natura, Book I, lines 599–631: see translation by Cyril Bailey (Oxford, 1924), 46–48. This was a source that Newton knew well. Thus this line of reasoning places Newton’s thought regarding tran-scategorical inference closer to that of Epicurus and Gassend:: see section I above. Nevertheless, this particular type of analogical reasoning would ultimately be justified by Newton through the general metaphysicll of analogy described in the last two sections of this paper.
Hall and Hall, op. cit., note 86, 138–140, and Newton’s intended letter for Hartsoeker of May 1712, U. L. C. Add. 3965.17 fol. 257r-v. Part of this is published in Chapter 5. The similarity of Newton’s views regarding ‘immaterial’ matter as an entity dependent upon God is remarkably similar to those of Malebranche, op. cit., note 57. For a different view of the unity and inter-dependenee of natural objects in relation to Providence, see Locke’s Essay, 4.6.11.
Gowin Knight, An attempt to demonstrate that all the Phaenomena in Nature may be explained by two simple active Principles Attraction and Repulsion (London, 1748), Coroll. II, Prop. VII, p. 7. Corollary I states that: ‘the Existence, Extension, Impenetrability, Mobility, and vis inertiae of matter, are apparently the immediate Effects of God’s will’ (7).
Philosophy, Science and Sense Perception, 78. Italics in original.
Philosophy, Science and Sense Perception, 87. Italics in original.
Philosophy, Science and Sense Perception, 88.
Alexander Koyré and I. Bernard Cohen, ‘Newton and the Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence’, Archives Internationales d’Histoire des Sciences 15 (1962), 113.
Mathematical Principles (1729), vol. II, 204.
Principia (1713), praefecto.
Correspondence of Newton and Cotes, 158–159.
Edward Stillingfleet, Origenes Sacrae, or a Rational Account of the Grounds of Christian Faith (London, 1680), 425. (The first edition was published in 1662).
Edward Stillingfleet, Origenes Sacrae, or a Rational Account of the Grounds of Christian Faith (London, 1680), 425, 425
But he also conceived micro-particles as having properties different from gross bodies. There is also a strong possibility that Newton may have conceived the particles of his later aethereal medium to be noninertial. In all three editions of the Principia, definition I, which is concerned with the notion of the quantity of matter (mass), seems to contrast ponderable bodies with the aether; for Newton says that he has ‘no regard in this place to a medium, if any such there is, that freely pervades the interstices between the parts of bodies’. This conjecture is strengthened by Newton’s observation in the intended letter to Hartsoeker (op. cit., note 138) of ‘a power seated in (an immaterial) a substance in wch bodies move & flote without resistence & which has therefore no vis inerttae ’. There is furthermore a curious inconsistency in Newton’s thought, displayed not only in the difference between these speculations and the third rule, but in the rule itself. In the remarks to the rule he speaks of ‘The extension, hardness, impenetrability, and vis inertiae of the whole’, resulting ‘from the extension, hardness, impenetrability, mobility and vis inertiae of the parts: and thence we conclude the least particles of all bodies to be all extended, and hard, and impenetrable, and moveable, and endow’d with their vires inertiae’. Not only does this commit the fallacy of composition, but the reasoning is evidently circular since the qualities of bodies are held to be known through experience alone. In any event, the possibiltty of micro-entities different from gross bodies occurred to Newton as early as 1663 in his Questiones quaedam Philosophiae (U. L. C. Add. 3996). He states there four possible positons ‘Off yt first mater’, namely: ‘Whither it be mathematicall points: or Mathematicall points & parts: or a simple entity before division indistinct: or individuals i.e. Attomes’ (Folio 88r). Newton rejects the other positions and argues for Gassendist-like atoms, which he associates with Henry More’s notion of ‘indiscerpible’ parts (Folio 89).
U.L.C. Add. 3970. Fol. 338r.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1995 Kluwer Academic Publishers
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
McGuire, J.E. (1995). Atoms and the ‘Analogy of Nature’: Newton’s Third Rule of Philosophizing. In: Tradition and Innovation. The University of Western Ontario Series in Philosophy of Science, vol 56. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-1581-7_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-1581-7_2
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-010-7207-6
Online ISBN: 978-94-009-1581-7
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive