Abstract
The relation of Henry More to the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century has been a matter of greater interest to historians of philosophy than to historians of science. The same remark might be applied, indeed, to other philosophers who have reflected critically or otherwise upon mathematics and natural science — George Berkeley, to cite another English example. However, the case of More is a little different in that positive influence upon the greatest of English scientists has been more than once confidently claimed for him. The writings of More perhaps most frequently considered by historians of philosophy are his his four letters to Descartes written in 1648–9. Without by any means belittling their importance as indications of contemporary idealist response to Descartes’s philosophy, there are good reasons for not giving them great prominence when thinking about More in relation to science. In them More himself gave pride of place to the epistemological and metaphysical problems he found in Descartes’s writings; although he does raise scientific objections to Descartes’s treatment of the planetary motions, of optics, of magnetism and so forth, not to say of Descartes’s fundamental theory of motion (but perhaps this is as much a matter of metaphysics as of science), these do not inhibit him from declaring in later writings that Descartes had constructed as perfect an explanatory mechanism for the universe as anyone could hope to meet with.
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References
More, CSPW, Preface p. xii.
More, Poems, Psychathanasia, 3, stanza 44.
Ibid., stanza 37.
Ibid., 388.
Ibid., 389, 390.
Ibid., 390–1.
Ibid., 401.
Ibid., 390–400.
Ibid., 391–5.
Ibid., 396.
Ibid., 385.
Ibid., 425.
Wallace Shugg et al., “Henry More’s Circulatio Sanguinis.”
M. H. Nicolson(ed.), Conway Letters, pp. 393,395, 397.
F. B. Burnham, “The More-Vaughan Controversy,” quotes More’s Observations upon Anthroposophia Theomagica (1650): ‘There never was anything proposed in the world in which there is more wary, subtil and close texture of reason, more coherent unity of all parts with themselves, or more happy uniformity of the whole with the phenomena of Nature’ than in the Cartesian philosophy.
Charles Webster, “Henry More and Descartes,” 365.
Ibid.
Ibid., 369.
Ibid., 371.
More, ET, 36 in CSPW.
Conway Letters, pp. 481–3.
More first made use of some of Boyle’s experiments from New Experiments Physico-Mechanical (1660) in the 1662 edition of AA (in CSPW) and again in Enchiridion Metaphysicum (1671). Boyle replied to More in An Hydrostatical Discourse (1672), which More answered in Remarks upon Two Ingenious Discourses (1976). See John Henry’s article in this volume.
More, AA, 44–6 in CSPW. Also EM, chap. 12.
Ibid.
Boyle, Hydrostatical Discourse, in Works, 3: 622–3.
A Letter from Dr. More to J. G. giving him an Account how M: Stubb Belies him, in Joseph Glanvill, A Prefatory Answer to Mr. Henry Stubbe, 155.
Ibid. For further discussion, see Allison Coudert’s paper in this volume.
A Letter from Dr. More, 156.
Ibid.
More,“Ad Artic. 35”: “Qui fit ut Planetae omnes in eodem non circumgyruntur piano (videlicet in piano Eclipticae), maculaeque adeo solares, aut saltern in planis Eclipticae parallelis; ipsaque Luna, aut in Aequatore aut in piano Aequatori parallelo, cum a nulla interna vi dirigantur, sed externo tantum ferantur impetu?” AT (NP), 5: 386.
More, A Letter... to J.G., 156–7.
More, DD, I: 34, 39.
More, IS, 275.
e.g. Conway Letters, p.269.
[Isaac Newton], “An Account of the Book entituled Commercium Epistolicum,” Philosophical Transactions, 29 (1715): 223. Facsimile in A. Rupert Hall, Philosophers at War: the Quarrel Between Newton and Leibniz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 313.
Rohault’s System of Natural Philosophy, illustrated with Dr. S[amuel] Clarke’s Notes, trans. John Clarke (London, 1723), 1: 45, note.
The loci classici are E. A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science and Koyré, Closed World.
Isaaci Barrow Lectiones Mathematicae XXIII, (London 1684), translated by John Kirby as The Usefulness of Mathematical Learning Explained and Demonstrated (London, 1734). See W. Whewell, Mathematical Works of Isaac Barrow, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1860).
J. E. McGuire and M. Tammny, Certain Philosophical Questions: Newton’s Trinity Notebook (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
Richard S. Westfall, Force in Newton’s Physics (London: MacDonald and Co., 1971).
Ernan McMullin, Newton on Matter and Activity (Notre Dame and London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1978).
Marie Boas Hall, The Mechanical Philosophy (New York: Arno Press, 1981; reprint from Osiris 10(1952) and, Isis 40(1949)).
Newton, Opticks, 4th ed. (London 1730; reprint New York: Dover Publications, 1952), 388–9.
Ibid., 400–1.
Westfall, Force, 377–8. I first drew attention to More’s name in this notebook more than forty years ago, Cambridge Historical Journal 9 (1948): 238–50.
Westfall, Force, 337.
More, CSPW, Preface, xiv-xv. This quotation gives occasion to remark upon the (to me) strange infrequency of references to Kenelm Digby in More’s works. ‘Sympathy’ for More embraced what we still call the sympathetic vibration of two strings in resonance — yet another physical phenomenon that he regarded as inexplicable upon mechanical principles.
See Hall, Philosophers at War, 314.
Newton, Opticks, note 29, 401–2.
Ibid.
Westfall, Force, 398.
Principia (1713) ad fin.
Hélène Metzger, Attraction universelle et religion naturelle chez quelques commentateurs anglais de Newton (Paris: Hermann & Cie, 1938), 75, note 6.
Koyré, 160.
S.E. Toulmin, “Criticism in the History of Science: Newton on Absolute Space, Time and Motion,” Philosophical Review 68 (1959): 214.
Ibid.
W. Von Leyden, Seventeenth-Century Metaphysics, 259–60.
R. S. Westfall, “Newton and the Hermetic Tradition,” in A. G. Debus (ed.) Science, Medicine and Society in the Renaissance (London: Heinneman, 1972), 2: 183–98;
idem, “The Role of Alchemy in Newton’s Career,” in M. L. Righini Bonelli and W. R. Shea (eds.) Reason, Experiment and Mysticism in the Scientific Revolution (New York: Science History Publications, 1975), 189–232.
J. E. Mc Guire, “Neoplatonism and Active Principles,” 132.
Ibid., 104.
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Hall, A.R. (1990). Henry More and the Scientific Revolution. In: Hutton, S. (eds) Henry More (1614–1687) Tercentenary Studies. International Archives of the History of Ideas/Archives Internationales d’Histoire des Idées, vol 127. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2267-9_3
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