Newton: The Classical Scholia

Newton I. , De mundi systemate (London, 1728). The work was sold to the booksellers Tonson, Osborn & Longman by the administrators of Newton's intestate estate for £31.10s; see the memoir by Conduitt John (King's College, Cambridge, Keynes MS. 127 A5) reproduced by Whiteside D. T. in The mathematical papers of Isaac Newton, i (Cambridge, 1967), xviii–xx. Numa Pompilius and the Temple of Vesta as a symbol for the heliocentric universe are a quotation from Plutarch, as Newton has taken the trouble to note in the margin. Indeed, one reads in the life of Numa: “Ferunt Numam aedem quoque Vestae sacro igni orbicularem circumjecisse, ut ibi asservaretur, adumbrans non effigiem terrae, quasi ea Vesta sit, sed universi mundi, cujus in medio ignis sedem locant Pythagorici, eamque vestam nominant & unitatem.” Newton consulted a Latin edition of Plutarch, Opera (see note 3 below, p. 38); the passage is at vol. i, col. 67a. Newton returns to the symbolic circular temple at the end of Scholium IX; cf. note 50 below.

Cambridge University Library, MS. Add. 3970, f. 619r; Professor Maurizio Mamiani kindly furnished me with a photocopy of it. A very similar formula is in the draught of Query 27, Add. 3970, f. 292v.

Speaking of the hypothesis of the aether: “And for rejecting such a medium, we have the authority of those the oldest and most celebrated Philosophers of Greece and Phoenicia, who made a vacuum, and Atoms, and the gravity of Atoms, the first principles of their Philosophy, tacitly attributing gravity to some other cause than dense matter” (Opticks, Query 28 (20 in the first edition, 1704), third edn (1721), 343–4?; Dover reprint (1952), 369).

The Scholium generale was added to the second edition of the Principia in 1713, and revised in the third.

McGuire J. E. Rattansi P. M. , “Newton and the Pipes of Pan”, Notes and records of the Royal Society of London, xxi (1966), 108–43.

The thesis of McGuire and Rattansi has indeed found a pretty favourable echo among the students of this current of thought, who have still further isolated it from its cultural context from the end of the sixteenth to the beginning of the eighteenth centuries. See Schmitt Charles B. , “Prisca Theologia e Philosophia Perennis: Due temi del Rinascimento italianoe la loro fortuna”, in Il pensiero italiano del rinascimento e il tempo nostro, Atti del V Convegno internazionale del Centro di Studi Umanistici, Montepulciano, 8–13 agosto 1968, 211–63; idem, “Perennial Philosophy from Agostino Steuco to Leibniz”, Journal of the history of ideas, xxvii (1966), 505–32; and Walker D. P. , The Ancient Theology: Studies in Christian Platonism from the 15th to the 18th century (Ithaca, N.Y., 1972) (on Newton, 254–63 and passim).

I use the term, but only as a metaphor or pseudoconcept, as is made clearer below.

McGuire Rattansi , op. cit. (ref. 5), 142, note 71: “These sources cannot be discussed in any detail here, although the historical sketch of the prisca doctrines in the text should help to clarify the significance of some of these citations”; as will be seen, a procedure has been chosen which is inverse to the correct one, by which a text is only to be interpreted historically after an analysis has been made of its internal stratification.

Ibid., 135. Plutarch's De facie in orbe lunae, from which Newton takes three important quotations, is not recorded at all; Natale Conti is mentioned by name, but without defining the use that Newton made of his book.

Besides several of his theological and exegetical writings; cf. Harrison J. , The library of Isaac Newton (Cambridge, 1978), 195, nos. 1109–16.

All recent students of Newton agree on this point; see, for example, Koyré Alexandre , Newtonian studies (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), 89ff.; Manuel F. E. , A portrait of Isaac Newton (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), 99ff. More is quoted in Newton's juvenilia, “Quaestiones quaedam philosophicae”, Cambridge University Library, MS. Add. 3996, ff. 88–135.

The immortality of the soul, 115, in More Henry , A collection of several philosophical writings (London, 1662) (each treatise is paginated separately).

In a manuscript now preserved at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, Los Angeles, Newton transcribes p. 13 et seq. of the True intellectual system of the universe, Bk. I, chap. I, §§6–16 concerning the atomic physiology of the Ancients.

Whose identification with Moses was accepted by Cudworth (§10), in a way that had become canonical after this hypothesis was put forward by Arcerius and Selden; but he does not admit the tradition of atomism from Moschus-Moses to Pythagoras. Cf. Sailor D. B. , “Moses and atomism”, Journal of the history of ideas, xxv (1964), 3–16.

See the last Scholium, marked “p. 412, post Corol. 2”.

On the Orphics, True intellectual system, Bk. I, chap. IV, 297; Newton cites the text of the “little Krater” and a remark attributed to Ermenesianathus, but directly from the Latin of Natale Conti; see below.

McGuire Rattansi , op. cit. (ref. 5), 134–5.

See the texts and evidence collected by Herivel J. in The background to Newton's Principia (Oxford, 1965), 65ff, and Casini P. , L'universo-macchina: Origini delta filosofia newtoniana (Bari, 1969), 28ff. (with bibliography).

At least three, on the evidence of the drafts at Cambridge, see below.

“To his holiness Pope Paul III”, quoted from Nicolas Copernicus, De revolutionibus orbium caelestium. Preface. Copernicus cites De placitis philosophorum. III, 13, from which Newton also borrows. See, for the implications of the passage, Garin Eugenio , La rivoluzione copernicana e il mito solare, in Rinascite e rivoluzioni: Movimenti culturali dal XIV al XVIII secolo (Bari, 1976), 255ff.

See below, notes 46, 17, 18.

See Koyre A. , La révolution astronomique (Paris, 1961); a good survey is Tangherlini S. , Temi platonici e pitagorici nell'Harmonice Mundi di Keplero, “Rinascimento”, ser. 2, xiv (1947), 117–78.

See below, Scholium to Prop. IV, Bk III of the Principia (1687), 407.

Cf. below, “Ad Prop. VIII”.

The image is in the Scholium to Prop. IX (see below, note 46, p. 44); a variant is the other image of the Lyre of Apollo which Newton cites in the Scholium to Prop. VIII from passages in Pliny and Macrobius (cf. notes 35 and 36). In the Queries in Opticks, composed later, Newton quotes both the images without naming the sources for them.

“Fistula enim ex septem calamis concentum rerum et harmoniam, sive concordiam cum discordia mixtam, quae ex septem stellarum errantium mota conficitur, evidenter ostendit” ( Bacon F. , De sapientia veterum , in Works, ed. by Ellis , Spedding and Heath (London, 1887–92), vi, 638). Newton possessed the Essays (1706) and the Opuscula varia (1658) of Bacon; among the Essays present was the Discourse on the wisdom of the Ancients (cf. Harrison , op. cit. (ref. 10), nos. 108–9). It is certain that Bacon too was greatly indebted to Natale Conti, see Rossi P. , Francesco Bacone, della magia alla scienza (Bar, 1957), 206ff. (English trans. (1968), 78, 93, 255).

Rossi , op. cit. (ref. 26); Schoell F. L. , Les mythologistes italiens de la Renaissance et la poésie élisabélhaine in Études sur l'humanisme continental en Angleterre à la fin de la Renaissance (Paris, 1920), 21–42, to be completed by Schrckx W. , “Chapman's borrowings from Natale Conti”, English studies, xxxii, no. 3 (1951), 107–12. Especially indispensable is the work of Seznec J. , La survivance des dieux antiques (1940), of which there is an English translation, The survival of the pagan gods: The mythological tradition and its place in Renaissance humanism and art (Kingsport, 1953); on handbooks of mythology and Conti see p. 279ff.

Conti Natale , Mythologiae, sive explicationis fabularum libri X (Coloniae Allobrogum, 1636), 1–2.

Ibid., my emphasis. Newton owned an edition at Cologne of 1612 ( Harrison , Library, no. 439); on the use he made of it, see below, notes 46–48, p. 44.

Keynes J. M. , “Newton, the man” (1942), in Royal Society Newton tercentenary celebrations, 1946 (Cambridge, 1947), 29.

Cf. Harrison , op. cit. (ref. 10), passim; and the appendices and bibliography to Dobbs B. J. T. , The foundations of Newton's alchemy (Cambridge, 1975), 235ff.

Dobbs , Foundations, 238.

Besides the book by Dobbs, one should consult the earlier studies by Westfall R. S. , “Newton and the Hermetic tradition”, in Science, medicine and society in the Renaissance: Essays to honor Walter Pagel, ed. by Debus A. G. (New York, 1972), ii, 183–98; “The role of alchemy in Newton's career”, in Reason, experiment and mysticism in the Scientific Revolution, ed. by Bonelli M. L. Righini Shea W. R. (New York, 1975), 199–232 (with commentaries by Casini P. Hall M. Boas ). Westfall first disclosed his researches into the Hermetic Key in the large volume Force in Newton's physics (London, 1971). It is interesting to note that one of the authors of “Newton and the Pipes of Pan”, McGuire J. E. , has in a recent essay proposed a sharp discrimination between the ‘Platonism’ that Newton shares with the Cambridge Platonists, and the ‘Hermeticism’ which he, McGuire, rejects: “There is no evidence that Hermetic magic appealed to Newton…. Nor does Newton make any significant references to Hernies in his writings. Where he does, ‘Hermetic'is a stock phrase referring to alchemy and cannot be pressed unduly. The materials he gathered in the 1690s for inclusion in the opening proposition of the third book of the Principia [the classical Scholia] do not make mention of Hermes or of Hermeticism, although they refer to the opinions of many of the Neoplatonists” (“Neoplatonism and active principles: Newton and the Corpus Hermeticum”, in Hermeticism and the Scientific Revolution (William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, Los Angeles, 1977), 131). This is a distinction one may well accept, against the thesis of Westfall and Dobbs.

McGuire Rattansi , op. cit. (ref. 5), 136, my emphasis.

Dobbs , op. cit. (ref. 31), 111.

Ibid., 110.

Ibid., 110. See, on the other hand, the balanced point of view of McGuire in his 1977 essay, op. cit. (ref. 33), 130: “…it cannot be concluded that Newton perceived himself as a mere renovator of lost wisdom…. The problems that Newton conceived and tackled in his science were not set by the parameters of ancient thought, nor did ancient thought function as a direct source for his creative ideas. The enterprise of interpreting ancient thought could only commence for Newton after the techniques of seventeenth-century science had revealed anew the real structure of things.”.

Letter to Newton from Flamsteed, 10 August 1691, in The correspondence of Isaac Newton, ed. by Turnbull H. W. , Scott J. F. Hall A. R. Tilling L. (Cambridge, 1959–77), iii, 164.

Ibid., iii, see the letters exchanged between Newton and Gregory in 1691.

Ibid., iii, 191,272, etc.

Ibid., iii, 311.

Ibid., iii, 334–6 (translated). Note the final Hermetic touch with ‘Thot’, who nevertheless does not figure in the Scholia.

Ibid., iii, editorial note p. 339.

On the collaboration between Newton and Gregory, on the errata supplied by Gregory, and his Notae Principiorum, see Cohen I. Bernard , Introduction to Newton's Principia (Cambridge, 1971), 188–99.

They must have been composed between 1687 and 1697, as was first remarked by Gregory J. C. , “Notice concerning an autograph manuscript of Sir Isaac Newton”, Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, xii (1834), 65–76.

“Most probably before 1694 … and not later than 1697”, according to McGuire Rattansi , op. cit. (ref. 5), 139, note 3.

Koyré , Newtonian studies (ref. 11), 206–9. Newton himself had found this ‘myth’ not in Galileo, but in Blondel François , L'Art de jelter les bombes (Amsterdam, 1683), ch. 8,166. Cf. note 20, below.

Cf. Casini , op. cit. (ref. 18), 55–82.

In his edition of the Principia, “with variant readings” (Cambridge, 1972), ii, 803–7, I. Bernard Cohen has confined himself to a transcription of the autograph leaf by Newton that is folded in four and inserted between pages 412 and 413 of a copy of the Principia (1687), once Newton's property and now in Cambridge University Library, pressmarked Adv. b. 39.1. No one knows how this leaf came there; it was surely not inserted there by Newton himself (who, if he had done so, would have added all the classical Scholia); probably it was done by some ill-informed custodian of the book. Cohen does not transcribe the texts in the correct order, nor indicate the sources of them.