Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer. Michael White
the earth, as being like the movement of a feather or a straw caught in an eddy or a whirlpool.
Descartes rejected mysticism and the occult in his writings and visualised the universe as a machine. Every action involving matter was purely mechanistic, and matter had no contact with spirit. To Descartes, all animals – including humans – were also mere machines. Humans had a spiritual aspect, a soul, but this had no link with our physical selves.
These ideas were highly controversial. On a scientific level, Descartes’s concepts were unverifiable and he did not contrive experiments to support his theories. On a superficial level, his vortex theory did not clash with the doctrines of Galileo, in that it did not contradict experimental evidence. Galileo had shown that, because of inertia, all movement continued until stopped, and Descartes proposed that the universe had been set in motion by God. The two ideas were not incompatible: if we assume the Creator set things in motion, they would continue until stopped by, say, the intervention of mortals.
But the most radical aspect of Cartesian philosophy was that it implied to many that, once the universe had been set in motion, God was no longer needed. The Creator had been effectively demoted from ‘Supreme Good’ to ‘First Cause’. Naturally this was a view hotly disputed by theologians and the majority of philosophers, many of whom had been brought up on Aristotle and still thought along the same lines as the Scholastics of the thirteenth century.
Descartes died when Newton was eight years old, but his philosophies were becoming immensely fashionable as Newton entered university and extended his reading beyond the curriculum. Because it contained material referring to his disputed theories of divine function in a mechanical universe, Descartes’s most famous book, Discourse on the Method (published in 1637), was unpopular with the ecclesiastical authorities, but his theories were discussed openly in the more liberal universities of Europe and began to spread.
As Descartes’s theories of dualism became known, three other philosophers were helping to create the intellectual scene to which Newton would add his own unique ideas.
Pierre Gassendi, who was a Catholic priest and a close contemporary of Descartes, revived the work of Democritus and proposed an atomic theory in which matter was composed of tiny indivisible parts. Unlike Descartes, Gassendi did not attempt to describe a mechanistic universe in which all action on a fundamental level occurred by way of vortices – a theory which for many people marginalised God. Instead, he envisaged a universe composed of Democritus’s atoms presided over by an all-pervading Creator. Gassendi’s outlook has been dubbed ‘Christianised atomism’, because it maintains an omnipotent and omnipresent role for God. This was more acceptable than Descartes’s model to men like Newton, who sought a mechanistic model for the universe but could not countenance any diminishing of the Creator’s position.
Another great innovator of the time was Robert Boyle, today seen as the supreme experimentalist of his era. Boyle believed in practical analysis and was more concerned with how a phenomenon occurred rather than why it happened.
Boyle tried to unite elements of Descartes’s philosophy of a mechanistic universe with the revived atomic theory, but he did not subscribe to the contention that God had no role in the physical world after initiating primal movement. Like Gassendi, he held that God’s ‘general concourse’ was continually needed to keep the mechanical universe working. But a greater contribution to the study of matter and energy was his demonstration of the fallacy of Aristotle’s notion of the four elements.
In one of these displays, Boyle illustrated how fire could not be considered a basic element and that Aristotle’s claim that fire could resolve things into their elements was false. He demonstrated that, contrary to Aristotle’s belief, gold can withstand fire and can also be alloyed with other metals and then recovered in its original form, suggesting the existence of unalterable ‘corpuscles’ of gold. He also showed that even when fire did break down materials it required different degrees of heat and different time periods to succeed, and more often than not it produced new substances that were also complex. Finally, he showed that some materials could not be reduced by fire alone.
The last of the major seventeenth-century figures who greatly influenced Newton’s intellectual development was Francis Bacon. Bacon was not solely a philosopher. He was Lord Chancellor under James I, and was an essayist and moral philosopher who wrote widely about the way he thought science should be conducted. In his The Advancement of Learning (1605), The New Organon (1620) and especially The New Atlantis (1627), he criticised the blind pursuit of Aristotelian philosophy and the rote-learning system of the universities. And, most importantly, he was the first to formulate what has become known as the experimental or inductive method. It was Bacon who, some time before Descartes dismissed magic and superstition, argued that scientific discipline should be guided and inspired by religious motivations. In The Advancement of Learning he wrote:
To conclude therefore, let no man out of weak deceit of sobriety, or an ill-applied moderation, think or maintain, that a man can search far or be too well studied in the book of God’s word, or in the book of God’s works; divinity or philosophy; but rather let men endeavour an endless progress or proficiency in both.6
Although he would have agreed with Descartes’s dismissal of metaphysics, Bacon objected to scientific ideas being driven purely by philosophy and the deductive reasoning employed by Aristotle, which Descartes did not completely shake off. In effect, Bacon was the first to conceive of a ‘Christian Technocracy’. Quoting Daniel in the Old Testament, that ‘many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased’, he envisaged a science driven by religion, guided by strict logical rules and experimental verification (almost as modern scientists perceive it) and aimed at enlightenment and practical applicability. Although Cartesianism provided Newton with a platform of reasoning about a mechanical philosophy which in turn led to the Industrial Revolution, it was Bacon’s scientific method, which was readily adopted by generations of natural philosophers, including Newton, that provided the modus operandi for the Scientific Revolution.
So, by the middle of the seventeenth century, as Newton was preparing to enter the academic world, natural philosophy was in a state of flux. The old notions of Aristotle still provided the traditional backbone of university study in the areas of logic, astronomy and natural philosophy, but this was primarily because of an old school of influential academics. Gradually, radical ideas from the Continent were eroding the Greek philosopher’s supreme position. According to one historian of science, ‘From being a realm of substances in qualitative and teleological relations, the world of nature had definitely become a realm of bodies moving mechanically in space and time.’7
It was within this climate of change that Newton entered university in 1661 and took the first steps towards finding his own path through the shifting philosophies of the time and establishing his own views.
[Truth is] the offspring of silence and unbroken meditation.
ISAAC NEWTON1
Cambridge during the 1660s was far from a Utopia of academic purity. It was both academically backward and a dangerous place in which to live. The buildings were overcrowded and huddled together along filthy streets which at night were unlit and during the day teemed with merchants, beggars, unschooled children and gowned students. An anonymous visitor to the town described it as:
so abominably dirty that Old Street, in the middle of the winter’s thaw, or Bartholomew’s Fair, after a shower of rain, could not have more occasion for a scavenger than the miry streets of this famous corporation, and most of them so very narrow that should two wheelbarrows meet in the largest of their thoroughfares they are enough to make a stop for half an hour before they can well clear themselves of one another to make room for passengers. The buildings in many parts