Isaac Newton (1642–1727), Lucasian Professor at Cambridge, Master of the Mint and President of the Royal Society. The Principia of 1687 gave the world a single mathematics for the fall of an apple and the orbit of the moon. He also left some three million words on theology, chronology and alchemy, most of it unpublished in his lifetime and some of it unpublishable: he was privately an anti-Trinitarian, in a college dedicated to the Holy Trinity, and took a royal dispensation rather than the holy orders his fellowship required.
Works (6)
- Four Letters to Dr Bentley — Newton’s answers to Richard Bentley, who was preparing the first Boyle Lectures, A Confutation of Atheism, and wrote to ask how far the Principia could be used in them. They are the fullest statement Newton made of the argument from the frame of the world to its maker: that gravity alone could not have divided matter into a shining sun and dark planets, nor given the planets their transverse motions, nor set the system in its order; and that gravity itself, acting at a distance without contact, is so great an absurdity that it must be caused by an agent. Bentley kept them, and they were printed after his death. (4 notes)
- Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St John — Newton spent more of his life on prophecy and chronology than on optics, and left this unpublished at his death; his nephew Benjamin Smith saw it through the press in 1733. It is not a work of enthusiasm but of scholarship in Newton’s own manner — the prophetic images treated as a language with fixed meanings, the text of Daniel dated from the compilers of the Old Testament canon, the seventy weeks computed, and the eleventh horn of the fourth beast identified with the Church of Rome. The second part does the same for the Apocalypse, and argues that it was written before the destruction of Jerusalem. (18 notes)
- Queries 28 and 31 of the Opticks — The two of the thirty-one questions closing the Opticks in which Newton follows natural philosophy to its end in God. The twenty-eighth argues against filling space with a medium and asks whence is it that Nature doth nothing in vain, and whether space is not the Sensory of a Being incorporeal, living, intelligent, omnipresent; the thirty-first, after a long survey of chemical attraction, ends with God forming matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, moveable Particles in the beginning, and with the hope that natural philosophy perfected will enlarge moral philosophy too. Both are given whole, since the theology closes an argument that begins with light and salts. (2 notes)
- The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended — Published the year after Newton’s death by John Conduitt, his nephew by marriage. It sets out to bring the histories of the Greeks, Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Medes and Persians down to the measure of the Hebrew Scriptures, shortening them by centuries on the evidence of the precession of the equinoxes and the average length of reigns — and in the fifth chapter reconstructs, cubit by cubit from Ezekiel, the Temple of Solomon, which Newton held to be the pattern of true worship. It is the companion to the Observations upon the Prophecies, and was the book of his that Newton was revising when he died. (10 notes)
- The General Scholium — The close of the Principia, added to its second edition in 1713: that this most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being, and what can and cannot be said of that Being from the frame of the world. It is where hypotheses non fingo comes from, and the one place in the book where Newton speaks of God at length. (1 note)
- Two Notable Corruptions of Scripture — An Historical Account of Two Notable Corruptions of Scripture, in a Letter to a Friend: Newton’s case, argued from the Fathers, the councils, the ancient versions and the manuscripts, that the testimony of the Three in Heaven (1 John v. 7) and the reading God manifested in the flesh (1 Timothy iii. 16) are not what the apostles wrote. The tract is one continued discourse, and the two titles given to its halves here are the library’s, not Newton’s. Horsley’s notes, which answer Newton, are marked Bp. Horsley; the unmarked notes are Newton’s own. The Greek is printed as the 1841 edition prints it, largely without accents. (3 notes)