How the Principia Got its Name;Or,Taking Natural Philosophy Seriously

The correspondence of Isaac Newton, ii, 1676–87 (Cambridge, 1960), ed. by Turnbull H. W. , 434, letter Halley to Newton, 7 June 1686.

Ibid., 437, letter Newton to Halley, 20 June 1686.

Gabbey Alan , “Newton and natural philosophy”, in Olby R. C. Cantor G. N. Christie J. R. R. Hodge M. J. S. (eds), Companion to the history of modern science (London, 1990), 243–63, p. 245.

Ibid., 251, 260.

For Newton's anatomical interests, see for instance Plate II in Hall A. Rupert Hall Marie Boas (eds), Unpublished scientific papers of Isaac Newton: A selection from the Portsmouth Collection in the University Library, Cambridge (Cambridge, 1962).

Wallace William A. , “Newton's early writings: Beginnings of a new direction”, in Coyne G. V. S.J. Heller M. Źyciński J. (eds), Newton and the new direction in science (Vatican City, 1988), 23–44.

Jo Betty Dobbs Teeter , The foundations of Newton's alchemy or “The hunting of the greene lyon” (Cambridge, 1975).

The correspondence of Isaac Newton, v, 1709–13, ed. by Hall A. R. Tilling Laura (Cambridge, 1975), 391, 398–9.

McGuire J. E. Rattansi P. M. , “Newton and the ‘pipes of Pan’”, Notes and records of the Royal Society, xxi (1966), 108–43, p. 138.

The term ‘scientist’ dates only from 1833. See Ross Sidney , “Scientist: The story of a word”, Annals of science, xviii (1962), 65–85.

Schuster John A. , “The scientific revolution”, in Companion to the history of modern science (ref. 3), 217–42, pp. 224–5.

Funkenstein Amos , Theology and the scientific imagination from the Middle Ages to the seventeenth century (Princeton, 1986); Lindberg David C. Numbers Ronald L. (eds), God and nature: Historical essays on the encounter between Christianity and science (Berkeley, 1986); Science in context, iii (1989), no. 1, “‘After Merton’: Protestant and Catholic science in seventeenth-century Europe”.

Biot claimed that after his mental breakdown in 1692 Newton “n'a plus donné du travail nouveau sur aucune partie des sciences”, and went on to write on the prophesies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St John. Biot was mystified as to why such a precise mind as Newton's could allow himself to be convinced by such uncertain conjectures, but concluded that religious freedom and political freedom were of a piece in seventeenth-century England, hence “les savants anglais de cette époque prennaient plaisir à mêler aux recherches des sciences les discussions théologiques”. It was Sir David Brewster who thought Biot was casting a slur on Newton — But because Biot claimed Newton went mad, not because Newton “mixed research in the sciences with theological discussions” as Biot claimed. See Biographie universelle, 2nd ed. (xxx, 1854), 366–404, esp. pp. 390 and 401; Brewster David Sir , Memoirs of the life, writings, and discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton (2 vols, Edinburgh, 1855), ii, chapter xvii.

See ref. 9 above, and McGuire J. E. , “Force, active principles, and Newton's invisible realm”, Ambix, xv (1968), 154–208; McGuire J. E. , “Newton's ‘Principles of philosophy’: An intended preface for the 1704 Opticks and a related draft fragment”, The British journal for the history of science, v (1970), 178–86; McGuire J. E. , “Newton on place, time, and God: An unpublished source”, The British journal for the history of science, xi (1978), 114–29.

Buckley Michael J. s.j. , At the origins of modern atheism (New Haven, 1987).

As quoted in Brewster , Memoirs (ref. 13), ii, 315.

The correspondence of Isaac Newton, iii, 1688–94, ed. by Turnbull H. W. (Cambridge, 1961), 233, letter Newton to Bentley, 10 December 1692.

For Motte's translation, see The mathematical principles of natural philosophy by Sir Isaac Newton, translated into English by Andrew Motte 1729 , Introduction by I. Bernard Cohen (2 vols, London, 1968), ii, 391–2. For the original Latin, see The correspondence of Isaac Newton, v, 1709–13 (ref. 8), 397, letter Newton to Cotes, 28 March 1713, “At the end of the last Paragraph but two now ready to be printed off I desire you to add after the words [nihil aliud est quam Fatum et Natura.] these words: [Et haec de Deo: De quo utique ex phaenomenis disserere, ad Philosophiam experimentalem pertinet.]”.

The course of this dispute has been recently unravelled by Rupert Hall and by Steven Shapin: Hall A. Rupert , Philosophers at war (Cambridge, 1980); Shapin Steven , “Of Gods and kings: Natural philosophy and politics in the Leibniz-Clarke disputes”, Isis, lxxii (1981), 187–215.

McLachlan Herbert , The religious opinions of Milton. Locke and Newton (Manchester, 1941), shows beyond doubt that Newton was a Unitarian. See also more recently Force James E. Popkin Richard H. , Essays on the context, nature and influence of Isaac Newton's theology (Dordrecht, 1990).

For example, Newton wrote: “One principle in Philosophy is ye being of a God or Spirit infinite eternal omniscient omnipotent” — Which are among the special characteristics of a Unitarian's God — “& the best argument for such a being is the frame of nature & chiefly the contrivance of ye bodies of living creatures…. And to lay aside this argumt is (very) unphilosophical”, Cambridge University Library Add. Ms. 3970.3 folios 479r–v, as cited in McGuire, “Newton's ‘Principles of philosophy”’ (ref. 14), 183. See also the essay by Newton, “De gravitatione et aequipondio fluidorum”, printed in Hall and Hall, Unpublished papers (ref. 5), 89–156.

This is to deliberately reverse our customary way of approaching Newton and the Newtonian universe, in which we take Newton's account to be, in essentials, true, and therefore ask how Newton ‘discovered’ it, and instead it opens up questions about how Newton constructed that particular view of the universe. On such “construction”, see Latour Bruno , Science in action: How to follow scientists and engineers through society (Milton Keynes, 1987).

As quoted from Cambridge University Add. Ms 3970.9 f.619 in Schaffer Simon , “Natural philosophy and public spectacle in the eighteenth century”, History of science, xxi (1983), 1–43, p. 4.

Schuster writes (Companion (ref. 11), 225): “Each system of natural philosophy rested on four structural elements whose respective contents and systematic relations went a considerable way towards defining the content of that system: (1) a theory of substance (material and immaterial), concerning what the cosmos consists of and what kinds of bodies or entities it contains; (2) a cosmology, an account of the macroscopic organisation of those bodies; (3) a theory of causation, an account of how and why change and motion occur; (4) an epistemology and doctrine of method which purports to show how the discourses under (1), (2) and (3) were arrived at and/or how they can be justified, and how they constitute a system.” Throughout this article Schuster constantly speaks of Newton's and other people's “scientific and natural philosophical work” as if they are different enterprises, see for instance p. 217.

It is quite striking how, even when the term ‘natural philosophy’ is in the title of their books or articles, modern historians of science feel no need at all to explain what natural philosophy is or was — Because they are assuming it was the same as modern science, or that they were parallel enterprises. To give just a few instances of this phenomenon, none of the following works defines natural philosophy or distinguishes it from science, despite having the term in their titles, and despite the term being one which is not in common use today: I. Bernard Cohen, Isaac Newton's papers and letters on natural philosophy, and related documents (Cambridge, Mass. 1958, repr. 1978); Grant Edward Murdoch John E. (eds), Mathematics and its application to science and natural philosophy in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1987); Heimann P. , “Newtonian natural philosophy and the Scientific Revolution”, History of science, xi (1973), 1–7; the list could be continued to great length.

This story will be detailed in Roger French and Andrew Cunningham, Before science: The invention of natural philosophy (forthcoming).

Quoted by Austin William H. , in “Isaac Newton on science and religion”, Journal of the history of ideas, xxxi (1970), 521–42, p. 522.

See Webb Clement C. J. , Studies in the history of natural theology (Oxford, 1915); Buckley , op. cit. (ref. 15), 74 for Raymond of Sebond and Montaigne; Gascoigne John , “From Bentley to the Victorians: The rise and fall of British Newtonian natural theology”, Science in context, ii (1988), 219–56.

Gillespie Neal C. , “Natural history, natural theology, and social order: John Ray and the ‘Newtonian ideology’”, Journal of the history of biology, xx (1987), 1–49, sees natural theology as an ancient practice revived in a particular way in Restoration England; I am not happy with the categories he uses to argue this. I am grateful to an anonymous referee for drawing this piece to my attention.

Evidently God was taken out of Newton's natural philosophy at some later date; if we need to locate this act with one individual then there is probably no better candidate than Laplace — Colleague of Biot (see ref. 13 above). For some of the transformations of Newtonian natural philosophy in the eighteenth century see Schaffer Simon : “Newtonianism” in Companion (ref. 3), 610–26; “Natural philosophy”, in Rousseau George Porter Roy (eds), The ferment of knowledge (Cambridge, 1980), 57–91; “Scientific discoveries and the end of natural philosophy”, Social studies of science, xvi (1986), 387–420.

See Jardine Nicholas , “Demonstration, dialectic and rhetoric in Galileo's Dialogue”, in Kelley Donald R. Popkin Richard H. (eds), Shapes of knowledge in early modern Europe (forthcoming).

Funkenstein (ref. 12) for instance pursues this line, applying the categories of ‘science’ and theology to the seventeenth century, claiming that “to many seventeenth-century thinkers, theology and science merged into one idiom, part of a veritable secular theology such as never existed before or after”, p. ix; but ‘science’ in the sense in which Funkenstein means it had never existed before this time, and did not come into existence for a long time after this period. A similar position is taken by John Hedley Brooke in Science and religion: Some historical perspectives (Cambridge, 1991), which appeared while the present article was in proof. As far as I can see, Brooke's whole argument is posited on the possibility of perceiving ‘science’ and ‘religion’ in the past as opposed or at least contrasted categories, despite his historiographical considerations in his Introduction, and despite his comment (p. 7), “if we prejudge what we mean by science and religion, we might be in no position to appreciate the distinctiveness of Newton's vision. There would be a degree of artificiality in asking how Newton reconciled his ‘science’ and his ‘religion’, if he saw himself pursuing a form of ‘natural philosophy’, in which the two interests were integrated.” Amen to that.

See my article “Getting the game right: Some plain words on the identity and invention of science”, Studies in history and philosophy of science, xix (1988), 365–89.