Newtonianism and religion in the Netherlands

In the early eighteenth century Newtonianism became popular in the Netherlands both in academic (Boerhaave, ’sGravesande, Van Musschenbroek) and non-academic circles. The ‘Book of Nature’ was interpreted with the help of Newton’s natural philosophy and his ideas about a providential deity, thereby greatly enhancing the attractiveness of physico-theology in the eighteenth-century United Provinces. Like other Europeans the Dutch welcomed physico-theology as a strategic means in their battle against irreligion and atheism. Bernard Nieuwentijt, Johan Lulofs, Petrus Camper, and Johannes Florentius Martinet were prominent experts in the field. Combining Newtonian notions with Leibnizian optimism and romanticist trends, physico-theology remained popular in the Netherlands well into the nineteenth century.     

Degrees of longitude and the earth's shape: The diffusion of a scientific idea in Paris in the 1730s

The paper deals with the confusion that has arisen in studying the revival of geodesy in Paris in the 1730s. The episode highlights the vast qualitative differences in science-reporting to be found in periodicals of the early eighteenth century, and the actual roles that certain better-known journals played in the genesis of what became a trademark for eighteenth-century Parisian science.     

Isaac Newton and Augustan Anglo-Latin poetry

Although many historians of science acknowledge the extent to which Greek and Roman ideals framed eighteenth-century thought, many classical references in the texts they study remain obscure. Poems played an important role not only in spreading ideas about natural philosophy, but also in changing people’s perceptions of its value; they contributed to Newton’s swelling reputation as an English hero. By writing about Latin poetry, we focus on the intersection of two literary genres that were significant for eighteenth-century natural philosophy, but seem alien to modern science. We classify Augustan Latinate scientific poetry by considering the audiences for whom the poems were intended. We distinguish three broad categories. One type of poetry was circulated amongst gentlemanly scholars (we look particularly at Tripos verses, and laments for Queen Caroline). A second group comprised poetry written specifically to promote or criticise Newton and his books, particularly the Principia (we look at versions of Pope’s epitaph, and Halley’s Lucretian poem). After Newton’s death, a third type of poetry became increasingly significant, included in collections of poems rather than in texts of natural philosophy. Overall, we show how the classical past was vital for creating the scientific future.     

The union of arts and sciences in the eighteenth century: Lorenz Spengler (1720–1807), artistic turner and natural scientist

The life and career of Lorenz Spengler (1720–1807) provides evidence to support the view that the eighteenth century was a period when there was a fruitful interrelationship between the arts, crafts, and sciences in the courts and capitals of Europe. Spengler was trained as a turner, and was appointed teacher of ornamental turning to the Danish royal family and turner of the court in 1745. Even in the early years of his artistic career Spengler was interested in electricity and its role in healing, and he became an avid collector of shells and naturalia. Over the years, Spengler's interests turned more to the natural sciences, and in 1771 he was appointed director of the King's Kunstkammer. Only by considering both aspects of Spengler's career can his scientific activities be placed in their proper historical context.     

From personality to party: the creation and transmission of Hutchinsonianism, c. 1725-1750

This paper represents a provisional attempt to chart the intellectual construction of Hutchinsonianism over approximately a quarter of a century from the mid-1720s through to the early 1750s. It looks at how Hutchinson’s works were received and fashioned by his first followers, the means they used to communicate their conviction to others, and the extent to which their outlook can be characterised as anti-Newtonian. The paper argues for a slow take up of ‘Hutchinsonian’ views before Spearman and Bate published a collected edition of the master’s works in 1748. This single edition gave Hutchinson’s writings a coherence and a unity they were ill-designed to carry, but it created Hutchinsonianism as an appreciable force in Oxford and elsewhere. The paper concludes that the anti-Newtonian rhetoric of the movement’s founder was increasingly muted in the hands of his followers (with the exception of Bate), and by the 1750s the main bone of contention was less attitudes to Newton than approaches to Hebrew scholarship.     

William Whiston, Isaac Newton and the crisis of publicity

William Whiston was one of the first British converts to Newtonian physics and his 1696 New theory of the earth is the first full-length popularization of the natural philosophy of the Principia. Impressed with his young protégé, Newton paved the way for Whiston to succeed him as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics in 1702. Already a leading Newtonian natural philosopher, Whiston also came to espouse Newton’s heretical antitrinitarianism in the middle of the first decade of the eighteenth century. In all, Whiston enjoyed twenty years of contact with Newton dating from 1694. Although they shared so much ideologically, the two men fell out when Whiston began to proclaim openly the heresy that Newton strove to conceal from the prying eyes of the public. This paper provides a full account of this crisis of publicity by outlining Whiston’s efforts to make both Newton’s natural philosophy and heterodox theology public through popular texts, broadsheets and coffee house lectures. Whiston’s attempts to draw Newton out through published hints and innuendos, combined with his very public religious crusade, rendered the erstwhile disciple a dangerous liability to the great man and helps explain Newton’s eventual break with him, along with his refusal to support Whiston’s nomination to the Royal Society. This study not only traces Whiston’s successes in preaching the gospel of Newton’s physics and theology, but demonstrates the ways in which Whiston, who resolutely refused to accept Newton’s epistemic distinction between ‘open’ and ‘closed’ forms of knowledge, transformed Newton’s grand programme into a singularly exoteric system and drove it into the public sphere.     

‘This inscrutable principle of an original organization’: epigenesis and ‘looseness of fit’ in Kant’s philosophy of science

Kant’s philosophy of science takes on sharp contour in terms of his interaction with the practicing life scientists of his day, particularly Johann Blumenbach and the latter’s student, Christoph Girtanner, who in 1796 attempted to synthesize the ideas of Kant and Blumenbach. Indeed, Kant’s engagement with the life sciences played a far more substantial role in his transcendental philosophy than has been recognized hitherto. The theory of epigenesis, especially in light of Kant’s famous analogy in the first Critique (B167), posed crucial questions regarding the ‘looseness of fit’ between the constitutive and the regulative in Kant’s theory of empirical law. A detailed examination of Kant’s struggle with epigenesis between 1784 and 1790 demonstrates his grave reservations about its hylozoist implications, leading to his even stronger insistence on the discrimination of constitutive from regulative uses of reason. The continuing relevance of these issues for Kant’s philosophy of science is clear from the work of Buchdahl and its contemporary reception.     

Poinsinet's Edition of the Naturalis historia (1771–1782) and the Revival of Pliny in the Sciences of the Enlightenment

This paper analyses the revival of Pliny's Naturalis historia within the scientific culture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, focusing on a French effort to produce an edition with annotations by scientists and scholars. Between the Renaissance and the early eighteenth century, the Naturalis historia had declined in scientific importance. Increasingly, it was relegated to the humanities, as we demonstrate with a review of editions. For a variety of reasons, however, scientific interest in the Naturalis historia grew in the second half of the eighteenth century. Epitomizing this interest was a plan for a scientifically annotated, Latin-French edition of the Naturalis historia. Initially coordinated by the French governmental minister Malesherbes in the 1750s, the edition was imperfectly realized by Poinsinet a few decades later. It was intended to rival two of the period's other distinguished multi-volume books of knowledge, Diderot and D'Alembert's Encyclopédie and Buffon's Histoire naturelle, to which we compare it. Besides narrating the scientific revival of the Historia naturalis during this period, we examine its causes and the factors contributing to its end in the first half of the nineteenth century.     

Copernicus: A Very Short Introduction

The reception of Buffon's Histoire Naturelle in the Enlightenment has not received the historical attention it deserves. Drawing primarily on archival sources, this paper examines Aberdeen reactions to the Histoire during the period c. 1750–1800. As pedagogues, the Aberdonians endeavoured to maintain intellectual orthodoxy, and hence they attacked Buffon for his apparent materialism and atheism. Moreover, the Aberdonians rejected Buffon's critique of taxonomy because they based their natural history courses on classifications of the three kingdoms of nature, and because they attempted to use classification systems in nosology and the study of the human mind. Finally, in the 1790s Aberdeen readings of the Histoire were profoundly affected by the fears aroused by the French Revolution.     

‘The long-lost truth’: Sir Isaac Newton and the Newtonian pursuit of ancient knowledge

In the 1720s the antiquary and Newtonian scholar Dr. William Stukeley (1687-1765) described his friend Isaac Newton as ‘the Great Restorer of True Philosophy’. Newton himself in his posthumously published Observations upon the prophecies of Daniel, and the Apocalypse of St. John (1733) predicted that the imminent fulfilment of Scripture prophecy would see ‘a recovery and re-establishment of the long-lost truth’. In this paper I examine the background to Newton’s interest in ancient philosophy and theology, and how it related to modern natural philosophical discovery. I look at the way in which the idea of a ‘long-lost truth’ interested others within Newton’s immediate circle, and in particular how it was carried forward by Stukeley’s researches into ancient British antiquities. I show how an interest in and respect for ancient philosophical knowledge remained strong within the first half of the eighteenth century.     

Reflecting ‘Popular Culture’: The Introduction,Diffusion, and Construction of the Reflecting Telescope in the Netherlands

The eighteenth century was an era in which science came to play a major role in the cultural ideal of the city elite. The phenomenon of the ‘gentleman-scientist’ arose: a layman without a scientific education who for a variety of often socially desirable reasons devoted himself to scientific endeavours. Scientific instruments were the tools for this interest. This article describes the introduction, diffusion, and construction in the Netherlands of one of the most prominent eighteenth-century instruments: the reflecting telescope. The reception of this instrument casts new light on the usually almost invisible network of gentleman-scientists and instrument-makers in this region. The specific economic and political factors of the Netherlands led to a totally different development of this instrument compared with the ‘motherland’ England. Whereas in Great Britain the reflecting telescope was a great success well into the nineteenth century, in the Netherlands it became a symbol of technical inability and stagnation.     

Newtonianism and the enthusiasm of Enlightenment

The career of John Jackson (1686-1763), Arian theologian and controversialist, provides a key to unlocking the early reception and quick collapse of a Newtonian natural apologetic originally developed by Samuel Clarke. The importance of friendship and discipleship in eighteenth-century intellectual enquiry is emphasised, and the links between Newton and his followers are traced alongside those of a group of Cambridge Lockeans, led by Jackson’s direct contemporary Daniel Waterland, who proved instrumental in the initial dismantling of Clarke’s brand of Newtonian apologetic. The controversial context of this engagement is shown to have been largely provided by the religiously compromising rise of freethinking, and Tindal’s Christianity as old as the creation (1731) signalled the dangers to proponents of natural religion as an adjunct of Christian apologetic in such a heated atmosphere. Religious division of the sort that resulted paradoxically played into the hands of the freethinkers in the anticlerical atmosphere of the 1730s, and accusations were exchanged between Newtonians and Lockeans accordingly. The dynamic of England’s Enlightenment experience is, then, a complicated one, and, as the career and writings of Jackson and William Whiston demonstrate, it was one which absorbed as well as repudiated ‘enthusiasm’.     

On reading Newton as an Epicurean: Kant,Spinozism and the changes to the Principia

This paper argues for three distinct, albeit mutually illuminating theses: first it explains why well informed eighteenth-century thinkers, e.g., the pre-critical Immanuel Kant and Richard Bentley would have identified important aspects of Newton’s natural philosophy with (a species of modern) Epicureanism. Second, it explores how some significant changes to Newton’s Principia between the first (1687) and second (1713) editions can be explained in terms of attempts to reframe the Principia so that the charge of “Epicureanism” can be deflected. In order to account for this, the paper discusses the political and theological changes in the wake of the Glorious Revolution (1688); Bentley plays a non-trivial role in these matters. Third, the paper argues that there is an argument in Kant’s (1755) Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens that undermines a key claim of Newton’s General Scholium that was used to discredit Spinozism by Clarke in A demonstration of the being and attributes of God.     

Producing objects, producing texts: accounts of android automata in late eighteenth-century Europe

Using the famous android automata made by the Swiss clockmakers Jaquet-Droz as an example, this essay examines the relationship between the production of automata and the production of texts about them against the background of economic and cultural conditions of artisan production and of the emerging ‘media industry’ in the public sphere of the late eighteenth century on the European continent. It explores the artisan environment in which the automata came into being and develops readings of various types of texts on the automata, including analyses of the contexts and print media of which they were a part. The essay concludes by explaining two interrelated peculiarities about eighteenth-century texts on the Jaquet-Droz automata: the fact that none of the texts displayed any interest in the metaphysical or ethical consequences of artificial or mechanical humans, and that they were, on the contrary, often simply copied from each other and thus adhered to the customs and exigencies of the emerging media industry of the time. The pre-industrial, traditional, non-mass produced construction of the automata thus coincided with the emerging contemporary mass production of texts and media, and it makes these texts and their objects bring into focus a key paradox underlying the history of modernity, the mass production of individuals and of individuality.     

Interpreting Aristotle on mixture: problems about elemental composition from Philoponus to Cooper

Aristotle’s On generation and corruption raises a vital question: how is mixture, or what we would now call chemical combination, possible? It also offers an outline of a solution to the problem and a set of criteria that a successful solution must meet. Understanding Aristotle’s solution and developing a viable peripatetic theory of chemical combination has been a source of controversy over the last two millennia. We describe seven criteria a peripatetic theory of mixture must satisfy: uniformity, recoverability, potentiality, equilibrium, alteration, incompleteness, and the ability to distinguish mixture from generation, corruption, juxtaposition, augmentation, and alteration. After surveying the theories of Philoponus (d. 574), Avicenna (d. 1037), Averroes (d. 1198), and John M. Cooper (fl. circa 2000), we argue for the merits of Richard Rufus of Cornwall’s theory. Rufus (fl. 1231-1256) was a little known scholastic philosopher who became a Franciscan theologian in 1238, after teaching Aristotelian natural philosophy as a secular master in Paris. Lecturing on Aristotle’s De generatione et corruptione, around the year 1235, he offered his students a solution to the problem of mixture that we believe satisfies Aristotle’s seven criteria.     

Terrestrial magnetism and the development of international collaboration in the early nineteenth century

The establishment of Gauss's and Weber's Magnetische Verein in 1834, and the British Government's support of Edward Sabine's ‘Magnetic Crusade’ in 1838, marked the opening of a new era in international geomagnetic research. However, the British and German efforts, although initiating an increase in the scale of investigations of the earth's field, were also the culmination of over half a century of activity by individuals and institutions in several countries. This article traces the growth of international cooperation in terrestrial magnetism from the late eighteenth century until the 1830s, and examines the change in leadership in the field from France to Britain and Germany. The transition from individual to government-backed collaboration is described, and also the role of Alexander von Humboldt as an organiser of geomagnetic research and author of a cosmical approach to earth magnetism as one of a number of related ‘telluric’ forces.     

Galileo and the problem of infinity

During the period before the Greek revolution of 1821, and especially during the years between 1750 and 1821, there were two ways in which European scientific thought was propagated in Greece. The first is traditional. It comes from ancient Greece and, through Byzantium, reaches the period before the Greek revolution. It makes known the thought of Aristotle, Democrititus, and others on ‘natural philosophy’. The second way comes from Europe. The Greek scholars of the period before the Greek revolution, and especially at the end of the eighteenth century, tried to bring to and propagate in Greece the spirit ofthe European Enlightenment, They tried to make known to the Greek people the scientific achievements of Newton, Descartes, Lavoisier, and Laplace. Scientific knowledge is an important weapon against superstition, and Greek students had to learn about science to become free persons in an independent Greek state.     

The wedge and the vis viva controversy: how concepts of force influenced the practice of early eighteenth-century mechanics

This article discusses the quest for the mechanical advantage of the wedge in the eighteenth century. As a case study, the wedge enlightens our understanding of eighteenth-century mechanics in general and the controversy over “force” or vis viva in particular. In this article, I show that the two different approaches to mechanics, the one that favoured force in terms of velocities and the one that primarily used displacements—known as the ‘Newtonian’ and ‘Leibnizian’ methods, respectively—were not at all on par in their ability to solve the problem of the wedge. In general, only those who used the Leibnizian concept of force or some related notion were able to get to the conventional results. This article thus rebuts the received view that the vis viva controversy was merely a semantic one. Instead, it shows that different understandings of “force” led to real and pragmatic differences in eighteenth-century mechanics.