Newton to Laplace
Lucinda Cole
The history of early modern science has sometimes been represented by a straightforward narrative of displacement: “occult” knowledges were replaced by the mechanical, mathematical, and empirically grounded models of Nature, culminating in the science of Isaac Newton (Vickers 1986: 3–44). But theology played a more significant role for Bacon, Boyle, Newton, and others than such a progressivist description allows (Markley 1993; Bono 1999). Newton’s writings on alchemy, religion, polytheistic theologies, and other so-called “unscientific” topics surfaced in an auction in 1936 and were sold to various libraries, thereby creating a schism in Newton studies between those who dismissed these writings as a product of senility or mercury poisoning and those who saw them as integral to Newton’s scientific theories (Westfall 1980; Castillejo 1989; Force and Popkin 1999). It is essential to recognize that neither Boyle nor Newton, nor any of their followers, claims that science is an independent means to truth, but only what Boyle calls a “handmaid to divinity” (Hellegers 2000). In his letter to Richard Bentley, Newton says of his Principia, “When I wrote my Treatise about our System, I had an Eye upon such Principles as might work with considering Men, for the Belief of a Deity” (Turnball et al. 1959–77: 3, 233). While the Royal Society banned debates about politics and religion, both discourses helped structure the work of British natural philosophers who, rather than rejecting a hermetic tradition and the religiosity underwriting it, often debated in their letters and papers the ways in which their empirical experiments and mathematical advances could be assimilated to – and reinforce – the theological metanarratives of Protestant voluntarism: the belief in God’s unlimited power and unpredictable, mysterious intervention in nature, in a world that, through His will, can be redeemed or destroyed.
Late seventeenth-century British natural philosophers like Boyle and Newton lived in and studied what they regarded as a post-lapsarian world in which nature, humans, language, and even knowledge itself had been corrupted by original sin. For these men, human sin was both cause and effect of a fallen but temporary state of Nature. “The present course of nature,” Boyle writes, “shall not last always, but that one Day this World … shall be either Abolished by Annihilation, or (which seems far more probable) be Innovated, and, as it were, Transfigur’d” by “Fire” which “shall dissolve and destroy the present frame of Nature” (Boyle 1674: 22). The idea of the clockwork universe where, in Bruno Latour’s words, a “crossed-out God was ‘relegated to the sidelines’” (Latour 1993: 13) was really the byproduct of a different historical period. Some hundred years later, in Revolutionary France after the Catholic Church had been banned and its houses of worship desecrated, Pierre Simon de Laplace, not Newton, proposed an entirely orderly and mechanistic universe based upon a rigorous mathematical determinism (Numbers 1977). To associate the “rise” of early modern science with a vision of mathematical determinism, then, depends on suppressing any number of political and religious discourses promoted by writers in both the English and Continental traditions, and on the occlusion of a complex historical context and its obsessions with order and origin (Hall 1980).
One of the dominant structuring metaphors in early modern science is the idea of the “two books”: the belief that one must read nature, as one reads the word of God, because both are paths to ultimate salvation for the soul and redemption for a fallen world. “The Book of Grace,” writes Robert Boyle, “doth resemble the Book of Nature; wherein the Stars … are not more Nicely nor Methodically plac’d than the Passages of Scripture” (Boyle 1674: a1r). But often early modern scientists had very different ideas from their predecessors about how “Nature” could be defined. Boyle addresses this problem in his Free Inquiry Into the Vulgar Notion of Nature, which is primarily directed against two interrelated notions that he believes have had “an ill effect upon religion”: treating merely “corporeal” things as though they had “life, sense, and understanding,” which is the basis of pantheism, and ascribing to Nature “things that belong to God alone,” which is the basis of idolatry (Boyle 1686: 113). Boyle inveighs here and elsewhere against the neo-Pythagorean tradition of anima mundi, or world soul. Implicit in Virgil, revised in certain neo-Stoic sects, and popularized through successive translations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the idea of anima mundi – literally, the breath of life – played an important part in physiognomy and Galenic approaches to the world, such as Giambattista della Porta’s immensely popular Natural Magick (1558). Sometimes called plastic nature, the Pythagorean idea of the world soul implied an idea of kinship among all animate creatures or, in some Stoic versions, the idea of an immanent, living, natural force which was often at odds with both voluntarist and, later, agnostic notions of the universe (Jacob 1977).
Debates about the nature of matter and the question of an animate soul had profound effects on a range of scientific discourses, from alchemy to physiology to physics, where it was often subject to charges of atheism and impiety. At stake in anima mundi was a host of issues: whether the transmigration of souls is a possibility; whether the universe could tolerate a vacuum; whether humans are a microcosm of a larger macrocosm; whether humans are alone in possessing a soul; the nature of God; whether or not the Deity can be said to be “in” the world; the truth of scripture; and the distinction between modern and “pagan” or “heretical” thought. Writing in 1741, the encyclopedist Ephraim Chambers offers a succinct, but bloodless, description of the issue many seventeenth-century natural philosophers faced: “the principle thing objected … against [the ancient] doctrine of the anima mundi,” he writes, “is that it mingles the deity too much with the creatures, confounds in some measure, the workman with his work, making this, as it were, a part of that, the several portions of the universe as so many parts of the Godhead” (Chambers 1741: sig 1Bb). Underwriting the relationship between the creator and his creatures is an equally fundamental question about the beginning and the ending of the world. Charles Blount (1679), citing Lucretius, polemically contrasts the assumptions about pagan and Christian ideas. Of the former, he writes, since no egg could be without a bird, and no bird without an egg, “superstitious” ancient philosophers “conceiv’d that the World, and the beginning of every begotten thing, together with the end thereof, must be by perpetual revolution semipiternal.” From this “semipiternal” perspective, God may be Nature, Nature may be God, and both must be regarded as “eternal, and void of all corruption” (Blount 1679: 11–12).
Boyle addresses the chicken-and-egg problem first by coming down on the side of the producer rather than the product. More precisely, for the self-creating nature of the ancients – the Natura naturans – he substitutes “the word God” (Boyle 1686: 14). In his voluntarist view, the coherence of Nature is the effect of God’s will: “Nature is the Aggregate of the Bodies, that make up the World, framed as it is, considered as a principle, by virtue whereof, they Act and Suffer according to Laws of Motion, prescribed by the Author of Things” (Boyle 1686: 71). God, not Nature, is therefore the universal force that directs and orders the universe, now conceived as fallen. Second, however, Boyle uses the fact of a post-lapsarian world to justify the project of experimental philosophy. “For Boyle, scientific experimentation is to nature what exegesis is to the Bible” (Markley 1993: 41). The proper study of both ultimately leads to “an Endlesse Progress” (Boyle 1674: 63) in natural and scriptural knowledge – that is, in the unending, asymptotic efforts to redeem science, Nature, and the scientist from irrevocable sin.
One byproduct of Boyle’s rejection of anima mundi is the elevation of humans at the expense of the animals upon which they feed and experiment: “It is an act of piety to offer up for the creatures the sacrifice of praise to the creator” (Boyle 1762: 8). Boyle’s insistence on human dominance of a fallen nature closely follows the argument made in The Novum Organon by Francis Bacon, who flatly asserts that he does “not approve” of the “confused and promiscuous philosophers” who would treat the human soul as though it differed “in degree rather than species from the soul of the brutes” (Bacon 1899: 125). One consequence of this argument for Bacon is that animals can be dissected in order to “answer the design” of experimental philosophy (Bacon 1899: 116). Boyle’s Of the Usefulness of Experimental Philosophy similarly opens with an extended defense of “skillful dissection” against those “dis-approving the study of physiology” (Boyle 1762: 8) and articulates a Christian justification for distinguishing radically between humans and the other animals by using the story of Noah to justify man’s dominance. Boyle explicitly connects scientific practice to a Noachian history and its sacrificial economy:
So when in Noah’s time, a deluge of impiety called for a deluge of waters, God, looking upon the living creatures, as made for the use of man, stuck not to destroy them with him, and for him; but involved in his ruin all those animals, that were not necessary to the perpetuation of the species, and the sacrifice due for Noah’s preservation.
(Boyle 1762: 17)
In rejecting anima mundi and in linking experimental science to Noachian history, Boyle promotes a view that makes all of creation a laboratory for human beings for the sake of their individual and collective redemption. In his words, Noah’s “noble sacrifice” of different species of animals constituted a “thank-you offering for the reprieve of the world” (Boyle 1762: 18). To the extent that science, for Boyle, is a form of prayer, his devotion demands a sacrifice – animal experimentation – that becomes a measure of his faith. In Boyle’s sacrificial and voluntarist world, there is no messy “mingling” between the deity and his creatures, no conflation between Nature and God, and no confusion about the differences between humans and the organic “texts” which constituted their proper objects of study.
Boyle’s sacrificial justification occurred during a period when markers of the difference between human and animal – based on anatomy, intelligence, and emotions – were being challenged by the new empiricism (Fudge 1999; Guerrini 2003). Ultimately, man’s claim to religion was the only difference left standing, making the question of animal immortality one of the most hotly debated issues of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. When situated within this volatile context, the doctrine of anima mundi is not simply an archaism of pre-scientific thought, but part of the deep history by which the tensions that characterize early modern science and its relationship to the natural world were articulated. Latour argues that modernity set itself the task of carving two realms, one characterized by a free-thinking subject – the realm of humans and politics – and one inhabited by mute objects – the realm of “Nature”–that, through scientific representatives, are thought to “speak the truth.” These “nonhumans,” writes Latour, “lacking souls but endowed with meaning, are even more reliable than mortals, to whom will is attributed but who lack the capacity to indicate phenomena in a reliable way” (Latour 1993: 23–24). Cast with new semantic powers, experimental animals contribute to a new kind of text, the experimental science article, “a hybrid between the age-old style of biblical exegesis … and the new instrument that produces new inscriptions” (23–24). By virtue of experiments – the most famous being those of the air pump to demonstrate the properties of a vacuum – animals were re-constituted as what Latour calls hybrids or quasi-objects, products of the laboratory. In a very real sense, the cultural history of early modern science is an effort to negotiate between the proliferation of hybrids in the laboratory and the ideology of purification that strives to distinguish humans from animal, spirit from Nature, theory from practice.
Keith Thomas writes that Boyle had no patience for the “veneration” of an uncorrupted Nature explicit in many ancient and Eastern religions, which he recognized as “a discouraging impediment to the empire of man over the inferior creatures” (Thomas 1983: 22). This sensibility he shared with Newton, although Newton’s relationship to religious history was more complicated. Boyle was a faithful member of the Anglican Church, a low-church latitudinarian; Newton, in contrast, was an anti-Trinitarian who perceived himself as outside established church doctrine and as entertaining the kinds of heretical beliefs that got his successor as the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, William Whiston, fired from his post (Force 1985). For Boyle, both the Bible and nature are perfectly ordered; for Newton, the bulk of the Bible “is a flawed, imperfect text that had been corrupted by poor translations and the willing deceit of Trinitarians” (Markley 1993: 144–45). In Newton’s view, the metaphor of the two books had been called into question, if not undermined, by a Roman Catholic and then Anglican institutionalizing of Trinitarian corruption of the Bible. In search of a more reliable grounding for the argument from design, Newton embarks upon a multifaceted research program, developing two interrelated strategies for dealing with a post-lapsarian world: he makes the study of Nature, rather than the Bible, the basis of religious faith; and he attempts to recover a true history of an uncorrupted monotheism characterized by a pristine knowledge of the heliocentric universe, a history corrupted by the arch-villain of Trinitarianism, Athanasius. In pursuit of this project, Newton returns to and revitalizes a hermetic tradition.
In his 1687 Principia Mathematica Newton introduced gravitation and the three laws of universal motion that, for two hundred years, were foundational to explaining everything from the movement of planets to the behavior of sub-atomic particles. But this masterwork of mathematical theory was, for Newton, only part of a larger project that took him, for the final four decades of his life, into sustained investigations of alchemy, religious history, and mythography. The way in which science continues to serve as a “handmaid to divinity” for Newton can be found in his treatment of the prytanea (Westfall 1982; Markley 1999). After writing the Principia, Newton returned to his obsessive study of ancient religions, arguing in an English précis of his Latin treatise Ori-gines, “The Original of Religions,” that the “most ancient” and “most generally received” religion after the Flood was that of “Prytanea or Vestal Temples” (cited in Markley 1999: 135). For Newton, these temples, built around a sacrificial altar, recall Noah’s sacrifice of clean animals after the Flood; they thereby provide evidence that a primitive monotheism antedates subsequent religious and philosophical corruption: “I gather that the sacrificing of clean birds and beasts by a consecrated fire in a consecrated place was the true religion until the nations corrupted it. For it was the religion of Noah, … the religion which Noah propagated down to his prosperity was the true religion” in which the father of the family “did the office of the Priest” (cited in Markley 1999: 136). In this respect, the prytanea stands for Newton as the ur-model of the heliocentric universe; the existence of a primitive scientific knowledge is embodied in the very “frame”–that is, the proportions of the prytanea – with its sacred fire at the center. “So then was one design of ye first institution of ye true religion to propose to mankind by ye frame of ye ancient Temples, the study of the frame of the world as the true Temple of ye great God they worshipped” (cited in Markley 1999: 136). Newton deliberately conflates Temple and world, architectural design and a pristine mathematical knowledge of the order of the universe, and like Boyle, albeit in different ways, locates his natural philosophy within a sacrificial economy that divides a heterogeneous world into the human and “the animal”: the sacrifice of the animal – the bodily, the material, the contingent – becomes the structural necessity for the realization and transcendence of the human.
Conceived both as a form of consumption and a means of regeneration, fire is the purifying agent that stands in for the unrepresentable evidence of the true religion and the millenarian renovation of a fallen world. Like Pythagoras, Newton considered fire as an “active principle” set against a physical world in which motion is “always decreasing” (Newton 1718: 375). As he writes in the Opticks, an active principle is the
cause of Fermentation, by which the Heart and Blood of Animals are kept in perpetual Motion and Heat; the inward Parts of the Earth are constantly warm’d, and in some places grow very hot; Bodies burn and shine, Mountains take Fire, the Caverns of the Earth are Blown up, and the Sun continues violently hot and lucid, and warms all things by his Light.
(Newton 1718: 375)
Comets are a special case of this active principle.
Provoked, as were many others, by a comet that appeared over Cambridge in 1680, Newton began thinking about the forces that could determine the comet’s elliptical orbit – a line of thought which led to his theories on gravity – but his investigations of the comet’s path were always at least partially informed by hermetic and scriptural invocations of fire. Preceding the formulation of principles of gravity, in other words, was a long-standing interest in the relationship between decay, or destruction, and creation, or growth, from both an alchemical perspective and a scriptural one. His undergraduate notebook contains an extended reference to II Peter 3: “the heavens that now are, and the earth, by the same word have been stored up for fire, being reserved against the day of judgment and destruction of ungodly men.” Towards the end of his life, as Dobbs points out, Newton explained to John Conduitt that comets are probably the mechanism by which the sun, which is subject to “waste by the constant heat and light it emitted” could be replenished “as a faggot would this fire” (cited in Dobbs 1991: 235). With Newton’s work, she continues, “comets were promoted in status” from “signs,” or portents of disaster, to “agents of destruction” (236). Destruction by fire, however, allowed for and even made necessary the creative capacity of what Newton elsewhere calls a “powerful ever-living Agent” who can move through divine will “the Bodies within his boundless uniform Sensorium” (Newton 1718: 379) and who, in the face of always-decreasing natural energies could periodically destroy and repeople the earth.
A Newtonian view of comets as a providential principle of regeneration is apparent in Richard Glover’s poem that prefaces Henry Pemberton’s A View of Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy (1728). Calling upon “the great dispenser of the world” to inspire his song, Glover recounts how the “still indulgent parent of mankind” has provided comets as a counteragent to “the vital principle decay/ By which air supplies the springs of life”:
Thou hast the fiery visag’d comets form’d
With vivifying spirits all replete,
Which they abundant breathe about the void,
Renewing the prolifick soul of things.
(Glover 1728)
Comets, once sources of trembling and terror, have now been recognized, thanks to Newton, in their true role as “vivifying spirits,” as principles of regeneration. Rather than signs of impending doom, Newtonian comets become compatible with the laws of gravitation “around the sun mov[ing] regularly on”:
And with the planets in harmonious orbs,
And mystick periods their obeisance pay
To him majestick ruler of the skies
Upon his throne of circled glory fixed.
(Glover 1728)
In this extended metaphor, comets – Newton’s life-bearing seeds – function like the prytanea in demonstrating fundamental physico-theological principles to those who know how to read them. Both the prytanea and the comet have a double life as images of decay, or consumption, and regeneration; the prytanea consumes life for the sake of spiritual renewal; the sun, in Newton’s mythos, will eventually consume the earth and the beings on it for the sake of regeneration on a cosmic scale. Without the active principle represented by gravity and fire, planets like Earth are prey to the corruptions of a sinful humankind and a fallen nature.
By the middle of the eighteenth century, the very real threats to Baconian physico-theology once offered by the ancient doctrine of anima mundi seem to have been resolved, or least minimized. Thus, in his entry on anima mundi, Chambers (1741) draws a direct line between Pythagoras and Newton, between the ancient and modern. While “most … modern philosophers reject the doctrine of anima mundi,” the “generality of them admit something very much like it.” The Cartesians, he points out, have their doctrine of “subtile matter,” while some others “substitute fire,” and still others a “subtle elastic spirit or medium diffused through all of space” (Chambers 1741). In relation to the latter, he cross-references “Newtonian,” thereby making Newton, in a kind of mutually reinforcing back formation, a modern Pythagorean, or Pythagoras, an ancient Newton. In a rhetorical strategy that minimizes religious and theological differences central to eighteenth-century natural philosophy, Chambers even goes so far as to claim that the Aristotelians had simply “misunderstood” the Pythagorean doctrine of anima mundi, interpreting it in ways that, prior to Newton’s clarifications, had created “confusion” (Chambers 1741).
How had Newton’s concept of gravity “clarified” the question of immanentism that had troubled Western philosophy since its inception? Newton claims that God created and controlled the related principles of heat, fire, and light, “And yet we are not to consider the World as the Body of God,” Newton insists, but as a “uniform Being, void of Organs, Members, or Parts,” who created all creatures but is in no way identical with them: “and are his Creatures subordinate to him, and subservient to his Will; and he is no more the Soul of them, than the Soul of the Man is the Soul of the Species of Things carried through the Organs of Sense into the place of its Sensation. … God has no need of such Organs, he being everywhere present to the Things themselves” (Newton 1718: 379). While Newton is not the first to make an argument against immanentism, what he demonstrated were the laws – although not the cause – of universal forces, and this, he claimed, was enough. “These principles I consider not as occult Qualities … but as general Laws of Nature, by which the Things themselves are form’d: their Truth appearing to us by Phaenomena, though their Causes be not yet discover’d” (Newton 1718: 376–77). Newton writes in the Opticks that he is willing to “propose” principles of motion “and leave their Causes to be found out” (377). In truth, however, Chambers correctly implies that Newton complicates rather than rejects the idea of causation: reworking older notions of animal spirits, Newton is impelled by some vitalist assumptions, but these are subordinated – perhaps even sacrificed – to an emerging scientific method.
The hallmark of Newton’s commitment is the inductive study of phenomena rather than deductive assertion. By transposing metaphysical questions into physical and phenomenological ones, by focusing upon effects rather than first principles, Newton’s writings offered a more systematic understanding of once-mysterious universal laws that struck many of his contemporaries as being God given, and whole. “O wisdom truly perfect!” writes James Thomson (1727): “Thus to call / From a few causes such a scheme of things, / Effects so various, beautiful, and great, / A universe compleat!” The Principia and The Opticks – or at least a popularized understanding of them – found their way into literature through such works as Glover’s “Poem on Sir Isaac Newton” of 1728, Elizabeth Tollet’s Hypatia of 1724, James Thomson’s The Seasons of 1727–30, Pope’s Essay on Man of 1732–34, and a host of other writings about Nature, reason, and the limits of understanding that have come to be associated with an “Enlightenment” sensibility. Tollet, for example, extols the predictive qualities of Newton’s universe, in which comets follow regular motions through the skies, as “Real Stars, which unextinguish’d burn / Thro’ larger periods of a just Return” (Tollet 1755). Once again, an image of fire validates the movement of an orderly cosmos in a mode of writing that has been termed the Newtonian sublime, both for its ability to inspire awe, the attitude most characteristic of the sublime from Longinus to Edmund Burke, and for its mimicry of alchemical sublimation. In this respect, the creation and coherence of the Newtonian system requires the transformation, through fire, of concepts once regarded as “occult.”
Along with the celebration of Newton’s regular and harmonious universe was his deification within an emerging history of science. Casting Newton as the endpoint in a developmental and progressivist history, didactic poets, elegists, and a new breed of universal historians helped create Newtonianism, sometimes by covering over the religiosity underwriting his science, and sometimes by exploiting it. “Snatches from the dark abyss,” writes Thomson (1727), “at [Newton’s] approach / Blaz’d into suns, / the living centre each / Of an harmonious system … rul’d unerring by that single power, / Which draws the stone projected to the ground” (ll. 61–67). In these lines, as elsewhere, Thomson conflates religious and scientific history – like a cosmic light, Newton illuminated the laws of “that single power” (gravity or God) manifest in a heliocentric universe.
The best extended example of such reconciliation is Glover’s “Poem on Sir Isaac Newton.” Representing Newton as a kind of divine authority in a chain of natural philosophers that includes Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Copernicus, Bacon, and Boyle, Glover poetically outlines a progressivist history of science, then reinforced by Pemberton’s essay on Newton’s ideas. Evoking the divine origins of Newton’s science, Glover writes: “Newton demands the muse … his sacred hand / Shall guide her infant steps; his sacred hand / Shall raise her to the Heliconian height, / Where, on its lofty top inthron’d, her head / Shall mingle with the Stars” (Glover 1728). This coupling – or even tripling – of the natural philosopher, poetic inspiration, and God is reinforced through an extended Miltonic simile in which Newton becomes yoked with Noah. Glover compares the state of knowledge before Newton to the Earth submerged by the Flood: “The Deity’s omnipotence, the cause, / Th’ original of things long lay unknown”:
As when the deluge overspread the earth,
Whilst yet the mountains only rear’d their heads
Above the surface of the wild expanse,
Whelm’d deep below the great foundations lay,
Till some kind angel at heav’n’s high command
Repul’d back the rising tides, and haughty floods,
And to the ocean thunder’d out his voice:
Quick all the swelling and imperious waves,
The foaming billows and obscuring surge,
Back to the channels and their ancient seats
Recoil affrighted: from the darksome main
Earth raises smiling, as new-born, her head,
And with fresh charms her lovely face arrays.
(Glover 1728)
Newton’s science is simultaneously illuminative (exposing the “originals” of things) and regenerative (“Earth raises smiling”). Much like Newton’s own theological writings on the prytanea, Glover’s poem yokes a Judeo-Christian tradition of symbology with the notion of prisca scientia, the ancient pristine knowledge of a heliocentric, sacrificial universe. This time, however, Newton occupies the place of redeeming angel in a fallen world. Redemption for Newton, as Markley argues, is “based not upon an idealized vision of an uncorrupted nature but on an idealization of an uncorrupted knowledge of nature” (Markley 1993: 147). In the Noachian mythos as represented by both Newton and Glover, knowledge of the universe is regenerative but always brief, partial, and – the ubiquitous eighteenth-century’s metaphors of light notwithstanding – viewed through a glass, darkly.
Their shared sense of impaired vision contrasts sharply to those who believe in the perfectibility of knowledge. James Fortescue (1750) envisions a progressive future history that will pass by Newton: “The time will come when such shall know / Much more than Newton ever knew, / Than fancy e’er conceiv’d” (ll. 154–56). This point seems worth making in the face of a still widespread assumption that Newton and Newtonians promoted a mechanistic, “clockwork” universe. In fact, mechanistic views of the universe are more accurately associated with the late eighteenth century and the work of Laplace. Laplace first articulated the nebular hypothesis in his Exposition du systeme du monde of 1796, positing a completely natural, rather than divine, origin of the world. After meeting William Herschel in 1802, Laplace borrowed Herschel’s claim to have discovered a “nebulous” fluid around distant stars and used that observation to support an account of the origin and order of the universe, which by the mid-nineteenth century was “widely accepted by scientists of opposing philosophical and theological views” (Markley 2005: 55–56). The eighteenth century, in contrast, was a time when wildly heterogeneous theories about the beginning of the world, and the stuff of which it was made, were part of theologically weighted arguments that had not only personal but also political and economic implications for Newton and his contemporaries. Alexander Pope’s famous epitaph –“Nature, and Nature’s Laws, were all hid in Night / God said ‘Let Newton Be!’ and all was light”–simultaneously reveals the importance of Newton as a scientist to the eighteenth century and obscures the complex negotiations required of Newton and Newtonians in their shared desire to reconcile religious and natural history.
In the work of the Newtonians, the religious threats and philosophical indeterminacies represented by the doctrine of “the world soul” that partially compelled the work of Boyle and Newton become the basis of a constitutive aestheticism. “Our creator,” Pemberton explains, has “adapted” the minds of humans so that before fully understanding nature, his visible works “strike us with the most lively ideas of beauty and magnificence” (Pemberton 1728: 4). It is “desire after knowledge,” he continues, “this taste for the sublime and the beautiful in things, which chiefly constitutes the difference between the human life, and the life of brutes”:
The thoughts of the human mind are too extensive to be confined only to the providing and enjoying of what is necessary for the support of our being. It is this taste, which has given rise to poetry, oratory, and every branch of literature and science. … Perspicuous reasoning appears not only beautiful; but, when set forth in its full strength and dignity, it partakes of the sublime, and not only pleases, but warms and elevates the soul.
(Pemberton 1728: 3–4)
In what Latour identifies as an “act of purification” characteristic of science, aesthetic discourse is deployed to create “two entirely distinct ontological zones: that of human beings on the one hand; that of nonhumans on the other” (Latour 1993: 11). According to Pemberton’s tautological logic, the ability to appreciate the “perspicuous reasoning” characterized by Newton’s philosophy serves as proof of, and justification for, a nature made for humans alone simply because only humans are capable of appreciating the nature of the universe’s systemic beauty. The Newtonian sublime, with its enthusiastic, collective emphasis upon universal laws and cosmic harmony, in this regard, helped create the conditions that led later to British Romanticism and its celebration of a human mind that can reflect and appreciate the perfection of a divinely created blade of grass. A related inheritance from the Newtonians, however, is the one rendered by William Blake in his etching Newton. Looking down at his paper and instruments, Newton, the divine geometer, appears tragically (and anachronistically) as father of a mechanistic system in which the mind was elevated over body, science over the imagination, religious orthodoxies over the natural world.
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