Abstract
While Boyle and his successors were entirely familiar with Newton’s work—so much so that Bentley, the first of the Boyle Lecturers, engaged in a correspondence with Newton to make sure that the physics of Bentley’s Boyle Lectures was in conformity with the Newtonian position on gravity1—there were differences between Boyle and his successors, and Newton to be observed as well. Boyle and Newton may have both been voluntarists, committed to the proposition that an all-powerful deity was capable both of creating an intelligible cosmos, describable by laws pertaining to such phenomena as the spring of air, the differential refrangibility of light, and gravitation, and of exercising his omnipotence to change or set aside those laws.2 But Boyle believed that the potential for such a disruption was both real and perhaps even imminent, given the intimate (and perhaps immanent) presence of God in the world, while the likelihood of such disruption for Newton, whose God exercised dominion at a distance, was further removed from the everyday situation of humanity than it was for Boyle.3
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Notes
See Richard G. Olson, Science and Religion, 1450–1900: From Copernicus to Darwin (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004), 123. Newton was inclined to agree with the corpuscular philosophers, including Boyle, that matter is largely passive, for that ensured the need for God to somehow initiate and conserve its motions. But the universal law of gravity demonstrated that every bit was attracted to every other bit. As a result, Newton suggested that there must be some cause of gravity that is not intrinsic to matter, possibly either God or some Immaterial agen of God. Bentley concurred.…
Jan W. Wojcik, Robert Boyle and the Limits of Reason (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 201.
See James G. Lennox, “Robert Boyle’s Defense of Teleological Inference in Experimental Science,” Isis 74, no. 1: (March 1983), 38–52, esp. 44.
See also Stephen D. Snobelen, “‘God of Gods, and Lord of Lords’: The Theology of Isaac Newton’s General Scholium to the Principia,” Osiris 16, Science in Theistic Contexts: Cognitive Dimensions (2001): 169–208, esp. 175–80.
See also Sir Isaac Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and His System of the World, trans. Andrew Motte, ed. Florian Cajori (1934; rpt. Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1966), 544–45.
I. Newton, Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel, and the Apocalypse of St. John (Teddington: Echo Library, 2007) 113.
Isaac Newton, Opticks, or a Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections, and Colours of Light; Based on the 4th ed., London, 1730, ed. Duane H. D. Roller (New York: Dover, 1952), 375, 400–01. The extent to which Newton seeks to save the phenomenon with recourse to the Hexameron is also clear in the thirtieth query of the Opticks. Discussing the life cycles of animals, Newton observes, “all Birds, Beasts, and Fishes, Insects, Trees, and other Vegetables, with their several Parts, grow out of Water and watry Tinctures and Salts, and by Putrefaction return again into watry Substances.”
See also Hentry Guerlac, “Theological Voluntarism and Biological Analogies in Newton’s Physical Thought,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 44, no. 2 (April-June 1983): 219–29; and my “Saving the Phenomenon or Saving the Hexameron?: Mosaic Self-Presentation in Newtonian Optics.” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 32, no. 2 (1991): 139–65, esp. 220. Guerlac notes that the Queries to the Opticks “are frankly speculative but constitute nevertheless an avowal of Newton’s underlying convictions or at least his speculations.” Much of the present chapter is a substantially revised version of my article. See also David Foster, “‘In Every Drop of Dew’: Imagination and the Rhetoric of Assent in English Natural Religion,” Rhetorica 12, no. 3 (Summer 1994): 293–325, esp. 297–98. The passage from the Opticks cited in the text seems to validate Foster’s contention that “the natural theologians constructed a rhetoric of assent by contextualizing ‘reason’ as a flexible instrument capable of developing conviction on the basis of the probable. In building assent, they argued, the mind moves from visible evidence to an inward conviction which is ‘morally certain’ and ‘unquestionable.’”
Geoffrey N. Cantor, “Weighing Light: The Role of Metaphor in Eighteenth-Century Optical Discourse,” in The Figurai and the Literal: Problems of Language in the History of Science and Philosophy, 1630–1800, ed. Andrew E. Benjamin, Geoffrey N. Cantor, and John R. R. Christie (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), 124–46, esp. 132.
See A. C. Crombie, Augustine to Galileo: The History of Science, A. D. 400–1650 (1952: rpt. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953), 71.
Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs, The Foundations of Newton’s Alchemy, or, “The Huntyng of the Greene Lyon” (1975; rpt. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 108.
Dobbs quotes Isaac Newton, The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended (London: J. Tonson, et al, 1728), 351.
See Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 170. Yates suggests the persistence of the initiative to found alternatives to the Judeo-Christian tradition by vesting the prisca sapientia in the works of the Egyptians or some other culture of antiquity.
See also Richard S. Westfall, Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 292, 524–25. No less an admirer of things Mosaic than Newton himself testifies to the powerful influence of Hermeticism on the thought of even those who considered themselves sincere believing, albeit dissenting, Christians.
See J. S. Bell, “Six Possible Worlds of Quantum Mechanics,” in Possible Worlds in Humanities, Arts, and Sciences: Proceedings of Nobel Symposium 65, ed. Sture Allen (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1989), 359–73.
John Pecham, John Pecham and the Science of Optics: Perspectiva communis, ed. and trans. David C. Lindberg (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970), 36.
David C. Lindberg, “The Science of Optics,” in Science in the Middle Ages, ed. David C. Lindberg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 332–68, esp. 366n.
See A. C. Crombie, Robert Grosseteste and the Origins of Experimental Science, 1100–1700 (1953; rpt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), 106–07 and nn. Crombie excerpts and translates a passage on the multiplication of species found in Grosseteste’s De Luce (ca. 1215–20), that is collected and reprinted in Die philosophischen Werke des Robert Grosseteste, Bischofs von Lincoln, ed. Ludwig Baur (Münster, Aschendorff, 1912), 51–52. Crombie comments that “some of the same points are made in the Hexameron [ca. 1230–35] MS Roy. 6 E. v, f. 147vb.” See also Lindberg, “The Science of Optics,” 351–52, 366.
Ibid., 219–21. See also Sarah Waterlow, Nature, Change, and Agency in Aristotle’s Physics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 32–33; and Peter Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science (Cambridge, 1998), 93–95.
Galileo Galilei, Il saßßiatore [The Assayer], ed. Libero Sosio (Milan, Feltrinelli, 1965), 261, as cited in Redondi, Galileo Heretic, 55–56, 225–226. Redondi contends further that “the dangerousness of the words ‘color, odor, and taste’” is what incited the heresy proceedings against Galileo.”
See also Fortunio Liceti, Ltheosphorus sive de lapide Bononiensi lucem in se conceptam ab ambiente claro mox in tenebris mire conservante (Utini: Nicolai Schiratti, 1640), 178, as cited in Redondi, Galileo Heretic, 21n. Liceti, professor of philosophy and medicine at the University of Bologna, interpreted Galileo’s experiments with “solar sponge” (see note 21 above) thusly: “‘The light is a body, a part of which is attracted with the Bologna rock as fire by naphtha and iron by the magnet.”
See Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative (New York: Basic Books, 1981), 143.
Charles Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and Reform: 1626–1660 (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1975), 329.
Martin Luther, Lectures on Genesis Chapters 1–5, vol. 1 of Luther’s Works, 55 vols., trans. George V. Schick, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan et al. (St. Louis, MO: Concordia Publishing House, 1955-), 8, 19–20.
Richard E. Palmer, Hermeneutics: Interpretation Theory in Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heideßßer, and Gadamer (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1969), 23.
Frank E. Manuel, A Portrait of Isaac Newton (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1968), 23–35, 51–67.
Abraham Cowley, “Hymn. To Light,” The Abraham Cowley Text Imaße Archive (http://etext.virginia.edu/kinney/small/inlucem.htm), 11. 96–97. See Robert B. Hinman, Abraham Cowley’s World of Order (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), 305. Hinman discusses Cowley’s view of light, set forth in his note on light in terms rather reminiscent of Bacon’s discussion of light as a mediator between the “corporal” and the “incorporai”: Light… is a substance, but an infinite substance, and hence very closely related to spirit. It is God’s first expression of Himself through specific creation, His first separation of any distinct and ordered substance from Himself. Light may be thus described as the indefinable point at which the material grades into the completely spiritual, or as creative energy made manifest. In heaven it has the immateriality of spirit, but in the created universe and on earth, the nature of the material substance.
A. I. Sabra, Theories of Light from Descartes to Newton (London: Oldbourne, 1967), 34–41.
Oeuvres Complètes de Christiaan Huyjjens, 10:610–14, as cited in The Correspondence of Isaac Newton, 7 vols., ed. H. W Turnbull (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Royal Society, 1959–77), 3:356; my translation Arthur Bell, Christiaan Huygens and the Development of Science in the Seventeenth Century (London: E. Arnold, 1947), 7, suggests that Huygens own lack of a strong religious commitment— “he turned away from Calvinism as from Catholicism”—tempered and perhaps limited his commitment to Baconianism.
Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, trans. R. E. Latham (1951; rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), 82 (II, 741ff.).
Dennis L. Sepper, Goethe contra Newton: Polemics and the Project for a New Science of Color (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 105, 116.
See Stephen Finney Mason, “Science and Religion,” in The Intellectual Revolution of the Seventeenth Century, ed. Charles Webster (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), 206–08.
See Rosalie L. Colie, Light and Enlightenment: A Study of Cambridge Platonists and the Dutch Arminians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957), x, 34–35. Amonf le Clerc’s early publications is an essay in biblical criticism: Genesis (1693).
See Israel Abrahams, “Numbers, Typical and Important,” in Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd ed., ed. Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik (Detroit, MI: Macmillan Reference USA, 2007), 15:333–37, esp. 335. One wonders how Newton would have fared writing in Russian, a language with just one word for yellow and green.
See Ibid., 1:364; Lucretius, Nature, 82; Redondi, Galileo Heretic, 53. The reminiscence of Lucretius does not signal Newton’s acceptance of him. Newton parted company with the Epicureans over the question of whether corpuscular (or atomistic) materia prima was created by God (Newton’s Genesis-inspired view) or had always been there, awaiting only an inaugural clinamen to become the basis of the natural world as we know it (the Lucretian view). See Frank E. Manuel, The Religion of Isaac Newton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), 65.
See Isaac Newton, Observations on the Prophecies of Daniel, and the Apocalypse of St. John (London: J. Tonson et al., 1733), 5. Newton cites Genesis 2:4, the last verse of the P-account, as the last verse of “the history of the Creation composed by Moses”, apparently privileging it over the j-account as the authoritative one. However, as was the case with Bacon in chapter one above, Newton moves more easily between the two accounts than might at first seem obvious.
See Stephen D. Snobelen, “To Discourse of God: Isaac Newton’s Heterodox Theology and His Natural Philosophy,” in Science and Dissent in England, 1688–1945, ed. Paul Wood, 39–66, esp. 43. Snobelen notes that in the first (1687) edition of the Principia, published 17 years before the first (1704) edition of the Opticks, “in Corollary 4 to Proposition VIII in Book Three of the first edition of 1687, Newton writes: ‘God therefore placed the planets at different distances from the Sun so that according to their degrees of density they may enjoy a greater or less proportion of the Sun’s heat.’” Snobelen credits I. Bernard Cohen, “Isaac Newton’s Principia, the Scriptures and the Divine Providence,” in Philosophy, Science and Method, ed. Sidney Morgenbesser et al. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1969), 523–48, with the insight, and credits the English translation of Newton’s observation to Isaac Newton, The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, trans. I. Bernard Cohen, Anne Whitman, and Julia Budenz (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), 530.
See Margaret J. Osier, “Whose Ends? Teleology in Early Modern Natural Philosophy,” Osiris, 2nd ser., 16, Science in Theistic Contexts: Cognitive Dimensions (2001), 151–68, esp. 152–53, 154. Osier notes that during the Middle Ages, both concepts of causality—immanent and external—were enmeshed in metaphysical and theological assumptions about the nature of matter and—in the biblical context—God’s relationship to the creation. Do natural things possess essences that control their development toward certain ends? Are these essences something more than the material structure of things? If so, how do they affect God’s ability to intervene in the creation? How does God—the creator, designer, and governor of the universe—implement his design and impart his purposes to the created world? Are these purposes external to natural processes or somehow embedded in the nature of things? These questions had a particular urgency within the context of early modern natural philosophy—especially among adherents of the mechanical philosophy—many of whom wanted simultaneously to eliminate Aristotelianism and to avoid the materialism, deism, and atheism into which the mechanical philosophy threatened to lead them.
Steven Shapin, “History of Science and Its Sociological Reconstruction,” History of Science 20 (1982): 157–211, esp. 182.
Newton, Opticks, 400. See also Walter J. Ong, S. J., Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 122. As the avatar of the (loyal) Jesuit—and, more generally, Catholic—opposition to a science grounded in atomistic materialism, Ong holds, after Bernard Lonergan, “that to consider knowing by analogy with visual perception… is also to rob knowledge of its interiority.”
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Peterfreund, S. (2012). The Second Moses Reconsidered, or, Back to Bacon and Beyond: Mosaic Natural Theology in the Age of Newton. In: Turning Points in Natural Theology from Bacon to Darwin. Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137015273_4
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