Abstract
When we carry our speculations into the two eternities, before and after the present state of things; into the creation and formation of the universe; the existence and properties of spirits; the powers and operations of one universal spirit, existing without beginning and without end; omnipotent, omniscient, immutable, infinite, and incomprehensible: We must be far removed from the smallest tendency to scepticism not to be apprehensive, that we have here got quite beyond the reach of our faculties. So long as we confine our speculations to trade, or morals, or politics, or criticism, we make appeals, every moment, to common sense and experience, which strengthen our philosophical conclusions .... But in theological reasonings, we have not this advantage; while at the same time we are employed upon objects, which, we must be sensible, are too large for our grasp. David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.1
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Notes
David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion,ed. Norman Kemp Smith (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1947), 134–5. (Emphasis added.)
David Hume writes, in his Enquiry concerning Human Understanding,that “Custom, then, is the great guide of common life.” [I cite this passage as it is found in David Hume, Enquiries concerning Human Understanding and concerning the Principles of Moral,Reprinted from the 1777 ed. with Introduction and Analytical Index by L.A. Selby-Bigge, 3rd ed. with text revised and notes by P.H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 44.] In the Dialogues,Hume writes (137) that “In vain would the sceptic make a distinction between science and common life, or between one science and another. The arguments employed in all, if just, are of a similar nature, and contain the same force and evidence.” Hume’s analyses of miracles, fulfilled prophecies, and evidence of a Divine Architect as a cause of the effects observed in nature all stem from his empirical starting point according to which: The existence… of any being can only be proved by arguments from its cause or its effect; and these arguments are founded entirely on experience. If we reason a priori,anything may appear able to produce anything. The falling of a pebble may, for aught we know, extinguish the sun; or the wish of a man control the planets in their orbits. It is only experience, which teaches us the nature and bounds of cause and effect, and enables us to infer the existence of one object from another. Such is the foundation of moral reasoning, which forms the greater part of human knowledge, and is the source of all human action and behaviour. Moral reasonings are either concerning particular or general facts. All deliberations in life regard the former; as also all disquisitions in history, chronology, geography, and astronomy. The sciences which treat of general facts, are politics, natural philosophy, physic, chemistry, &c. where the qualities, causes and effects of a whole species of objects are enquired into. Divinity or Theology, as it proves the existence of a Deity, and the immortality of souls, is composed partly of reasonings concerning particular, partly concerning general facts. It has a foundation in reason,so far as it is supported by experience. But its best and most solid foundation is faith and divine revelation. … When we run over libraries persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quality or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter offact and existence?No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion. (Hume, Enquiry,164–5).
It is a liberty - but a reasonably justified one - to claim that Adams’ intellectual world symbolized by the “Virgin” of Chartres captures the essence of the moderately sceptical empiricism of David Hume who writes witheringly of “the ceremonies of the Roman Catholic religion” as an instance of the operation of the “principle of connexion” called “Resemblance” in relations of cause and effect: The devotees of that superstition usually plead in excuse for the mummeries, with which they are upbraided, that they feel the good effect of those external motions, and postures, and actions, in enlivening their devotion and quickening their fervour, which otherwise would decay, if directed entirely to distant and immaterial objects. We shadow out the objects of our faith, say they, in sensible types and images, and render them more present to us by the immediate presence of these types, than it is possible for us to do merely by an intellectual view and contemplation. Sensible objects have always a greater influence on the fancy than any other; and this influence they readily convey to those ideas to which they are related, and which they resemble. I shall only infer from these practices, and this reasoning, that the effect of resemblance in enlivening the ideas is very common; and as in every case a resemblance and a present impression must concur, we are abundantly supplied with experiments to prove the reality of the foregoing principle. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature,ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge, 2nd edn. with text revised and notes by P.H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 99–100. Hume is almost as virulently anti-Catholic as Newton but the realm of Adams’ “Virgin” is not so much a symbol of Catholicism as it is a more general symbol for the great medieval Age of Faith. The faithful in all ages have accepted that the Bible tells them of the “two eternities”: before “the present state of things” is the topic of Genesis; after “the present state of things” is the topic of the Revelation of St. John and other prophetic books such as Daniel and 2 Peter.
Lynn White, Jr., “Dynamo and Virgin Reconsidered,” in Dynamo and Virgin Reconsidered. Essays in the Dynamism of Western Culture ( Cambridge, Mass.: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1971 ), 58.
Cited in ibid.,59.
W.H. Auden, “The Virgin & the Dynamo,” in The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays (New York: Vintage International, 1989; first published, 1948), 61–2.
Ibid.,63.
White, “Dynamo and Virgin Reconsidered,” 61.
Ibid.,62 and 67
Ibid.,67.
Ibid.,62.
Ibid.,72–3.
Richard H. Popkin, “Hume: Philosophical Versus Prophetic Historian,” The Southwestern Journal of Philosophy 7, No. 2 (July, 1976.)
Deism is a much misunderstood term in our age because of the tendency to dualism which White correctly identifies. Deism essentially reduces reality to the world of the Dynamo and ridicules the “historical world of the Virgin” while ruthlessly excising it from the imagination. On Newton’s so-called deism, see James E. Force, “Samuel Clarke’s Four Categories of Deism,” in Scepicism in the History of Philosophy, ed. Richard H. Popkin. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1996, 53–74; James E. Force, “Biblical Interpretation, Newton, and English Deism,” in Scepticism and Irreligion in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, ed. Arjo Vanderjagt. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1993, 282–305; James E. Force, “Newton and Deism,” in Wissenschaft and Religion. Hrsg. Ä. Bäumer/Manfred Büttner. Bochum: Universitätsverlag Dr. Dr. N. Brockmeyer, 1989, 120–32.
In his “The Language of the Prophets,” Keynes MS 5, King’s College, Cambridge, Isaac Newton writes that “The whole world natural consisting of heaven and earth signifies the whole world politick consisting of thrones and people, or so much of it as is considered in the prophecy; and the thing in that world signify the analogous things in this”
For the impact of these cosmogonies upon the poetic imagination of Jonathan Swift, see Ernest Lee Tuveson’s old but still valuable article “Swift and the World-makers,” Journal of the History of Ideas 11, No. 1 (January, 1950), 54–74.
White, “Dynamo and Virgin Reconsidered,” 60 and 67.
Ibid.,63.
Ibid.,65–7.
Ibid.,69.
The first two Parts of Burnet’s Telluris Theoria Sacra were published in 1681. Greatly impressed, King Charles II urged Burnet to prepare an English translation which was published in 1684 as The Sacred Theory of the Earth and was dedicated to the Stuart king. For the second Latin edition of 1689 two more Parts were added. All four Parts were published together in an English translation in 1690 and were dedicated to Queen Mary, consort to King William III.
For the impact of Burnet’s earth theorizing upon general English aesthetic appreciation of the earth’s topographical features, especially of mountains, see Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (Ithaca, New York, 1959.)
Newton to Burnet, “January 1680\ 1,” in Correspondence of Isaac Newton, 7 Vols., ed. H.W. Turnbull et al. (Cambridge, 1959–77), 2:334. Newton is a literalist because any sort of excessively allegorical reading (such as Burnet’s) corrupts and distorts the message of God. Newton writes that: He that without better grounds then his private opinion or the opinion of any human authority whatsoever shall turn scripture from the plain meaning to an Allegory or to any other less naturall sense declares thereby that he reposes more trust in his own imaginations or in that human authority then in the Scripture…, Hence is it and not from any reall uncertainty in the Scripture that Commentators have so distorted it; And this hath been the door through which all Heresies have crept in and turned out the ancient faith. Newton, Fragments from a Treatise on Revelation, “Rules for interpreting the words and language in Scripture,” Yahuda MS 1, 12r. [his text is published as Appendix A in Frank E. Manuel, The Religion of Isaac Newton (Oxford, 1974), 118–9)].
Newton to Burnet, “January, 1680\ 1,” Correspondence,331–2.
Ibid.
Ibid.,333.
Ibid.,332.
Ibid.,332–3.
Ibid.,333–4.
When one’s received framework is informed daily by the scenario in the Book of Revelation, one views everyday things in everyday life in a special light. See the poems of T. Crunk, Living in the Resurrection,Yale Younger Poets Series, Vol. 90 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.)
Again, Newton explicitly derives the doctrines which constitute his idiosyncratic Christianity from his own primarily literal reading of scripture. Newton writes that: We are commanded by the Apostle (1 Tim 1.13) to hold fast the form of sound words. Contending for a language which was not handed down from the Prophets and Apostles is a breach of the command and they that break it are also guilty of the disturbances and schisms occasioned thereby. It is not enough to say that an article of faith may be deduced from scripture. It must be exprest in the very form of sound words in which it was delivered by the Apostles. Otherwise there can be no lasting fixity nor peace of the Church catholick. For men are apt to vary, dispute, and run into partings about deductions. All the old Heresies lay in deductions; the true faith was in the text. (Newton, Yahuda MS 15.1, fol. 11r. Cited in Manuel, The Religion of Isaac Newton,54–5). Newton echoes, in his “literalism,” the “literalism” of John Milton who also adheres to the express word of Holy Scripture as his criterion for interpreting what is true and false in matters of doctrine. See W.B. Hunter, C.A. Patrides, and J.H. Adamson, Bright Essence: Studies in Milton’s Theology (Salt Lake City, Utah, 1971.) On Newton’s particular “literalism,” see Reiner Smolinski’s outstanding essay, “The Logic of Millennial Thought: Sir Isaac Newton Among His Contemporaries,” in Newton and Religion: Context, Nature, and Influence (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999) in which he discusses Newton’s approach to biblical “literalism” and contrasts it with such contemporaries as Burnet and Whiston. I am greatly indebted in what follows in Part 3 from what I learned from this essay.
See James E. Force, “Millennialism,” in The Blackwell Companion to the Enlightenment,ed. John Yolton (Oxford, 1991), s.v. “Millennialism.”
Newton, The Synchronisms of the Three parts of the Prophetick Interpretation, “Of the [world to come] Day of Judgment and World to come,” Yahuda MS 6, ff. 13r and 14r, at the Jewish National Library, Jerusalem, and published as Appendix B in Manuel, The Religion of Isaac Newton,128–9. Cited by Smolinski, “The Logic of Millennial Thought.”
As quoted in Manuel, The Religion of Isaac Newton,126–8. I have emphasized the phrases “continues for ever” and “the Sun is no more her light by day nor the moon, but the Lord is her everlasting light” because they illustrate how this earth, once it becomes a wandering comet, will still be illuminated as prophesied.
Ibid.,Emphasis added.
As quoted in Manuel, The Religion of Isaac Newton,134. Also cited by Smolinski, “The Logic of Millennial Thought.”
As quoted in Manuel, The Religion of Isaac Newton,135–6. Newton admittedly does not make absolutely clear whether these “children of the resurrection” have physical bodies which are simply invisible to the mortals in New Jerusalem or whether they are, somehow, spectral. In either case, the problem of the interaction of the substance of mind and body is central. What, after all, is invisible body?
Newton is a pscychopannychist who does not believe that the soul maintains a continuously conscious existence after the death of the body. He quotes this famous “soul-sleeping” text from Daniel 12.2 and most of the other texts which literally support such an interpretation (e.g., “The dead know not any thing…. There is no work nor knowledge nor wisdom in the grave. Eccles. 9.5,10”) in the Clark Library Manuscript “Paradoxical Questions concerning ye morals & actions of Athanasius & his followers” in the Question entitled “Quest. Whether Athanasius did not set on foot the invocation of saints.” See James E. Force, “The God of Abraham and Isaac (Newton),” in The Books of Nature and Scripture: Recent Essays on Natural Philosophy, Theology, and Biblical Criticism in the Netherands of Spinoza’s Time and the British Isles of Newton’s Time (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1994.) See also Norman T. Burns, Christian Mortalism from Tyndale to Milton (Cambridge, Mass, 1972.)
As quoted in Manuel, The Religion of Isaac Newton,136.
Newton, Yahuda MS 1.2, ff. 60–1; Yahuda MS 1.3, ff. 40–8. Cited in Westfall, Never at Rest. A Biography of Isaac Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 325. The doctrines of Arius began to emerge following the year 318 A.D., when Arius, Presbyter of Alexandria (260–336 A.D.), first challenged the eternity of Christ thus precipitating the “Arian Crisis” in the early church which culminated, in one sense, with the rejection of Arius’ doctrines and the adoption of the Trinitarian Athanasian creed in 325 A.D. at the Council of Nicaea. In fact, this controversy continued to rage throughout the fourth century. For Arius, there is a fundamental distinction between God, the Creator, and all his creation. Jesus is one of God’s creatures, he is a “work” of God, who is neither co-eternal nor co-substantial with God the Father. Jesus is sinful mankind’s redeemer, the divine son of God, but only because of the power and will of the Lord God. Whether Newton’s theological doctrine of Arianism precedes or follows Newton’s voluntaristic theory of the dominion of the Lord God (again, I think it more likely that they are logically connected and, hence, emerge together) both emerge nearly simultaneously in the early 1670’s. Faced with the necessity of entering the Anglican priesthood to retain his fellowship at Trinity College, in the early 1670’s Newton began an intensive study of theology and of the history of the early church. From the period between 1672 and 1675 there is a sheet summarizing Newton’s conclusions about both the nature of Christ and the nature of God the Father. Proposition 5, for example, proclaims that “The Son in several places confesseth his dependance on the will of the father.” (Newton, Yahuda MS 14, at the Jewish National and University Library, Jerusalem) Proposition 10 is even more instructive: It is a proper epithete of ye father to be called almighty. For by God almighty we always understand ye Father. Yet this is not to limit the power of ye Son, for he doth what soever he seeth ye Father do; but to acknowledg yt all power is originally in ye Father & that ye son bath no power in him but wt derives from ye father for he professes that of himself he can do nothing. (Yahuda, MS 14). Frank E. Manuel, in his book The Religion of Isaac Newton (Oxford, 1974), 21, discusses a fragment from Yahuda MS 15.5. Manuel argues that Newton utilizes his concept of the Lord God too many times in too many contexts for it to be merely coincidental to his great dispute with Leibniz. The text pointed to by Manuel from Yahuda MS 15.5 on page 21 of his book reads: If the father or son be called God, they take the name in a metaphysical sense as if it signified Gods metaphysical perfections of infinite eternal omniscient omnipotent whereas it signifies the same thing with Lord and King, but in a higher degree. As we say my Lord, our Lord, your Lord, the King of Kings, and Lord of Lords, the supreme Lord, so we say my God, our God, your God, the God of Gods, the supreme God, the God of the earth, the servants of God, serve other Gods: but we do not say my infinite, our infinite, your infinite, the infinite of infinities, the infinite of the earth, the servants of the infinite, serve other infinities. When the Apostle told the Gentiles that the Gods which they worshipped were not Gods, he did not meane that they were not infinities, (for the Gentiles did not take them to be such:) but he meant that they had no power and dominion over man. They were fals Gods; not fals infinities, but vanities falsely supposed to have power and dominion over man. Forty years later, we find Newton repeating this combined Arian Christology and voluntaristic metaphysical theory emphasizing the ultimate will and power of the Lord God of dominion. And we find it both in his manuscripts and in his General Scholium to the second edition of the Principia published in 1713. No more clear statement of Newton’s view of the nature of God’s dominion exists than the General Scholium: The Supreme God is a Being eternal, infinite, absolutely perfect; but a being, however perfect, without dominion, cannot be said to be Lord God; for we say, my God, your God, the God of Israel, the God of Gods, and Lord of Lords; but we do not say, my Eternal, your Eternal, the Eternal of Israel, the Eternal of God; we do not say, my Infinite, or my Perfect: these are titles which have no respect to servants. The word God usually signifies Lord; but every lord is not a God. It is the dominion of a spiritual being which constitutes a God: a true, supreme, or imaginary dominion makes a true, supreme, or imaginary God. [Sir Isaac Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and His System of the World. Translated into English by Andrew Motte in 1729. The translations revised, and supplied with an historical and explanatory appendix by Florian Cajori. 2 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1962), 2:544. In a footnote to this text, Newton states that, according to Dr. Edward Pococke (the Biblical scholar and Orientalist who had introduced the study of Arabic into Oxford and had become the first Professor of Arabic there), the Latin word Deus derives from the (transliteration of) du in the Arabic which means lord.] For Newton, only a God of true and supreme dominion is a supreme and true God. A manuscript note from the early eighteenth reaffirms the Christological consequences of this metaphysical voluntarism regarding the deity. Newton still, some decades after his intensive theological researches of the early 1670’s, views Jesus as deriving from God a: unity of dominion, the Son receiving all things from the Father, being subject to him executing his will, sitting in his throne and calling him his God, and so is but one God with the Father as a King and viceroy are but one King. For the word God relates not to the metaphysical nature of God but to dominion. (Newton, Yahuda MS 15.1, at the Jewish National and University Library, Jerusalem.) Ordinary mortals are no less under the dominion of God than Jesus Christ. In an entry to his theological notebook from the 1670’s there is a tantalizing hint that Newton is much impressed by St. Paul’s comparison of the relation between God and man to that between a potter and his clay. In an entry entitled simply “Predestinatio,” Newton quotes the famous ninth chapter of Romans where St. Paul places the eternal fate of men under the dominion of their supreme Lord God: What shall we say then? Is there unrighteousness with God? God forbid. For he saith to Moses, I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, & I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion. So than it is not of him that willeth, or of him yt runneth, but of God that sheweth mercy. For ye scripture saith unto Pharoh Even for this same purpose have I raised thee up that I might shew my power in thee, & that my name might be declared throughout all ye Earth. Therefore he hath mercy on whom he will have mercy, & whom he will he hardeneth. Thou wilt say then unto me; why doth he yet find fault? For who hath resisted his will? Nay but O man, who art thou that repliest against God? Shall ye thing formed say to him yt formed it why hast thou made me thus? Hath not the potter power over the clay of ye same lump to make one vessel unto honour and another unto dishonour? (Newton, “Commonplace Book,” s.v. “Predestinatio,” Keynes MS 2, King’s College Library, Cambridge) God’s very “deitas” results, on Newton’s view, from his “dominion” over the whole of his creation. For Newton, the nature of God’s “dominion” is his infinite will and omnipotent power over everything else that there is. Everything that God created in the world of physical nature such as drops of dew (Job 38:28), the world of natural inconstant creatures (Deut. 32:18), the human world including inconstant sons (Isa 1:2), even Jesus Christ, falls under the dominion of God. All his creatures are consequently his servants and all the rest of his physical creation, the fabric of nature itself, is likewise owned, possessed, and used in accord with the dictates of God’s will and power. Newton’s theory about the dominion of God is central to all the other aspects of his theology in particular and to the rest of his thought in general. For example, one of his central theological concerns throughout his life is to combat what he calls idolatry. Worshipping anything but the Lord God of true and supreme dominion lessens the absolute nature of God’s dominion and constitutes idolatry. The Roman Church is his chief target beginning with his theological notebook of the early 70’s owing to its Trinitarian creed which lessens the Father’s dominion by promoting the co-eternality and co-substantiality of the Son. “Never,” he writes, “was Pagan Idolatry so bad as the Roman.” (Newton, Yahuda MS 14, f. 9 verso. Cited in Richard S. Westfall, Never at Rest,315.) Newton’s manuscript entitled “Paradoxical Questions concerning ye morals & actions of Athanasius & his followers” is devoted to showing how such idolatrous doctrines as the “invocation of saints,” the trinity and the continuous, conscious immortality of the soul were introduced into Catholicism by the “anti-Christian” Athanasius.
In interpreting Newton’s chronological claims, David Castillejo points to Newton’s calculations in the Observations on Daniel and to Keynes MS 5 and argues that, in Newton’s view, “the order to return and build Jerusalem could begin to occur in the year 1899 (609 + 1290=1899), and the end of the great tribulation of the Jews would then possibly occur in 1944 (609 + 1335=1944.)” Castillejo also refers to some alternative computations offered by Newton which defer these events until the 21st or 22nd centuries. In consideration of Newton’s interpretation of the text about the prophetic injunction to rebuild Jerusalem (preceding the coming of the Messiah by 449 years), Castillejo puts Newton’s dating of the second coming and the first little resurrection (or revival) of a dissolved dominion in 1948, or, alternatively, in 2127/2180. See David Castillejo, The Expanding Force in Newton’s Cosmos ( Madrid: Ediciones de Arte y Bibliofilia, 1981 ), 54–5.
Sir Isaac Newton, Opticks, or A Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections & Colours of Light,Based on the Fourth Ed., London, 1730 (New York, 1952), Query 31, 402. First Published in 1704 in the first edition, this text was added to the Latin edition of 1706 as Query 23. Beginning with the 1717 edition, Query 23 became Query 31. Newton’s assertion that God purposely built a machine which required a “Reformation” provoked Leibniz’ charge that Newton thereby reduced God to an inferior clockmaker. Leibniz scoffs that, according to Newton’s doctrine in this query, “God Almighty wants to wind up his watch from time to time: otherwise it would cease to move. He had not, it seems, sufficient foresight to make it a perpetual motion.” Samuel Clarke responds on behalf of Newton that Leibniz misunderstands the nature of God’s providential Lordship because of Leibniz’s metaphysical doctrine of preestablished harmony which leaves God, after the creation, with no providential role to play in his own dominion. For Clarke, it redounds to the greater glory of God’s generally provident workmanship that God fabricated the solar system to require his continuous, specially provident governance. Clarke argues that “the wisdome of God consists, in framing originally the perfect and complete idea of a work, which begun and continues, according to that original perfect idea, by the continual uninterrupted exercise of his power and government.” [See The Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence,ed. H.G. Alexander (New York, 1956), “Mr. Leibnitz’s First Paper,” 11, and “Dr. Clarke’s Second Reply,” 22.] As Newton stresses in 1713 in his “General Scholium” to the second edition of the Principia (in what might be considered his own direct attack upon Leibniz’ conception of the deity and upon Leibniz’ metaphysical doctrine of pre-established harmony), “a god without dominion, providence, and final causes, is nothing else but Fate and Nature. Blind metaphysical necessity, which is certainly the same always and everywhere, could produce no variety of things.” See Sir Isaac Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and his System of the World,Translated into English by Andrew Motte in 1729. The translations revised, and supplied with an historical and explanatory appendix, by Florian Cajori, 2 volumes (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1934), 2:546. The classic philosophical treatment in English of the metaphysical implications of the Leibniz-Clarke debate is C.D. Broad, “Leibniz’s Last Controversy with the Newtonians,” Theoria 12 (1946), 146ff; see, too, Marie Boas and A. Rupert Hall, “Clarke and Newton,” Isis 52 (1961), 583–5; I. Bernard Cohen and Alexandre Koyré, “Newton & the Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence with notes on Newton, Conti, & Des Maizeaux,” Archives internationales d’Histoire des sciences 15, Nos. 58–9 (Janvier—Juin, 1962), 63–126; Alexandre Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe,Ch. XI, “The Work-Day God and the God of the Sabbath,” (Baltimore, Maryland, 1957), 235–72; F.E.L. Priestley, “The Clarke-Leibniz Controversy,” in The Methodological Heritage of Newton (Toronto, 1970), 34–56; G.H.R. Parkinson, “Science and Metaphysics in the Leibniz-Newton Controversy,” Studia Leibnitiana 2, Supplementa (1969), 79–112. More positivistic treatments which presume a hard and wiry boundary between science and metaphysical theology are found in Margula R. Perl, “Physics and Metaphysics in Newton, Leibniz, and Clarke,” Journal of the History of Ideas 30 (1969), 507–26, and in Edward W. Strong, “Newton and God,” Journal of the History of Ideas 13 (1952), 147–67. While not so explicitly positivist in their orientation, some important recent treatments have nevertheless also assumed that the metaphysical issue in the Leibniz-Clarke debate is absolutely disconnected from the focus of their interpretations. For Frank E. Manuel, the metaphysical issues brought forth in the Leibniz-Clarke dispute is a “sideshow” to the more basic psychological issue of Newton’s relationship with his father. See his A Portrait of Isaac Newton (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), 333. For A. Rupert Hall, the only issue of genuine relevance between Leibniz and Newton is the dispute over who discovered the calculus first. The metaphysical issue in the Leibniz-Clarke correspondence is, to Hall, a “regrettable and largely pointless diversification.” See A. Rupert Hall, Philosophers at War: The Quarrel Between Newton and Leibniz (Cambridge, 1976), 192. For the political implications of the metaphysical dispute, see Steven Shapin, “Of Gods and Kings: Natural Philosophy and Politics in the Leibniz-Clarke Disputes,” Isis 72 (1981), 187215. Much of the above bibliography, especially the references to Manuel and Hall’s Philosophers at War,is derived from this excellent article.
Newton, Opticks,402.
The development of Newton’s explanations for “maintaining and recruiting” the degrading motion of the machine of nature was told first and told definitively in the classic article by David Kubrin, “Newton and the Cyclical Cosmos: Providence and the Mechanical Philosophy,” Journal of the History of Ideas 28 (1967), 325–46.
Conduitt Memorandum, Keynes MS 130, No. 11, King’s College Library, King’s College, Cambridge. In the above citation, “[gathered]” is crossed out by Conduitt. Cited in Kubrin, “Newton and the Cyclical Cosmos,” 340.
Sir Isaac Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy,540–1. Cited in Kubrin, “Newton and the Cyclical Cosmos,” 340. Whiston’s work in the New Theory of the Earth in 1696 may have influenced Newton’s new task for comets in the second edition of the Principia of 1713 as much as any contemplation of the comet of 1680.
Ibid. Conduitt crossed out “occasion” in the text. Cited in Kubrin, “Newton and the Cyclical Cosmos,” 341. As early as 1702, Newton mentions the possibility that “Halley’s Comet” might hit the earth. In a manuscript memorandum at The Royal Society in London, David Gregory writes that “The Comet whose Orbie Mr Newton determines may sometime impinge on the earth. Origen [sic] the manner of destroying the world’s by one falling on another.” Gregory MS 247, f. 87.
Ibid. Newton crossed out “think” and “planet.” Cited in Kubrin, “Newton and the Cyclical Cosmos,” 342.
Certain Philosophical Questions: Newton’s Trinity Notebook,ed. J.E. McGuire and Martin Tamny (Cambridge, 1983), 374–7.
Sir Isaac Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy,540–1. Cited in Kubrin, “Newton and the Cyclical Cosmos,” 343.
Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis. The Hidden Agenda of Modernity ( Chicago: The Univ. of Chicago Press, 1990 ), 1.
White, “Dynamo and Virgin Reconsidered,” 73.
This term is coined by Reiner Smolinkski, “The Logic of Millennial Thought: Sir Isaac Newton Among His Contemporaries,” in Newton and Religion: Context, Nature, and Influence,ed. James E. Force and Richard H. Popkin (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, forthcoming, 1998.) For Newton, experiments and observations which admit of “no exception” are “certain” even though the “Principles” inductively derived from them are only “morally certain” and that, even so, such “Principles” are initially “the best way of arguing which the Nature of Things admits of.” It is also the case, for Newton, that a single, well-chosen experimentum crucis may be the basis for the firm induction of a “Principle” or Law which governs the current natural order. Nevertheless, even the best scientific knowledge which Newton’s version of the probatio duplex can provide is limited to the current “Nature of Things” which, in turn, is utterly dependent, both for its being and its continued operation, upon the absolute will and power of the Lord God of supreme dominion described in the “General Scholium.” Newton’s Judaized, voluntaristic conception of the Lord God interacts with his scientific epistemology just as it does with all other elements of his thought. Newton’s single methodological procedure for obtaining “knowledge” begins with “Analysis” (resolutio) and moves to “Synthesis” (compositio.) [Henry Guerlac, “Newton and the Method of Analysis,” in Essays and Papers in the History of Modern Science (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 193–216. This paper was first published as an article in the Dictionary of the History of Ideas in 1973.] For Newton, in contrast to Descartes, the initial path of “Analysis” is identified with empirical experiments and observations. On the basis of this empirical starting point, Newton inductively derives probationary “Principles” such as, for example, the Inverse Square Law. The second part of Newton’s probatio duplex is the synthetic deduction of future phenomena on the basis of these “Principles.” Newton’s clearest statement of his two- pronged method is in the famous passage Query 31 of the second English edition of the Opticks: As in Mathematicks, so in Natural Philosophy, the Investigation of difficult Things by the Method of Analysis, ought ever to precede the Method of Composition. This Analysis consists in making Experiments and Observations,and in drawing general Conclusions from them by Induction,and admitting of no Objections against the Conclusions; yet it is the best way of arguing which the Nature of Things admits of and may be looked upon as so much the stronger, by how much the Induction is more general. And if no Exception occur from Phaenomena, the Conclusion may be pronounced generally. But if at any time afterwards any Exception shall occur from Experiments, it may then begin to pronounced with such Exceptions as occur. By this way of Analysis we may proceed from Compounds to Ingredients, and from particular causes to more general ones, till the Argument end in the most general. This is the Method of Analysis: And the Synthesis consists in assuming the Causes discover’d and establishes as Principles, and by them explaining the Phaenomena proceeding from them,and proving the Explanations. [Sir Isaac Newton, Opticks or A Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections & Colours of Light,based on the 4th London edition, 1730 (New York, 1952), Query 31, 404–5. An abbreviated version of this Query was published in the Latin edition of 1706 as Query 23. In the above citation, I have added the italics.]
Newton, Opticks,Query 31, 403. It seems very likely that this aspect of Newton’s metaphysical viewpoint is influenced by his reading of Moses Maimonides’ De Idolatria. In addition to the immediate cultural influences shared by all writers of Newton’s day, the influence of Maimonides’s voluntarism and of Maimonides’s concomitant view about the nature of idolatry are crucial to the development of Newton’s theology as are the influences of other philosophers in the medieval nominalist tradition such as, especially, Pierre d’Ailly. Cf. Manuel, The Religion of Isaac Newton,87, and Brian P. Copenhaver, who corrects Manuel’s overly rationalistic interpretation of Maimonides’ thought, “Jewish Theologies of Space in the Scientific Revolution,” 545. Cf. note 23. Moses Maimonides’s brief tract, De Idolatria,was translated into Latin and edited by Dionysius Vossius, the son of the noted seventeenth-century taxonomical doxographer, Gerardus Joannis Vossius. Young Vossius died before printing his edition of Maimonides’s tract. His father, G.J. Vossius, published his son’s edition of De Idolatria with his own massive commentary on the text. Newton owned a copy of this work which is “very extensively dog-eared….” Cf. John Harrison, The Library of Isaac Newton (Cambridge, 1978), 258. Finally, on voluntarism in general see Margaret J. Osier, Divine Will and the Mechanical Philosophy: Gassendi and Descartes on Contingency and Necessity in the Created World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) and “Robert Boyle on Knowledge of Nature in the Afterlife,” infra, esp. note 23.
Sir Isaac Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy,2:400. This rule is not added to the Principia until the second edition of 1713. Newton’s view about the contingency of human knowledge, in the light of God’s absolute power and dominion over every aspect of creation, parallels that of Robert Boyle who writes that: in this very phenomenal world of partial regularity, at any moment all our science may be upset by the elimination, or change of regularity through the operation of Him who is the guider of its concourse. For the most optimistic investigator must acknowledge that if God be the author of the universe, and the free establisher of the laws of motion, whose general concourse is necessary to the conservation and efficacy of every particular physical agent, God can certainly invalidate all experimentalism by withholding His concourse, or changing those laws of motion, which depend perfectly upon His will, and could thus vitiate the value of most, if not all the axioms and theorems of natural philosophy. Therefore reason operating in the mechanical world is constantly limited by the possibility that there is not final regularity in that world, and that existential The Virgin, the Dynamo and Newton’s Prophetic History 93 regularity may readily be destroyed at any moment by the God upon whom it depends. [Robert Boyle, Reconcilableness of Reason and Religion,in The Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle,6 Vols., ed. Thomas Birch (London, 1772), 4:161.]
Cleanthes, Dialogues,154, is made to say: “Consider, anatomize the eye: Survey its structure and contrivance; and tell me, from your feeling, if the idea of a contriver does not immediately flow in upon you with a force like that of sensation.” I am certain that the character Cleanthes does in fact represent Newton’s view on natural religion — and the generally provident nature of the divine architect — extremely well. Cleanthes, of course, is a literary creation, an interlocutor in a dialogue, a character, in essence, in a particular play with a particular point. The author of the Dialogues,David Hume, specifically (ironically?) limits the boundary of inquiry in this work to natural religion in the “Introduction.” The character “Cleanthes” has no fully articulated, complete theology. He speaks his part about natural religion well. But to reduce Newton to this one character in a dialogue is to ignore what Newton says in his manuscripts about the specially provident deity revealed to a few, adept Biblical exegetes.
James Boswell, “An Account of my Last Interview with David Hume, Esq.” in the Private Papers of James Boswell from Malahid Castle,18 vols., ed. Geoffrey Scott (Mount Vernon, N.Y.: privately printed, 1928–34), 12:227–32.
The Correspondence of Isaac Newton,ed. H.W. Turnbull, J.F. Scott, A.R. Hall, and Laura Tilling, 7 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959–77), 7:382. Cited in Richard S. Westfall, Never at Rest,828.
William Stukeley, Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton’s Life,ed. A. Hastings White (London, 1936), 82–3. Cf. Westfall, Never at Rest,869.
Keynes MSS. 130.6, Book 1; 130.7, Sheet 1. Cited in Westfall, Never at Rest,869.
In the pertinent section of the Clark Library Manuscript of Newton’s “Paradoxical Questions,” Newton directly poses the key question about the fate of the soul and inquires how the early church developed the unscriptural, idolatrous, and anti-Christian doctrine of a continuously conscious immortal soul in the face of the many scriptural texts which state literally that, after death but prior to its specially provident resurrection and rembodiment for the Last Judgment, the soul simply sleeps in total unconsciousness. Newton believes that: Were not many greatly prejudiced they would consider such texts of scripture as these. In death there is no remembrance of thee in the grave who shall give thee thanks. Psal. 6.5 Shal thy loving kindness be declared in ye grave thy wonders in the dark & thy righteousness in the land of forgetfulness? Psal 88.11,12. The dead praise not ye Lord neither any that go down into silence. Psal 115.17. The dead know nothing…. There is no work nor knowledge nor wisdom in ye grave. Eccles. 9.5,10. The grave cannot praise thee, death cannot celebrate thee Isa. 38.18. God hath begotten us again unto a lively hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from ye dead, to an inheritance… in heaven 1 Pet.1.3,4 which is as much as to say that without ye resurrection there is no hope, no inheritance in heaven. Now according to the tenour of these texts of scripture the first Christians placed all ye dead in Hades, that is, not in hell as we corruptly translate ye word, but in ye land of darknesse & silence as ye old Testament sometimes expresses it…. And Athanasius by making Antony see ye soule of Ammon ascend up to heaven, laid the foundation for introducing into ye greek Churches this heathen doctrine of Daemons, together wth that Popish one of Purgatory. [Clarke Library MS. “Paradoxical Questions concerning ye morals & actions of Athanasius & his followers,” under the heading, “Quest. Whether Athanasius did not set on foot the invocation of saints.” I quote from this manuscript with the permission of the Clark Library.) This particular text connects with Newton’s general theme in this manuscript regarding Athanasius’ “dishonesty and falsification of records” of the early Church. The phrase belongs to John Maynard Keynes who purchased the copy of the manuscript now in the collection of King’s College Library (Keynes MS. 10.) It is cited by Herbert McLachlan in his published version of the Keynes Collection. See H. McLachlan, Sir Isaac Newton. Theological Manuscripts (Liverpool: At the University Press, 1950), 60. It is worth noting that Newton takes his Mortalist stance about how to interpret Jesus’ promise to the thief on the cross (with most of the other Mortalists) on the ground of “proper” punctuation. If, as in Newton’s manuscript and with most other Mortalists, Jesus says, “Verily I say unto thee today, Thou shalt be with me in paradise,” then Jesus means that he is giving his promise to the thief TODAY, as they are being crucified, for immortality at some unspecified time in the future. The location of the comma after today thus is crucial to Newton’s Mortalist interpretation. But if the comma is placed after thee, the meaning changes radically. If Jesus says, “Verily I say unto thee, today Thou shalt be with me in paradise,” then Jesus means to promise that the soul will begin its immortal phase TODAY after the death of the body. Professor Norman T. Burns pointed out this crucial point to me. He discusses how, for the Mortalists, punctuation is the key to meaning in his book, Norman T. Burns, Christian Mortalism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972) 18ff.
Cited in Frank E. Manuel, The Religion of Isaac Newton,100–1.
Marvell’s “To his coy mistress” and this particular Pascalian pensée are explicated at length in Christopher Hill, “’Till the Conversion of the Jews’,” in Millenarianism and Messianism in English Literature and Thought 1650–1800,ed. Richard H. Popkin (Leiden, 1988), 12–36.
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Force, J.E. (2001). The Virgin, the Dynamo, and Newton’s Prophetic History. In: Force, J.E., Popkin, R.H. (eds) Millenarianism and Messianism in Early Modern European Culture. International Archives of the History of Ideas / Archives Internationales d’Histoire des Idées, vol 175. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2282-7_6
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