ISAAC NEWTON (1642-1727)
Early life and education
The world into which Newton was born on Christmas Day 1642 was one in which Puritanism
was ascendent. An explosion of sectarianism, prophetic fervour and Calvinist moral austerity
sent shock waves through English society during the earliest years of Isaac‟s life, as did the
concomitant upheaval of the Civil Wars, when Roundheads and Cavaliers clashed swords and
galloped up and down the green and pleasant land. Young Isaac also saw his domestic world
turned upside down. His father Isaac, an illiterate yeoman who had married well, was laid in a
humble grave three months before his son‟s birth at Woolsthorpe manor in the county of
Lincolnshire. Hannah Ayscough, a gentleman‟s daughter, was left alone with their firstborn son
and a farm of above average holdings. Three years after this dual bereavement young Isaac
suffered a second loss when the widow Newton wed the Reverend Barnabas Smith, aged
sixty-three, and joined him at the rectory of nearby North Witham. The child was placed in the
care of his maternal grandparents at Woolsthorpe manor. Widowed once more in 1653, but now
with a boy and two girls bearing the surname Smith, Hannah returned home to Woolsthorpe and
Isaac. The pain of the separation had weighed heavily on him. Amongst a list of sins he tabulated
nine years after the Reverend‟s death was: “Threatning my father and mother Smith to burne
them and the house over them.” He did, however, inherit the rector‟s library—a collection of two
to three hundred works of theology.
Two years after his maternal reunion, Isaac was enrolled in the King‟s School at
Grantham, seven miles to the north. There Newton was fed a diet of Latin heaped on Latin, with
a helping of Greek and a pinch of Hebrew for good measure, but virtually no mathematics. At
the core of his education was a solid grounding in the Word of God and the Protestant faith.
While at Grantham, Newton lodged with an apothecary named Mr. Clark. Late in life, Clark‟s
stepdaughter Catherine remembered Isaac as “a sober, silent, thinking lad.” Thinking he did do
in great measure. After the boy ranked above him picked a fight, Isaac soundly beat him, rubbed
his nose against a wall and rose to the top of the class. It was the shape of things to come.
Despite his proven abilities, around the time he was fifteen Hannah pulled Isaac from the
grammar school, intending him to begin to take on his inherited role as lord of the manor. It was
no use. Newton was dilatory, to say the least, in his farming duties, spending more time with his
books than his sheep. Eventually Hannah relented to the appeals of her son‟s schoolmaster and
the boy was sent back to Grantham. For several more months Newton immersed himself in the
classics, preparing for university. On a late spring day in 1661, shortly after the Restoration of
the monarchy, the rural Lincolnshire lad alighted his coach and first set eyes on the green courts
and stone spires of Cambridge—the Fenland university that would be his home for the next
thirty-five years. There is some unsubstantiated evidence that Newton had a romantic interest in
the apothecary‟s daughter. If so, this was soon forgotten as Isaac embarked on the life of a
solitary scholar.
Although his mother was wealthier than some gentlemen, Newton was enrolled as a sizar,
a lowly status that entailed his performance of menial duties for fellows and scholars of higher
rank, including emptying their chamber pots. As for the undergraduate curriculum, it had not
altered much since the University‟s Medieval foundation four centuries before, and concentrated
on Aristotle and Plato, along with logic, rhetoric and chronology. But an independence of mind
manifested itself early. In 1663, or shortly thereafter, he wrote in one of his notebooks: “I am a
friend of Plato, I am a friend of Aristotle, but truth is my greater friend.” Soon Newton began to
imbibe the teachings of the new mechanical philosophy, turning to the works of Copernicus,
Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, Hobbes, Boyle and Cambridge‟s own Henry More. Following the
lead of these natural philosophers, he also took up experiment and began to carry out
observations of the heavenly bodies. In the spring of 1665 he took the examinations for his BA.
Rumour has it that he placed second. The evidence of his extra-curricular reading, on the other
hand, shows that he had already far out-stripped even most of the tutors.
Calculus and optical experiments
In the summer of 1665 the plague descended on Cambridge and the University was closed.
Newton returned to Woolsthorpe. Cradled in the surroundings of his nativity, his voyage of
discovery continued. It was here in the maternal sphere that he saw the apple fall and received
his first insight into universal gravitation, thus laying the foundation for his work in physics. It
was here that he completed his work on calculus, allowing him to solve problems involving
curves and rates of change and thereby solving with elegance a problem that had plagued
mathematicians for decades. And here he performed revolutionary optical experiments with
refraction that demonstrated the heterogenous nature of light. Excepting a brief return to
Cambridge in the spring of 1666, he remained home for the better part of two years. It is a period
rightly described as his anni miribiles. Newton himself spoke of the time as “the prime of my age
for invention.”
Lucasian Professorship
Back at Cambridge in the spring of 1667 he went on to compete for a college fellowship. On the
first day of October Newton and eight other successful candidates were ushered into the chapel
and inducted as fellows of the College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity, each swearing to
“conform to the Liturgy of the Church of England.” It was also expected that fellows remain
celibate. Newton‟s position at Cambridge was now secure. An MA degree followed in 1668. In
recognition of his demonstrated mathematical prowess, in 1669 Newton was appointed Lucasian
Professorship of Mathematics, which his predecessor Isaac Barrow—the first to hold the
post—surrendered to the twenty-six-year-old scholar. This new academic chair had by that time
acquired none of the prestige attached to it today; nevertheless, it was a step up in rank, and its
£100 annual stipend was much more than most country parsons earned at the time. His first
series of lectures was on optics.
Along with an agreement to embrace the Anglican faith, the Trinity fellowship also
required ordination within eight years. It was likely in part because of the impending 1675
deadline that Newton began to study theology, prophecy and church history in earnest. As with
every other project to which he turned his attention, there were no half-measures. In his
exploration of Christian doctrine, Newton scoured the Fathers, combed the annals of
ecclesiastical history and analyzed every turn of phrase in the creeds. Unfortunately for the
Church of England, Newton‟s powerful intellectual powers led him to discover that its central
doctrine, the Holy and Undivided Trinity, was a pagan corruption wickedly imposed on primitive
Christianity in the fourth century by Athanasius. Newton was faced with a double dilemma. A
man of conscience, he could not now take holy orders. At the same time, to express the reason
why would have led to his immediate and ignominious expulsion from Cambridge. Newton had
been prepared to resign. Then, at the eleventh hour, a special dispensation was granted by king
Charles II exempting holders of the Lucasian Chair from the requirement of ordination. Newton
was safe—in a manner of speaking. Until his dying day, he would live the dangerous life of a
secret heretic.
Meanwhile, word had reached the Royal Society of London that Newton had developed a
reflecting telescope—the first working example of its kind. Having been entrusted with a
newly-constructed version of the telescope, Barrow brought it to a Society meeting in late 1671.
It was an instant hit and was even demonstrated before no less a personage than the king. Stirred
into action by this success, Newton proposed to send a paper to the Society‟s secretary Henry
Oldenburg outlining his discoveries in optics. In 1672, Newton‟s paper on colours was brought
to the attention of the scholarly world when it appeared in the Philosophical Transactions of the
Royal Society. Newton included his experiments with the prism, along with his experimentum
crucis demonstrating that light refracted into the various homogeneous colours of the spectrum
does not further divide. Newton was both rewarded with fame and exposed to controversy.
Robert Hooke, the Royal Society‟s curator of experiments, immediately expressed his doubts.
Attacks also came from natural philosophers on the Continent who were unable to replicate the
experiments. Impatient and hostile in his responses to his critics, he charged them with placing
too much weight on philosophizing and not enough on experiment. Nor was it lost on him that
his chief European opponents were Jesuits, a society the vehemently anti-Catholic Newton
believed was given to cavil and dispute.
Alchemy
By the time of his appointment to the Lucasian Chair, Newton‟s wide-ranging mind had been
attracted to the crucible of alchemy. In the mid-1660s he began taking notes from the works of
such “chymists” as Boyle. In 1669, after buying two furnaces, some chemicals and the
six-volume alchemical compendium Theatrum chemicum, he began serious experimentation.
Soon Newton became involved in secretive alchemical networks and devoted time to copying
out the unpublished alchemical treatises passed around among them. Scholars still debate the
precise nature of his alchemical studies, but it seems that he saw its emphasis on divine activity
in micromatter as an antidote to the excesses of mechanization evident in such philosophies as
Cartesianism. It is also clear that he drank deeply of its religious symbolism and accepted its
teachings about a general renovatio in both matter and humanity.
Theology
The need for a thorough reformation in Christianity was also an abiding feature of Newton‟s
thought. That Newton looked forward to a reformation instead of back to that of Protestantism
signals his distance from the majority of his religious contemporaries. But for a man who saw the
Trinity—and much else besides—as a blight on the Church, the view was a natural one. The
more than half century Newton devoted to the study of theology was motivated by a desire to
recover primitive Christianity from such corruptions. This project formed part of his
commitment to the tradition of the prisca sapientia, the Renaissance idea that the ancients had
possessed true knowledge about God and the world. In order to retrieve pure doctrine, Newton
carried out an immense historical survey of Jewish and Christian theology. His research traced
the rise of idolatry and monkery, along with the doctrinal damage done by Athanasius and his
followers. A massive 425-page ecclesiastical history entitled “Of the Church” was but one
product of these efforts. Surviving extensive notes and ink sketches show that he also sifted
through biblical and Talmudic sources in order to reconstruct the plan of the Jerusalem Temple.
Not only did he believe that the Temple and its ritual provided a backdrop to the visions of
Revelation, but he also saw it, along with certain other ancient temples, as a model of the
heliocentric solar system—knowledge of which the ancients had subsequently lost.
Newton discovered in the Scriptures that the Father alone is the One True God of Israel.
Jesus Christ, preexistent and miraculously born, was God‟s literal Son but not “very God of very
God” in the Trinitarian sense. Although Newton‟s Christ is not to be worshipped directly or
invoked in prayer, he still occupies an elevated position, both through the atonement wrought by
his shed blood and his powerful apocalyptic role at the end of time. Newton had nothing but
disdain for the monks and Trinitarian “homoousians”who corrupted this pure doctrine with
metaphysics and doctrinally novel terms. These same agents of false doctrine introduced the
unbiblical notion of the immortality of the soul to unpin Catholic saint worship. Eternal life,
Newton believed, is granted only after resurrection. Even the orthodox teaching on the Devil and
demons did not stand before Newton‟s reformation. Evil spirits came to represent distempers of
the mind and the Devil a symbol for human lust. These latter ideas do not derive from some
putative incipient rationalism, but likely from the logic of his belief in a God of dominion Whose
sovereignty does not allow the existence of lesser deities, and possibly from his reading of
analogous ideas in ancient rabbinic thought and contemporary accounts of idolatry.
All of these researches were carried out in private. Quite apart from the attendant social
stigmatization, denial of the Trinity was a punishable offence throughout Newton‟s lifetime.
Newton in any case believed that the higher truths of religion were not fit for the masses.
Theological knowledge was divided into “milk for babes” and “meat for elders”, and he put in
the latter class an elite remnant class who alone were able to understand the deeper meanings of
faith. And thus he revealed his heresy only to an inner circle of similarly-minded friends. One
such adept was John Locke, himself a biblical scholar, with whom Newton discussed matters of
theology through the 1690s and to whom he sent a treatise of antitrinitarian textual criticism to
be published anonymously on the Continent (Newton suppressed it at the last minute for fear of
exposure). Powerfully impressed by Newton‟s theological acumen, Locke described him as “a
very valuable man not onely for his wonderful skill in Mathematicks but in divinity too and his
great knowledg in the Scriptures where in I know few his equals.” Newton‟s religious outlook
resembled contemporary Non-Conformity and shows strong doctrinal analogies with Judaism,
pre-Nicene Christianity and contemporary biblicist antitrinitarian movements such as the
Socinians.
Prophetic beliefs
Newton wrote his first large prophetic treatises in the 1670s and continued to study biblical
prophecy until the end of his days. He sought to uncover the meaning of the various symbols of
the Books of Daniel and Revelation, along with their fulfilments in history past and future. His
hermeneutics tended to the literal and his eschatology was strongly premillenarian. He believed
in the return of Christ, the restoration of the Jews to Israel, the rebuilding of the Jerusalem
Temple and the coming Kingdom of God on earth—for which Newton believed one should pray
every day. Such was the passion of his prophetic faith that any attempts to portray Newton as
some sort of proto-deist are doomed to failure. For Newton the exact accomplishment of
prophecy formed one of the most powerful arguments for a deity. On the other hand, Newton
was unhappy with those who set prophetic dates and thereby brought discredit on Christianity
when they failed. This did not stop Newton himself from making prophetic calculations, from
which his own dates can be extrapolated. These show that he put the parousia off well beyond
his own lifetime to the nineteenth or twentieth centuries at the earliest. Newton also believed that
the final reformation of Christianity would not happen until around this time, a realization that
likely reinforced his Nicodemism. Newton saw in prophetic hermeneutics one of the greatest
intellectual challenges. For him, the interpretation of prophecy and the correct identification of
the seducing power of Antichrist was seen as “no idle speculation, no matter of indifferency but
a duty of the greatest moment.”
The Principia
After it had been raised without resolution in a discussion between Hooke, Edmond Halley and
Sir Christopher Wren, Halley went to Cambridge in August 1684 and laid a problem before
Newton. Could he demonstrate mathematically why a planet should move in an elliptical orbit
when acted on by a force of attraction from the sun that decreases in an inverse proportion to the
square of the distance between the two bodies? Newton said he had solved this problem, but
could not find his calculations. After promising to send some, Halley departed. Eventually, in
November 1684, Halley received a nine-page document entitled De motu corporum in gyrum
(Concerning the motion of revolving bodies). Halley immediately recognized in it nothing less
than the beginnings of a new physics. Newton‟s study of the comets of 1680 and 1682 had
provided one of the final keys. Sometime between early 1681 and late 1684, Newton concluded
that the heavenly bodies meet with no resistence from an aether and that comets, like planets,
travelled around the sun in closed, elliptical paths. It was only at this point that he let go of the
final vestiges of the Cartesian doctrine of fluid vortices. De motu reflects this change of thinking.
But De motu also stirred Newton into action and he would not be satisfied until he
completed the project he had commenced. After a fury of activity that lasted almost two years,
the result was published in 1687 as Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica (Mathematical
principles of natural philosophy). The volume was divided into three books. Book I lays the
foundations of Newton‟s system of mechanics, treating the movement of bodies without
resistance and identifying gravity as the force operating on moving bodies in space. Book II
tackles problems of the motion of fluids and the motion of solid bodies through fluids. Newton
saved the best for last, and Book III demonstrates how the law of gravitation operates
consistently on moving bodies throughout the universe. Included in the volume is his
inverse-square law of gravitation and his now-famous three laws of motion. And, as the title
implies, Newton explained it all with the language of mathematics. In short, Newton had
produced a new general theory of dynamics. It is the most revolutionary book in the history of
science.
What most readers did not know was that Newton saw his magnum opus as less of a work
of the discovery of new principles than a work of the recovery of ancient wisdom long since lost.
Nor was it immediately plain in the first edition that Newton believed his universe could only be
sustained through the dominion of God and that the Principia itself offered a storehouse of
material confirmatory of the argument from design. In a 1692 letter to Richard Bentley he
acknowledged: “When I wrote my treatise about our Systeme I had an eye upon such Principles
as might work wth considering men for the beleife of a Deity & nothing can rejoyce me more
then to find it usefull for that purpose.” Theology was present in other ways also. The four rules
of reasoning he developed through the three editions of the work, and which now appear
emblematic of modern scientific induction, were themselves modelled after sixteen rules of
prophetic interpretation he had drafted in the previous decade. As for induction, Newton relied
on this because he believed that God guaranteed simplicity in nature. This was all of a piece for a
man who believed that an integral constituent of the original Ur-religion was the study of nature.
For Newton, there was no cognitive wall between the study of God and the study of His creation.
In his introductory Ode to Newton, Halley declared: “Nearer to the gods no mortal may
approach.” Many of those who read the Principia shared these convictions. Soon after the
Principia‟s release, a cluster of young scholars at Cambridge were heard to comment as the
great man himself walked by: “there goes the man who has writt a book that neither he nor any
one else understands.” After marvelling at the “fund of knowledge” in the book, the Marquis de
l‟Hôpital asked of Newton “does he eat & drink & sleep? is he like other men?” It is not hard to
see why many readers responded in this way. A cursory glance at the pages of the Principia
reveals a seemingly impenetrable Latin text replete with equations and geometrical diagrams. To
be sure, much of the difficulty with the Principia is due to the revolutionary nature of its
discoveries. But it was also in large part Newton‟s doing. The heavy use of geometry derived
from Newton‟s belief that the ways of the ancients were more rigorous and precise. There were
darker motivations as well. He later acknowledged that “to avoid being baited by little
Smatterers in Mathematicks . . . he designedly made his Principia abstruse; but yet so as to be
understood by able Mathematicians.” He had in mind men like Hooke, whom Newton did
believe had the ability to keep up with high level mathematics. As with his heretical theology,
Newton revealed his mathematical analysis only to the adepts.
The release of the Principia marked the beginning of a more public and assertive phase in
Newton‟s career. A first indication of this came just as the Principia was going through the press
in early 1687 when, against the efforts of King James II to catholicize the University, Newton
publicly defended the rights of Cambridge to refuse an MA degree to a Benedictine monk. In
1689, after the Catholic monarch had been forced to flee England, Newton, now a known
anti-Catholic, was elected for the first time as an MP for Cambridge. He sat in the Convocation
Parliament and voted with the majority to declare the English throne formally vacant, thus
freeing the way for the Protestant Prince William of Orange to be crowned king of England.
During his participation in the so-called Glorious Revolution, Newton had his first sustained
contact with the upper echelons of London society. Soon the grand metropolis would become his
home.
London
Newton arrived in London in 1696 to take up a position as Warden of the Royal Mint. One of the
jobs assigned to the Warden was the prosecution of counterfeiters. No less energy than was
devoted to his exposure of doctrinal forgery was spent on the pursuit of “coiners”—several of
whom he sent to the gallows. Like everything else in which he involved himself, he attacked the
new role with a passion. In 1699 he became Master, a position he held until his death. He was
not the sort of man to treat the position as a mere sinecure. Revealing a gift for administration,
Newton spent long hours at the Mint, dramatically increasing production and directing it through
a major recoinage.
In 1703, with his old foe Hooke out of the way, Newton was elected president of the
Royal Society. In the preceding years attendance had been in decline and the intellectual vigour
of meetings had waned as the remaining Fellows turned increasingly to discussions on medicine
and rare animals. Armed with a “Scheme for establishing the Royal Society,” Newton set out at
once to redirect its focus back to experiment and natural philosophy. Shortly after taking over at
the helm of the Royal Society, Newton, who had been waiting for the death of Hooke, published
his Opticks (1704). This work, based on his Lucasian optical lectures and a paper he published in
1675, along with new material, differed markedly from the Principia. Written in English, and
focussing more on practical experiment and less on theory than his first great work, the Opticks
reached a much broader range of readers. In 1705 Queen Anne knighted Newton. This was not
for his Principia or Opticks, or even for his work at the Mint, but for the more Machiavellian
reason of giving Newton added support in an attempt to oust a Tory incumbent at Cambridge
during the General Election of that year.
Sir Isaac‟s entrenchment at the top of British society led to increased confidence,
reflected in part by his sitting for a growing number portraits as he grew older. After his natural
philosophical and religious acolyte Samuel Clarke published a mild attack on Trinitarian
orthodoxy in 1712, Newton added a General Scholium to the conclusion of the second edition
of the Principia (1713), and included along with an explicit affirmation the role of God‟s
providence in nature was an encoded critique of Trinitarian hermeneutics. A small number of the
orthodox recognized this indiscretion, but the now powerful Newton got away with it all the
same. The General Scholium also attacked the Cartesian doctrine of vortices and Leibniz‟s
notion of the cosmos, which did not require God to intervene to keep it on course, as did
Newton‟s. Unlike Descartes, Leibniz was still alive to defend himself. A theologically-tinged
and now famous debate subsequently sprang up between Leibniz and Newton‟s supporter
Clarke. Around the same time, Newton published anonymously in the Philosophical
Transactions a rebuttal of Leibniz‟s claim to priority in the discovery of calculus. Petty disputes
also continued with John Flamsteed, the Astronomer Royal, until he too, like Hooke and Leibniz,
succumbed to mortality.
For Newton, the end came on 20 March 1727. Newton had foreseen his impending death
and had evidently begun to think of his image in posterity. Shortly before his final illness he
threw into the fire a number of his manuscripts—the contents of which are forever lost to history.
His last days were spent preparing for publication his Chronology of ancient kingdoms amended
(1728). On his deathbed, as an incredulous Voltaire reported, Newton confessed to having never
known a woman. It was a final triumph. This was not the only pointed statement he made before
he gave up the ghost. As death approached, he refused the sacrament. This was no act of
irreligion, but likely a rejection of the idolatrous, Trinitarian Church of England in whose
communion he had so long uneasily subsisted. But these were private matters. Newton‟s funeral,
on the other hand, was a very public affair conducted with pomp and ostentation. The Lord
Chancellor, two dukes and three earls bore the pall and he was interred in a place of prominence
in Westminster Abbey. In attendance Voltaire, marvelling that in England a natural philosopher
was “buried like a king who had benefited his subjects.” The moment erected over his tomb
shortly afterward shows Newton reclining on four books representing the range of his thought:
the Opticks, the Principia, theology and chronology. The inscription below ends with a
doxology: “Let Mortals rejoice That there has existed such and so great an Ornament to the
Human Race.”
Newton and the Enlightenment
The Enlightenment image of heavenly bodies in the Newtonian planetary system travelling
unhindered through empty space guided by nothing but well-ordered laws is still the dominant
one today. But this image is a mirage. This materialistic version of the universe constructed by
the philosophes is also one from which the great man himself would have shrunk back in horror.
Isaac Newton was not an Enlightenment man. Newton‟s firm conviction in the argument from
design, fierce opposition to scepticism and atheism, along with his fervent conviction that he had
recovered the lost knowledge of the ancients are not of the Enlightenment cast. But above all, his
profound piety, biblicism and literal prophetic faith reveal his great distance from the classical
Enlightenment. The British Enlightenment, is a slightly different matter. Unlike its French
counterpart, the British Enlightenment had a religious orientation. But even in Augustan Britain,
many aspects of his thought, including his heresy and commitment to the prisca tradition,
remained largely hidden. Newton was known in Britain primarily through popular broadsheets,
simplified textbooks and coffeehouse demonstrations of his physics and optics. These renditions
of Newton rarely ventured beyond commonplace natural theology. The Newton venerated in
eighteenth-century Britain differed only by degrees from the Newton apotheosized in France.
Ironically, by keeping his most of his theology private, Newton himself bears part of the blame
for his secular posthumous legacy.
Prophetic interpretation formed part of Newton‟s friendship with Locke, and Newton
once sent the philosopher of Oates a schematization of his interpretation of the seals, trumpets
and vials of the Apocalypse. Nothing subverts the notion of Newton and Locke as founders of
the Age of Reason more than this single sheet of paper. When Voltaire championed Newton‟s
work for a French audience in his Lettres philosophiques (1733), he was happy to mention the
great man‟s denial of the Trinity, which he wrongly believed could be cast as an example of the
great man‟s rationalism. About Newton‟s prophetic faith, however, nary a word was spoken. As
if to supply this glaring lacuna, the same year was published Newton‟s Observations on the
prophecies of Daniel, and the Apocalypse of St. John.
Because of the publication of this small portion of his prophetic manuscripts, Newton
also played a role in the rise of Protestant fundamentalism, itself in large part a reaction against
the legacies of Enlightenment secularism. Newton‟s Observations was regularly cited by
conservative Protestant prophetic exegetes during the nineteenth century. This was only possible,
of course, through the ignorance or deliberate neglect of his problematic unorthodoxy.
Nevertheless, it helps demonstrate both the range of Newton‟s thought and how competing views
of the man have arisen. Now, with most of Newton‟s manuscript corpus of roughly one million
words on alchemy and four million words on theology available for study, scholars are beginning
to realise just how misleading the Enlightenment view of Newton is. In its place is emerging a
much more holistic view of the man in which his theology and natural philosophy are seen as
equally important elements of the same grand project.
Like Voltaire, most French Enlightenment apologists were eager to sing the praises of
Newton‟s physics, but equally determined to maintain a stony silence about such problematic
features of his thought as his prophetic faith. Others explained the theology away. To alleviate
their own concerns, the French positivists Pierre-Simon de la Place and Jean-Baptiste Biot
invented a story that the author of the Principia had suffered an intellectual derangement after
his breakdown of 1693, after which a now weak-minded Newton turned to the irrational study of
theology. The Enlightenment desacralization of the Newtonian universe is best epitomised by a
now-famous anecdote. When Laplace died in 1827, precisely a century after Newton, he was
hailed as the “Newton of France” for his work in physics. His Exposition du système du monde
(1796), however, laid out a completely secular and mechanical view of the universe that rendered
God redundant. Newton‟s universe required both general and special providence; Laplace‟s
needed neither. Napoleon is reputed to have asked Laplace, “Newton spoke of God in his book. I
have perused yours, but failed to find His name even once. How come?” To which came
Laplace‟s famous reply, “Sire, I have no need of that hypothesis.” Newton had come a long way.
Stephen David Snobelen
University of King’s College
Halifax, Nova Scotia
Dobbs, Betty Jo Teeter. The Janus faces of genius: the role of alchemy in Newton’s thought.
Cambridge, 1991.
Fara, Patricia. Newton: the making of genius. London, 2002.
Fauvel, John, Raymond Flood, Michael Shortland and Robin Wilson, eds. Let Newton be! A new
perspective on his life and works. Oxford, 1988.
Force, James E. and Richard H. Popkin. Essays on the context, nature, and influence of Isaac
Newton’s theology. Dordrecht, 1990.
Force, James E. and Richard H. Popkin, eds. Newton and religion: context, nature, and
influence. Dordrecht, 1999.
Force, James E. and Richard H. Popkin, eds. The Books of Nature and Scripture: recent essays
on natural philosophy, theology, and biblical criticism in the Netherlands of Spinoza’s time and
the British Isles of Newton’s time. Dordrecht, 1994.
Guerlac, Henry. Newton on the continent. Ithaca, 1981.
Guicciardini, Reading the Principia: the debate on Newton’s mathematical methods for natural
philosophy from 1687 to 1736. Cambridge, 1999.
Hahn, Roger. “Laplace and the vanishing role of God in the physical universe,” The analytic
spirit: essays in the history of science in honor of Henry Guerlac, ed. Harry Woolf. Ithaca, 1981,
85-95.
Iliffe, Robert. „“Is he like other men?” The meaning of the Principia mathematica, and the
author as idol,‟ Culture and society in the Stuart restoration, ed. G. Maclean. Cambridge, 1995,
159-76.
Mamiani, Maurizio. “To twist the meaning: Newton‟s Regulae philosophandi revisted,” Isaac
Newton’s natural philosophy, ed. Jed Z. Buchwald and I. Bernard Cohen. Cambridge, MA, 2001,
3-14.
Mandelbrote, Scott. “„A duty of the greatest moment‟: Isaac Newton and the writing of biblical
criticism.” The British Journal for the History of Science 26 (1993): 281-302.
Manuel, Frank. The religion of Isaac Newton. Oxford, 1974.
Manuel, Frank. Isaac Newton, historian. Cambridge, 1963.
Newton, Isaac. The correspondence of Sir Isaac Newton, 7 vols., ed. H.W. Turnbull, J.F. Scott,
A. Rupert Hall and Laura Tilling. Cambridge, 1959-77.
Newton, Isaac. The Principia: Mathematical principles of natural philosophy, a new translation
by I. Bernard Cohen and Anne Whitman, assisted by Julia Budenz. Berkeley, 1999.
Schaffer, Simon. “Newton‟s comets and the transformation of astrology,” Astrology, science and
society: historical essays, ed. Patrick Curry. Woodbridge, 1987, 219-43.
Snobelen, Stephen D. “Isaac Newton, heretic: the strategies of a Nicodemite.” The British
Journal for the History of Science 32 (1999): 381-419.
Stewart, Larry. The rise of public science: rhetoric, technology, and natural philosophy in
Newtonian Britain, 1660-1750. Cambridge, 1992.
Stewart, Larry. “Seeing through the Scholium: religion and reading Newton in the eighteenth
century,” History of Science 34 (1996):123-65.
Westfall, Richard S. Never at rest: a biography of Isaac Newton. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1980.