Newton, page 9
Newtonianism is a deceptively straightforward word. By 1765 it had already – according to the French Encyclopédie – acquired five distinct meanings. Since then, it has become even more ambiguous, as new interpretations of Newton’s ideas have been generated. At its most general level, Newtonianism now signifies adopting a scientific approach not only to the physical world, but also to living beings and social systems. It was during the Enlightenment period that Newtonian natural philosophers started to advertise this emphasis on taking a rational experimental approach in order to model nature and society with mathematical laws.
Newtonianism is now pretty well restricted to scientific writings, but even among scientists it means different things. In addition to this technical splitting, the term can also refer to other aspects of Newton’s thought. Because science and technology are so fundamental to the modern world, we celebrate Newton overwhelmingly for his contributions to topics such as physics, astronomy and mathematics. This was much less the case in the century after his death, when Newton was also renowned for his expertise on money, biblical interpretation and historical dating. As society changed, these other strands of his influence mostly faded away, although traces do still remain. For instance, a group called The Lord’s Witnesses funds expensive advertising campaigns promoting Newton as a millenarian whizz-kid. Using his mathematical approach to biblical analysis, based on the power of 666 (see below, page 78), they can apparently predict exactly when a small clique of ten leaders will take over the world.18
At the beginning of the eighteenth century, it would have been hard to predict exactly which aspect of Newton’s thought would ultimately prove most significant. One of his earliest biographers described a scholar who appears only distantly related to the scientific genius we commemorate today. For this anonymous author, Newton’s measurements of the dimensions of Solomon’s temple and the durations of royal dynasties seemed as valuable as calculating the trajectory of a bullet or the motion of the moon. Readers might well have gained the impression that although the Principia was undoubtedly an important book, it was possibly overshadowed by Newton’s Dissertation upon the Sacred Cubit of the Jews.19
Newton’s posthumous reputation was honed against those of colleagues who had shared his interests, but who were retrospectively fashioned to appear different from one another. For instance, during their lifetimes, Locke and Newton were often bracketed together as learned authors. Yet in the early nineteenth century, when the arts and sciences were separating, they were each converted into distinct cultural heroes; one French writer imagined them sitting in Oxford carving up the disciplines between them, Newton agreeing to take over the physical sciences while Locke was to lead the humanities. Similarly, Boyle had been a leading light in the early Royal Society, renowned for his chemical and pneumatic experiments. But during the eighteenth century, he gradually became distinguished for his deep religiosity, thus allowing Newton to become the hero of natural philosophy, and reinforcing the distinctions between science and religion.20
Ideas do not, however, travel by themselves. We can discern general trends in the past, such as the fall of Descartes, the rise of Newton, and his subsequent displacement by Einstein. Yet these massive transformations only came about because of the cumulative activities of many, many thousands of individuals who were each absorbed in their own activities. As George Eliot observed at the end of Middlemarch, the world is improved through small ‘unhistoric acts’. During the eighteenth century, Newton’s supporters promoted different facets of his thought. Focusing on his disciples reveals some of the diverse ways in which countless men (and a few scattered women) manoeuvred to improve their own positions, and simultaneously forged an impregnable Newtonian orthodoxy that came to pervade eighteenth-century life.
Three men in particular represent contrasting strands of Newton’s impact and illustrate some unfamiliar aspects of how Newton’s ideas have affected modern views: Willliam Whiston, George Cheyne and John Desaguliers. Each with his own fascinating life story, they are now rather obscure figures, but were renowned during the early eighteenth century as fervent champions of the Newtonian cause. Although they never met together, as members of the relatively small and intimate community of learned scholars, their trajectories overlapped as they each carved out individual paths of self-advancement. It is only in retrospect that these three individuals seem to be oriented towards three subsequent Newtonian destinies: the near-oblivion of Newton’s preoccupation with ancient chronology and biblical prediction; the application of his ideas about the physical world to revolutions in biological and social thought; and the transformation of Newton’s secretive quest to learn more about God’s creation into giant scientific and technological enterprises.
The man who attained the greatest academic eminence was William Whiston, who briefly held Newton’s chair at Cambridge, but became notorious for pursuing those theological and historical aspects of Newton’s inquiries that were squeezed out of public memory. The most widely esteemed was George Cheyne, a fashionable doctor who helped conduct Newtonian ideas into biological research and political treatises. Only one of them, John Desaguliers, an experimental lecturer and entrepreneurial engineer, dedicated himself primarily to promoting what we now value as Newton’s greatest achievement, his contributions towards modern science.
Whiston, Cheyne and Desaguliers were all determined to convert Newton’s arcane ideas into general knowledge, but they chose very different routes and interpreted his work in very different ways. Addison’s Mr Spectator declared that ‘I shall be ambitious to have it said of me, that I have brought Philosophy out of Closets and Libraries, Schools and Colleges, to dwell in Clubs and Assemblies, at Tea-Tables, and in Coffee-Houses.’21 Like him, these three Newtonian publicists were determined to make Newtonianism a public commodity rather than a private preoccupation reserved for esoteric academics. Whiston, Cheyne and Desaguliers were unique, but they represent significant types of response to Newton’s work. Their contrasting approaches illustrate how Newton’s posthumous reputation was fashioned not only by scholarly university men, but also by the poets, journalists, preachers and instrument makers of Enlightenment England for whom economic survival was as strong a motivation as academic legitimacy.
William Whiston (1667–1752): millenarian crusader
It has always been tempting to poke fun at Whiston. In the Madhouse scene of Hogarth’s Rake’s Progress, an inmate of the Bedlam Hospital stares bemusedly at his sketch of Whiston’s rejected scheme to measure longitude; in The Vicar of Wakefield, Oliver Goldsmith’s comic cleric is modelled on this scholar who sacrificed his Cambridge chair for his religious convictions. In 1750, when London was shaken by two earthquakes, Whiston gave lectures denouncing the ‘horrid Wickedness of the Present Age’. Quoting from the Book of Revelation he predicted further earthquakes that only the virtuous would survive. His insistence that texts in the Bible foretell the imminent arrival of Christ and the restoration of the Jews to Jerusalem made Whiston the butt of harsh Augustan wits, and invited contemporaries as well as subsequent historians to dismiss him as mad.22
In fact, Whiston’s ideas were attuned to contemporary concerns and closely resembled those found in Newton’s own writings. Whiston was no ill-educated crank: Locke’s learned circle thought extremely highly of his first book, and Cambridge mathematicians appointed him the Lucasian Professor. Whiston’s major eccentricity was to advertise publicly what Newton prudently kept private. This best-selling author introduced far more people to the Principia than had Newton himself, but he became ostracized from Georgian society by deliberately flouting religious respectability and persistently propagating aspects of Newton’s theological analyses that had come to be deemed unacceptable.
The trajectory of Whiston’s own life mirrors the profound transformations in attitudes towards natural philosophy that took place in the first half of the eighteenth century. The Principia and the Opticks became canonical texts, whilst Newton’s researches into biblical prophecy became marginalized. But as Whiston grew older, he increasingly focused on the millenarian aspects of Newton’s work. His once-glowing reputation degenerated into scornful dismissal, reflecting the move of public faith away from biblical interpretation towards philosophical experimentation as the most reliable route to knowledge about the world. Most natural philosophers were trying to gain prestige by ridiculing interpretations of abnormal events – earthquakes, comets, floods – as heralding divine vengeance. Whiston obstinately clung to what was rapidly becoming an outmoded approach, conflating apocalyptic prophesy with philosophical prediction. For Newton’s successors, denigrating Whiston as a millenarian obsessive hovering on the edge of lunacy consolidated Newton’s scientific credentials and at the same time minimized his unorthodox religious views. Yet despite their derision, Whiston’s influence still resonates today.
Whiston’s first success came in 1696 when, as an obscure provincial chaplain, he produced a highly acclaimed book; dedicated to ‘Summo Viro Isaaco Newton’, it was repeatedly published over the next sixty years. Its full title indicates the intimate relationship between theology and natural philosophy in the late seventeenth century: A New Theory of the Earth, From its Original, to the Consummation of all Things. Wherein The Creation of the World in Six Days, The Universal Deluge, And the General Conflagration, As laid down in the Holy Scriptures, Are shewn to be perfectly agreeable to Reason and Philosophy. For the previous decade, scholars and clergymen had been furiously debating whether or not natural philosophers threatened to undermine the Church’s authority by contradicting biblical accounts of the earth’s formation. Whiston’s intervention in this heated controversy simultaneously catapulted him to fame and publicized Newton’s ideas.
Inspired – like Newton – by the rash of comets that fascinated his contemporaries and were widely interpreted as messages from God, Whiston astutely reconciled God’s two books, the Bible and the natural world. Mathematical calculations jostled with biblical quotations, and cometary orbits were treated with the same intellectual gravity as the Garden of Eden. According to Whiston, the words of Moses had been divinely dictated, yet provided a historical description of the world’s creation that was compatible with the new mathematical and physical explanations being formulated by natural philosophers. Hypothesizing that a comet had long ago collided with the earth and triggered off Noah’s flood, Whiston juxtaposed Newtonian techniques of scriptural interpretation and philosophical exposition to reinforce the reliability of both approaches.
In the same year that Whiston’s New Theory appeared, Newton moved to London to take up his position at the Mint. As he severed his links with Cambridge, he invited Whiston to take over his Cambridge lectures for him, and approved – may even have arranged – his protégé’s selection to deliver the Boyle Lectures of 1707. Funded by a bequest in Boyle’s will, this annual series had been initiated in 1692 ‘for proving the Christian religion against notorious infidels, viz, Atheists, Deists, Pagans, Jews, and Mahometans’.23 This frightening roll-call of enemies apparently threatening the Church of England’s stability included philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes and Benedict de Spinoza. Far from being atheists by modern definitions, they were challenging traditional political and theological beliefs about the relationships between God, society and knowledge.
Many historians judge the Boyle Lectures to have played an important role in consolidating Newtonian ideology. In the troubled political atmosphere after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, most of the lecturers held what we might now describe as Protestant, progressive attitudes towards religion and politics. Deliberately calling themselves Low Church men, they drew on Newtonian ideas to promote an alliance between Christianity and rationality. These Whig adherents wanted to support the new Hanoverian monarchy in the face of continued High Church Tory support for the dethroned, yet divinely appointed, Stuart dynasty. Since their Boyle sermons were often published, they helped to consolidate a characteristically British version of natural theology, the quest to learn about God by examining nature.
Anglicans vacillated between two conflicting images of God. Newton had often portrayed a deity who intervened intermittently in the smooth running of the cosmos: thus he regarded comets as God’s way of fine-tuning the celestial mechanism. This model went some way towards resolving the nagging problem of miracles, although critics were quick to point out that too many miracles would contradict the ideal of cosmic order. As Leibniz acerbically commented: ‘Sir Isaac Newton, and his followers, have also a very odd opinion concerning the work of God. According to their doctrine, God Almighty wants to wind up his watch from time to time: otherwise it would cease to move. He had not, it seems, sufficient foresight to make it a perpetual motion.’ British natural philosophers discarded this interventionist God to favour portrayals of a divine watchmaker whose Newtonian universe ran itself like clockwork, governed by the laws of gravity. Their paternalistic deity presided over a stable, well-regulated universe that mirrored orderly Augustan society.24
Newton suggested to Whiston that his Boyle Lectures could be devoted to showing how historically provable events fulfilled God’s own prophecies that had been directly transcribed in the Bible. Taking this advice to heart, Whiston discovered over 300 instances, enabling him to fix the start of the apocalypse and the millennium at 1736 (later updated to 1766 when 1736 passed undramatically). Echoes of Newton’s famous but ambiguous remark, ‘I feign no hypotheses’, resonated throughout Whiston’s preaching. Both men believed that just as modern natural philosophers should reject metaphysical speculation and rely on mathematics and experiments, so too the prophecies of the Old Testament should be analysed literally rather than allegorically.
Whiston’s audiences welcomed this aspect of his Newtonian biblical exegesis, but became disenchanted with his outspoken claims that historical research showed prevailing Christian beliefs in the Holy Trinity to be falsely founded. Unlike Newton, who self-protectively concealed how his chronological reinterpretations confirmed his own anti-Trinitarianism, Whiston refused to heed counsels of caution. Deviating from orthodoxy was highly risky, as a diarist’s anecdote reveals: ‘A lady asked the famous Lord Shaftesbury what religion he was of. He answered the religion of wise men. She asked, what was that? He answered, wise men never tell.’25 Anti-Trinitarianism, denying God’s threefold nature as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, was a legal offence punishable (in principle, at least) by imprisonment or even death. Newton astutely followed public opinion by dissociating himself from his over-ardent disciple, but, proclaiming his adherence to the unorthodox creed known as Arianism, Whiston defiantly continued to question prevailing beliefs in Christ’s holy status. As this idealistic scholar naively ventured into the dangerous terrain of Church politics, he became caught up in the wake of a national scandal. Banished from Cambridge for heresy, he fled to London.
Distinguished metropolitans like Addison welcomed this fervent Newtonian. They felt that if his ‘Itch to be venting his Notions about Baptism & the Arian Doctrine’ could be kept under control, his track record at Cambridge suggested that he would be a profitable recruit to teach the new courses in natural philosophy. Whiston was a successful and entertaining lecturer as well as a prolific author, one of the earliest and most significant popularizers of Newton’s mathematics and natural philosophy. One particularly enthusiastic student was Alexander Pope, whose poems ensured that Newton’s fame reached audiences far beyond those frequenting London halls and coffee houses.26
Produced in long and cheap print runs, books like Sir Isaac Newton’s Mathematick Philosophy More Easily Demonstrated brought Whiston a much-needed income, and also converted Newton’s complicated theoretical speculations into simple unshakeable certainty. Ignoring Newton’s grumbles, Whiston resuscitated some of his earlier papers on algebra to publish them as Arithmetica Universalis, a deliberate riposte to Descartes’s book on geometry. Translated into English, this became the century’s most widely read book on Newton’s mathematics; forty years later, Newton falsely boasted that he had chosen the title himself.
But particularly after Newton’s death, Whiston publicized aspects of Newton’s thought that have become less familiar. Theological issues were central to Newton’s life and thought, even though only privileged friends were aware how far his beliefs deviated from orthodoxy. Over the past three centuries, we have come to celebrate Newton as a genius of science, and few people are aware of his writings on ancient chronology, scriptural interpretation and prophecy, which survive in voluminous manuscripts and posthumously published books. These were not simply casual interests to fill a Sunday afternoon, but fundamentally affected what we call his scientific work.
How, Newton repeatedly asked himself, can a spiritual God interact with the material world? For help, he immersed himself in ancient alchemical and scriptural texts, so that his interest in unorthodox spiritual beliefs moulded his constantly shifting speculations about aether and the operation of gravity. His dedication to alchemical experimentation was no vain quest to transmute lead into gold, but a committed search for an aetherial animating spirit, evidence of God’s presence in the universe. As Newton delved into the writings of the Greeks, he became convinced that his natural philosophy was a retrieval of lost ancient knowledge. He argued, for instance, that the Babylonians had – like him -placed the sun at the centre of a universe composed mainly of empty space. As Colson’s frontispiece advertises, Newton preferred to use traditional geometrical arguments (Figure 3.1). He turned his back on the new algebraic methods being developed on the Continent, thus adversely affecting British mathematics during the eighteenth century.27
