Abstract Considerations

Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci.
35 (2004) 427454
www.elsevier.com/locate/shpsa
Abstract considerations: disciplines and the

incoherence of Newtons natural philosophy
Rob Ilie
Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, Shereld Building 452, Imperial College,
London SW7 2AZ, UK
Abstract
Historians have long sought putative connections between dierent areas of Newtons
scientic work, while recently scholars have argued that there were causal links between even
more disparate elds of his intellectual activity. In this paper I take an opposite approach,
and attempt to account for certain tensions in Newtons scientic work by examining his
great sensitivity to the disciplinary divisions that both conditioned and facilitated his early
investigations in science and mathematics. These momentous undertakings, exemplied by
research that he wrote up in two separate notebooks, obey strict distinctions between
approaches appropriate to both new and old natural philosophy and those appropriate to
the mixed mathematical sciences. He retained a fairly rigid demarcation between them until
the early eighteenth century. At the same time as Newton presented the mathematical principles of natural philosophy in his magnum opus of 1687, he remained equally committed to
a separate and more private world or ontology that he publicly denigrated as hypothetical or
conjectural. This is to say nothing of the worlds implicit in his work on mathematics and
alchemy. He did not lurch from one overarching ontological commitment to the next (for
example, moving tout court from radical aetherial explanations to strictly vacuist accounts)
but instead simultaneouslyand often radicallydeveloped generically distinct concepts
and ontologies that were appropriate to specic settings and locations (for example, private,
qualitative, causal natural philosophy versus public quantitative mixed mathematics) as well
as to relevant styles of argument. Accordingly I argue that the concepts used by Newton
throughout his career were intimately bound up with these appropriate generic or quasidisciplinary structures. His later eorts to bring together active principles, aethers and
voids in various works were not failures that resulted from his confusion but were bold
attempts to meld together concepts or ontologies that belonged to distinct enquiries. His
E-mail address: r.ilie@imperial.ac.uk (R. Ilie).

0039-3681/$ - see front matter # 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.shpsa.2004.06.004
428
R. Ilie / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 35 (2004) 427454
analysis could not be coherent because the structures in which they appeared were
fundamentally incompatible.
# 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Connectionism; Incoherence; Appropriateness; Setting; Discipline; Genre; Structure
1. Introduction
Early research into Newtons archival bequest was naturally dominated by attention to his seminal achievements in mathematics, physics and chemistry.1 When his
alchemical and theological writings were investigated in more detail in the 1960s
and 1970s, they were not seen initially as relevant to Newtons scientic pursuits.
Consequently, a deep ssure emerged between historians working on the scientic and non-scientic areas of his research. Partly as a response to this situation
and as a corrective to the implication that it rendered Newton a divided selfa
number of scholars argued that there were conceptual links between Newtons theology or alchemy, and his natural philosophy or mathematical physics. Most
notably, perhaps, Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs and Richard S. Westfall argued that
Newtons alchemical research possessed a degree of quantitative precision that was
unmatched by contemporary adepts. More boldly, they claimed that with no
apparent antecedent in standard mechanical philosophy, Newtons notion of Universal Gravitation owed a great deal to alchemical categories such as sympathy.2
The idea that apparently disparate parts of his writings are somehow connected
was to some extent a response to the positivist emphasis of earlier Newton scholarship, but more generally, it was based on the metaphysical presumption that the
individual Isaac Newton was the undierentiated author of a group of writings
that were all coherent or unied at some level. In his Religion of Isaac Newton of
1974, for example, Frank Manuel rehearsed pertinent connections between
Newtons theological conception of God as pantokrator and his notion of absolute
space, and pointed to virtually identical passages in both the 1713 General
Scholium and Newtons contemporaneous History of the Church. Manuel added,
quite plausibly, that Newtons condemnation of metaphysical corruptions of early
Christianity bore some relation to his early eighteenth-century attack on Leibnizs
philosophy. Beyond this, he remarked that whatever Newton scrutinised he was
searching for a unifying structure; all his studies bespeak the same mentality and
style of thought. If nature was consonant with itself, so was Isaac Newtons mind.
More recently, Dobbs and Jim Force have extended this approach to argue that
other elds of Newtons research were linked or unied in some manner. According to Dobbs, The Janus-like faces of Newton were after all the production of a
single mind [that] was equipped with a certain fundamental assumption, common
1
See inter alia Newton (19591977, 19671981, 1962); Herivel (1965); Westfall (1971); Cohen (1971,
1980).
2
See Westfall (1984), pp 388390, and Dobbs (1975), p. 11.
429
to his age, from which his various lines of investigation owed naturally: the
assumption of the unity of Truth.3
However plausible a priori an integrated identity of author and the oeuvre
appears, this assumption has not gone without major criticism. Attacks on authorial unity and textual coherence, and the celebration of the death of the author,
have all been staples of recent literary criticism. While not embracing the more
extreme implications of deconstructionist approaches, Brian Vickers suggested two
decades ago in his Occult and scientic mentalities in the Renaissance that a unied
Newtonian mind was no longer tenable. Vickerss distinction between occult and
scientic is rather anachronistic, and his use of the notion of mentalities detracts
somewhat from the force of his anti-mentalist argument. While I concur with the
general anti-connectionist thrust to his approach, I develop a dierent view in this
essay. I suggest that from the very beginning of his researches, Newton shaped his
own work according to distinctions between what was appropriate to the distinct
disciplinary traditions of natural philosophy and mixed mathematics. The way he
viewed his own roles as a practitioner within these elds, and what these productions were, can only be understood by grasping where they stood vis-a`-vis other
exemplary writings within given disciplines or traditions, and not through their
putative connection to other parts of his research. In short, what I propose is the
recognition of metaphysical heterogeneityat both the textual and authorial
levelsrather than the unity presupposed by many other historians.4
Of course, there is a danger of merely rehearsing the older viewlicensed
by Newton in his own writings in mixed mathematicsthat mixed mathematics
was a superior form of enquiry to more hypothetical research, and that the
mathematisation of nature was the only proper fate of such material. Against the
view that there was a strong causal link between Newtons alchemical concepts
and those of his mathematical physics, Bernard Cohen argued in 1980 that
the route to the enunciation of Universal Gravitation was the result of Newtons
scientic style. According to Cohen, Newtons approachexemplied by the
logical structure of the Principiaseparated the study of the exact sciences into
a number of stages and the development of Newtons master-concept could be
explained perfectly adequately without recourse to his other pursuits. Cohen
pointed to the signicant distinctions that Newton maintained in the Principia
between the abstract categories deployed therein, and the more privately conducted
programmes or projects concerning the physical causes of natural phenomena.
These last activities Newton denigrated publicly as hypotheses or conjectures,
and he often professed his unwillingness to release his own theories to the public,
3
Manuel (1974), p. 103; see also Dobbs (1991), pp. 515 (esp. p. 6), and Force (2000), esp. p. 254. See
in particular McGuire & Rattansi (1966) and Kubrin (1967). As a further variant of the holistic perspective, it has been implied that a particular area of study, particularly Newtons theological studies, constitutes a conceptual or methodological fons et origo for all of his other researches. See in particular
Castillejo (1981), esp. p.15.
4
Vickers (1984), pp. 6, 1516. For comments relating to the existence of the author and authorial
unity see Eakin (1985); Soderqvist (1996), esp. pp. 5558; Burke (1998).
430
for fear (as he put it) of causing unnecessary disputes. In the Principia and elsewhere Newton remarked on the incomplete nature of these studies, as if they could
only be fully legitimated by their later incorporation into a mathematical natural
philosophy.5
I have sympathy both with Cohens argument, and with his sensitivity to
the disciplinary compartmentalisation that Newton introduced into his work.
However, in this paper I claim that throughout his career he performed philosophical and chymical research at the same time and with the same commitment as
he developed mixed mathematical approaches to geometrical optics and rational
mechanics. Although his writing in these elds ostensibly concerned identical
phenomena (such as gravitation), for the most part they were fundamentally
incompatible and there was little if any interaction or connection between them.
I do not deal here with putative relations between Newtons natural philosophy
and theology (or alchemy). However, it should be apparent that the recognition
of disciplinary compartmentalisation within his analyses of the natural world
has ramications for larger claims about the unity of his entire oeuvre, or for
sorts of connection between dierent areas of his research. Attention to disciplinespecic discourses and epistemological demands detracts from explanations that
make use of Newtons much vaunted caution, or of his later confusion or more
generally of a schizoid mind whose various parts worked in ignorance of each
other. Rather, those actions of Newton that have traditionally been attributed to
mentalist or psychologistic categories, I view as being shaped by sophisticated concerns with settings that were appropriate to the disciplines or genres in which he
wrote.
2. The power of discipline

The importance of disciplinary divisions is the overriding theme in the historiography of early modern science in the last two and a half decades. At the heart of
this recent research has been an awareness of how contemporaries were partly constrained by, but also manipulated the features pertaining to the basic division
between mixed mathematics and conventional natural philosophy.6 In his pioneering article on sixteenth-century astronomy, Robert Westman rst drew attention to
the socio-epistemological signicance of this disciplinary distinction for Copernicus
(and by extension for Osiander) in his De revolutionibus, while Nick Jardine and
5
Cohen (1980), pp. xiixiii, 6467, 71, 52, 8283, 9293, 106, 109111, 130131, and esp. pp. 1011
(where Cohen rejects Westfalls attempt to give a unity to Newtons intellectual endeavour on the basis
of seeing Universal Gravitation as primarily the ospring of alchemical active principles). Note the
rened version of Cohens model, describing Newtons approach as using if-then models, in Harper &
Smith (1995) and Smith (2001). Ernan McMullin pointed to a similar process (McMullin, 1978, esp.
p.2).
6
For distinctions between natural philosophy and mixed mathematics see Weisheipl (1965);
McKirahan (1978); Livesey (1985), esp. pp. 127128.
431
others have shown how in the eld of astronomy, Kepler was interested in eliding
this division and in creating a new discipline of celestial physics.7
Mario Biagioli has shown in detail how Galileo manipulated disciplinary conventions in his successful bid to become the prestigious Philosopher-in-Chief at the
court of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, and Galileos greatest intellectual triumph
was arguably to transform the discipline of natural philosophy by creating a mathematical science of motion. The exorbitant price for this was that some concepts
were ruthlessly shorn of their traditional physicalist associations. For example, in
his Discourses and mathematical demonstrations concerning two new sciences of
1638, his spokesman Salviati called previous philosophical explanations of accelerations fantasies, noting only that it suced if the odd-number rule obtained in
nature. Contemporaries recognised that Galileos mathematisation of the natural
world could scarcely be accommodated within conventional natural philosophy,
and asked quite reasonably whether what applied in the abstract was relevant to
the concrete.8 In the second half of the century the distinctions in the approach to
nature embodied in these basic disciplinary divisions were the source of substantial
disagreements across Europe between empiricist experimentalists, mechanistic
system-builders, mathematicians, and those who still professed allegiance to
Aristotelian systems.9
Newton himself explicitly compartmentalised his work according to these divisions and he recognised that dierent subjects required discipline-specic discursive
forms. Following in the path of the Italian maestro, he would have similar problems in trying to convince fellow natural philosophers that some parts of the
world could be mathematised, and that natural philosophy should not concern
itself with less-than-certain conjectures about the causes of things. Nevertheless, his
deployment of disciplinary distinctions is much more subtle than this general statement suggests. Even within the Principia itself he made use of a distinction between
a mathematical, idealised world analysed in terms of both innitesimal-impulse and
continuous force attractions, and the physical system of the world of Book
Three that is accounted for in terms of real entities such as Universal Gravitation
and short-range attractive or repulsive forces. In turn, the analysis in the Principia
was itself contrasted with private and more orthodox research in natural philosophy. Although they were conducted according to very dierent rules, Newtons
experience in publishing his mixed mathematical researches did have an eect on
7
See Westman (1980); Westman (1990), esp. pp. 178185; on textual incoherence see Jardine (1992).
For Kepler see Jardine (1987), pp. 138139, 144145, 230254; Westman (1980), pp. 117129; Rose
(1975).
8
Galileo (1974), pp. 152153, 159, 223225. For commentary on dierent aspects of the Galilean programme, see Koyre (1968); Clavelin (1974), pp. 384391 (for the critique of Aristotelian accounts of
essences); Shea (1978); Biagioli (1993); McMullin (1985), esp. pp. 255262; Feldhay (1998), esp. p. 132.
9
Dear (1995), pp. 180207 (esp. pp. 180187, 197201), and Jones (2001), esp. pp. 141145. For Boyle
see Shapin (1988), esp. pp. 4254; Shapin (1994), pp. 181, 316317, 310353, and Dear (1995), p. 226.
For the early Royal Societys views on mathematics see Shapiro (1993), pp. 227231, and Feingold
(2001), esp. pp. 8183.
432
the presentation of his more private work. Even non-mathematised physical concepts such as aether would be neutralised (that is, Newton stated that he was not
concerned with its physical cause) when moved to what he took to be a more precarious public forum for presenting his work.10
3. The Barrovian programme

As part of the Quadrivium, mathematics was an intrinsic part of the early modern undergraduate curriculum at Cambridge University and in the 1650s Isaac
Barrow developed a series of treatises on, or epitomes of, central texts in Greek
mathematics, mainly directed at beginners. He delivered his rst Lucasian lectures
in March 1664, six weeks before Newton was elected a scholar at Trinity. Although
he rarely acknowledged it, Newton almost certainly attended the bulk of Barrows
lectures, which concerned limit sums and innite series, and his condant of the
1720s, William Stukeley, understood Barrow to have been Newtons tutor. In a
memorandum from 1699 Newton recorded that shortly before Christmas 1664
I bought Schootens Miscellanies & Cartess Geometry (having read this Geometry
& Oughtreds Clavis above half a year before) & borrowed Walliss works & by
consequence made these Annotations out of Schooten & Wallis in winter between
the years 1664 & 1665. In another recollection from the end of his life, Newton
famously reported that he was elected to the scholarship only after an examination
on Euclid at the hands of Barrow. This had gone badly because although Newton
was already a master of Descartess Geometrie, he failed to impress Barrow with
his knowledge of Euclid. He passed nevertheless and was to show Barrow many of
his mathematical productions over the following years.11
In his Lucasian lectures, which are saturated with discussion about disciplinary
divisions, Barrow claimed that all branches of natural science could be made a part
of mixed mathematics and that all of the latter could be subordinated to geometry.
As for Physics he remarked that there is no Part of this which does not imply
Quantity, or to which geometrical Theorems may not be applied, and consequently, which is not in some Way dependant on Geometry. The distinction
between mathematics and the mixed sciences was articial since once the mixed
mathematical sciences were disrobed of particular Circumstances, and their own
fundamental and principal Hypotheses come to be admitted (whether sustained by
a probable Reason, or assumed gratis) they become purely Geometrical. Furthermore, he strove to show that mathematical reasoning was causally demonstrative
in the Aristotelian sense, since mathematical axioms were universally and necessarily true, Primary and Immediate and More Known and More Evident than the
10
Cohen (1980), p. 61. For recent discussions concerning Newtons mathematical techniques for analysing force, see Gandt (1995) and Blay (2001). For the exclusionary eects of Newtons work, and the
Continental reception of the Principia, see Gingras (2001), esp. pp. 386396, and Ilie (2003).
11
Feingold (1990), pp. 4045; Feingold (1993), esp. pp. 314318; Stukeley (1936), pp. 5354;
Cambridge University Library (CUL) Add. Ms. 4000, fol. 14v; Westfall (1984), pp. 98, 99 n. 91, 102.
433
Conclusions inferred, while propositions arising from these axioms and denitions
must needs ow from the intimate Essences and Causes of the Things. According
to Barrow, the truth of philosophical principles did not depend only on induction
by simple enumeration, or on the perpetual observation of Particulars, but constant Experience and frequent Experiments could provide a ready Assent to a
proposition. However, one experiment, if it were suciently clear and indubitable
could corroborate a true hypothesis. Philosophers could achieve something more
than probabilistic statements, and he argued that in certain circumstances, given
the Constancy of Nature, we may prudently infer an universal proposition even by
one Experiment alone.12
Barrows strong presumption in favour of a mathematical approach to natural
philosophy, coupled with the mathematical content of his lectures as Lucasian
Professor, had a strong eect on Newton, and the latter quickly learned to innovate
in the subject. Even before he took notes from Wallis and Schooten, he had composed his rst mathematical essay (in the summer of 1664), and he stormed into
the front rank of European mathematicians following the researches of 16651666
that gave rise to discoveries such as the Binomial Theorem and the fundamental
theorems of the calculus. Conceptually, his geometry was already becoming physicalised. By the summer of 1665 he had broken away from Walliss technique of
considering quadratures as summations of innitesimals, and had begun to develop
techniques for thinking of areas as swept out by lines, and solids as swept out by
areas. In November 1665 he began to develop a more general kinematical
approach to mathematics based on the idea that curves or crooked lines were
traced out by a point in a space over a given portion of time and hence possessed a velocity. This method of solving problems by motion was not simply the
preserve of Barrow, although Newton later recalled that Barrows lectures were
probably pivotal in inspiring him to develop this sort of analysis. Possibly the rst
sets of curves subjected by Newton to this kind of approach were the so-called
Mechanicall Lines, or curves that could in principle be constructed with a special
instrument such as the Mesolabum. As early as November 1665 he invented
the term uxion to capture the kinematic aspect of his new approach, and he generalised his discoveries in a seminal paper on mathematical motion in October
1666.13
12
Barrow (1970), pp. 22, 27, 80100 (esp. p. 83), 7374, Shapiro (1993), pp. 3037, Dear (1995),
pp. 222227, Malet (1997), and especially Mancosu (1996), pp. 1924.
13
Newton (19671981), Vol. 1, pp. 45, 25121 (for notes on Oughtred, Descartes, Schooten, Huygens,
Vie`te and Wallis); pp. 377381 (How to draw tangents to Mechanicall Lines, 8 November, 1665); pp.
382389 (To nd ye velocitys of bodys by ye lines they describe, 13 November, 1665); pp. 392398
(To resolve Problems by motion ye 6 following prop: are necessary & sucient, 16 May, 1666); pp. 400448
(To resolve problems by motion these following Propositions are sucient, October, 1666); pp. 146147.
See also Westfall (1984), pp. 123127, 131134. Due to the plague, Newton left Trinity at the end of July or
start of August 1665 and returned in March of the following year; a recurrence of the pestilence forced him
to vacate his rooms once more in June 1666 and he only returned in April 1667.
434
Notably, many of the so-called Problems he laid out as part of a potential

mathematical programme in November 1665, were concerned with areas, volumes,
points of maximum and minimum curvature, collisions and centres of gravity etc.
In dealing with the resolution and composition of vector speeds, and invoking the
inertial or uniform motion of points moving in virtual space, many entries in the
Waste Book (originally his stepfathers religious commonplace book) from late
1664/early 1665 blurred the distinction between mechanics and mathematics. As
early as 1665, for example, Newton was attempting to construct a parallelogram
rule of vector motions in which the diagonal of the parallelogram was understood
as being composed of both motions from one end of the diagonal to its neighbouring points. The uxional form of the calculus that he developed soon afterwards was based on the velocity, acceleration and retardation of a point in motion
with respect to invariant moments of time. Occasionally, it is unclear whether
problems in the Waste Book concern mathematics or mechanics, or even whether
the distinction is valid. Aside from this tension, a more pervasive division between
mixed mathematical topics and philosophical questions was already integral to the
way Newton composed and presented his work.14
At the same time as he mastered contemporary mathematical texts, he critically
scrutinised the latest journals and books in natural philosophy, and from his musings on these works he swiftly and almost seamlessly concocted new notions and
projects. From early 1664 he began to make notes on metaphysical and philosophical questions in a notebook (the Trinity Notebook) in which he had previously
made annotations on works from the traditional Cambridge curriculum. For most
of the notebook, Newton subjected contemporary natural philosophy to a penetrating critique. Many of the conceptions he formulated in these passages, as a
young student of twenty-three or twenty-four, formed the basis of his later work in
optics and natural philosophy. The earliest entries in the section, aptly entitled
Questiones qudam Philosophi concern more traditional topics, such as the
existence of rst matter, the nature of quantity, and aspects of time and eternity,
but scholastic metaphysical arguments of this kind were soon to hold little interest
for him. Although the topics varied widely, the treatment of natural philosophy in
the Trinity Notebook completely distinguished the relevant subjects from those
treated in the Waste Book.15
4. The mathematical theory of colours

Newtons interest in the implications of the heterogeneity of white light evolved
rapidly in the mid-1660s. A section of his Trinity Notebook entitled Of col14
For the Waste Book researches see Herivel (1965), pp. 128182; Newton (19671981), Vol. 1,
pp. 452465 (esp. p. 456 n. 2), and Cohen (1980), pp. 27, 5662. Other early researches in mechanics are
to be found in CUL Add. Ms. 3958.
15
Newton (1983), pp. 1525, 26126 (esp. pp. 2643, 112113); Newton (19671981), Vol. 1, pp. 8991.
For the quaestiones tradition see Thijssen (1986).
435
ours was transformed by 1666 into an extended essay of the same name that
appeared in a separate notebook largely devoted to notes and researches in what
can loosely be termed chemistry and alchemy. In the earliest researches recorded in
the Trinity Notebook, Newton mixed a basic description of simple prismatic
phenomena with accounts of the role of the aether, the elastick power of ye subtil
matter whereby ye motions of ye rays are conserved, the speed of various rays,
self-experimentation and the way the perception of colours depended upon the disposition of the sensorium. By the time of the 1666 essay, he was describing a run
of experiments in which aspects of the experimental set up were described in minutes of a degree and ten thousandth parts of an inch. When he analysed the
phenomenon of periodicity, comments on the nature of the vibrating media
through which light travelled clearly constituted a dierent feature of the subject
and they were apparently added later.16
Separately, and following his reading of Descartess Geometrie and Dioptrique, he
inserted notes on reection and refraction in the Waste Book in September 1664
and performed experiments on the same topics in late 1665 and early 1666. As forays
into geometrical optics he entered the results of this programmelargely concerning
refracting surfaces caused by the revolution of conics and notes on hyperbolic and
parabolic lens-grinding machinesinto yet another notebook. In this case, of
course, his acknowledgement of the chromatic aberration inherent in ordinary lenses
was intimately bound up with his research into dierential refrangibility of primary
coloured rays. He attended Barrows lectures on geometrical optics in 1667 and
1668, and Barrow allowed him to proofread the published version of his optical lectures that appeared in 1669. Before he began delivering his Lucasian lectures in
January of the following year, Newton added some notes to the essay on refractions,
exploring the possibility of a compound achromatic lens and writing down a table of
refractions and reections for glass, crystal and water.17
The content of his Lucasian lectures shows that well before he experienced negative criticism as a result of publishing his theory in the Philosophical Transactions
(in 1672), Newton believed that only a mathematical approach to nature could
deliver an indisputable level of certainty. There are two versions of the optical lectures given by Newton when he assumed the Lucasian Chair. Neither the rst, the
Lectiones opticae, nor the second, the Optica, can be conclusively proved to correspond exactly to the actual lectures that he gave, and the Optica was at least
partly rewritten after he received criticisms of his paper on light and colours. At
various points in the Lectiones, there appears to be a positive attitude to the corroboratory role of experiments that is lacking from the main part of the later
Transactions paper. For example, after describing experiments designed to show
16
The notebook is now CUL Add. Ms. 3975; the essay Of colours from it appears on fols. 122 and
is reproduced in Newton (1983), pp. 466489; cf. esp. pp. 476477, 481. For the earlier notes from the
Trinity Notebook itself, see ibid., pp. 430441 (esp. p. 434).
17
The earliest notes are from CUL Add. Ms. 4004 fols. 1v4r; cf. Of refractions in CUL Add. Ms.
4000 fols. 26r33v; see Newton (19671981), Vol. 1, pp. 551555, 559576; Newton (1984), pp. 78,
1315, 1820.
436
that dierent primary rays have dierent degrees of refrangibility, Newton

remarked that since
the agreement of several [plurimorum] things imparts an intellectual pleasure
and a generally more assured acceptance than the evidence of a single, though
highly scientic argument [quam unici licet maxime scientici argumenti testimonium], it will not be without benet if I briey introduce investigators to
another kind of experiment related to the preceding ones.
This experiment merely involved looking through a prism at the rays emerging
from it, and noticing that the image seen thereby was oblong. This was not presented in a historical narrative style, but rather as a set of precise directions
accompanied by a diagram.18
In the Lectiones Newton considered the eorts of previous scholars in considering the nature of colours. The Peripatetics neither considered how colours were
generated, nor the means by which they became dierentiated, thereby dismissing
those things the explanation of which seems the highest function of philosophy
and indeed, [which] alone can satisfy the mind eager for natural science. Others
referred the generation of colours to the mixture of light and shadow or from a
spinning of little balls or their various pressures, or, nally, from the various ways
in which a certain aetherial medium is vibrated. However, all previous theories
rested on the modication theory of light that Newton had conclusively refuted,
and so all were ultimately unsatisfying. At this point he stated that the generation
of colours included so much geometry that the science of colours properly had to
be considered a branch of the mixed mathematical sciences, along with astronomy,
geography, navigation, optics and mechanics. So despite the fact that colours
belonged to physics, the science of them must nevertheless be considered mathematical insofar as they are treated by mathematical reasoning. With great condence he pronounced that
Since an exact science of [colours] seems to be one of the most dicult that
philosophy is in need of, I hope to showas it were, by my examplehow
valuable mathematics is in natural philosophy. I therefore urge geometers to
investigate nature more rigorously and those devoted to natural science (avidos
scientiae naturalis) to learn geometry rst. Hence the former shall not entirely
spend their time in speculations of no value to human life, nor shall the latter,
while working assiduously with an absurd method, perpetually fail to reach their
goal. But truly with the help of philosophical geometers and geometrical philosophers, instead of the conjectures and probabilities that are being blazoned
about everywhere, we shall nally achieve a natural science supported by the
greatest evidence.19
18
Newton (1984), Vol. 1, pp. 7577, 309.

Ibid., pp. 8789 (and p. 439), and pp. 161162 (and p. 533). Optica was deposited in the University
Library as his Lucasian lectures in 1674.
19
437
This mathematicist approach clashed with the dominant probabilistic approach

of the Royal Society. Yet following the transmission of his reecting telescope to
the Society at the end of 1671, Newton published an account of his novel views on
light and colours in the Philosophical Transactions. He began by relating his
surprising observation of the elongated image made by light passing through
a prism. After carefully measuring the shape of the image, the distance between the
prism and the image, the diameter of a hole made in his window-shuts, and
the angle of incidence of light both before and after meeting the prism, he invoked
the sine law of refraction to show that the angle subtended by the emerging rays
could not be accounted for by the angle of the incident rays. Having considered
the possible physical causes of this, he attempted to show, by means of a new,
crucial experiment, that each individual colour-making ray had its own degree of
refrangibility. This was constant after successive refractions, and thus could
not have been caused by modication of the incident ray. Hence white light was
heterogeneously composed of all such primary colour-making rays. The crucial
experiment (which did not appear in the Lectiones) seems to have been an
idealised amalgamation of Experiments 7 and 44 of the 1666 essay on colours and,
perhaps as a result of this, many contemporaries had diculty reproducing the
experiment.20
At this point in the narrative Newton remarked that although naturalists would
not expect to see the treatment of colours become part of mixed mathematics,
there was as much certainty in it as any other part of optics. This was not merely
an Hypothesis but was based on incontrovertible conclusions based on many
experiments carried out in private. He now remarked that continuing in the historical narrative mode would make a discourse too tedious & confused and stated
that he would now lay down the doctrine, afterwards supplying one or two further experiments for its examination. Accordingly, he laid down a set of propositions in which the doctrine was comprehended and illustrated. It is signicant
that he withheld his private thoughts about the physical causes of light, remarking
only that it could perhaps no longer be doubted whether light was a body: to
determine more absolutely, what Light is, after what manner refracted, and by
what modes or actions it produceth in our minds the Phantasms of Colours, is not
so easie. He would not, he said, mingle conjectures with certainties.21
This abstract account, drawn from the tradition of mixed mathematics, was cast
in a discursive style with which Newton had long been familiar, and his publication
represented a deliberate and ambitious attempt to transform contemporary natural
philosophy, and closer to home, the nature of enquiry at the Royal Society. Forcing
20
Newton (19591977), Vol. I, pp. 92107, 9295; Newton (1983), pp. 468, 478; Feingold (2001),
pp. 8185; Schaer (1989), esp. pp. 7678; Shapiro (1996). See also Laymon (1978) and especially
McMullin (1985).
21
Newton (19591977), Vol. I, pp. 97100. Interestingly, when Barrow cited Aristotles injunction that
mathematical exactness should not be expected from a natural philosopher, he included colour (as part
of physics) and the Law of Nations as pursuits not susceptible to mathematical treatments; see Mathematical lectures in Barrow (1970), pp. 5354.
438
the Society to recognise that a mathematical natural philosophy was not just
possible but was preferable to what they routinely endorsed would have been every
bit as momentous as the content of the discovery itself. He himself noted in a letter
to Henry Oldenburg (who as editor of the journal had removed the more extreme
mathematicist statements) that the style of his presentation was perhaps inappropriate for the Philosophical Transactions, being too straight & narrow, and
designed onely to those that know how to improve upon hints of things. Indeed,
in July 1672, he suggested that the apparent obscurity of his exposition was due to
its brevity. Such a format, describing an experimental set-up shorn of the sorts of
corroborative procedures more apt for an empiricist, probabilist setting, was partially responsible for the mixed response to his work, even if senior philosophers
like Robert Hooke agreed with the basic phenomenon of dierential refrangibility.
Hooke denied that Newtons explanation for his observations need be saved by
Newtons hypothesis alone, and he armed that his own hypothesis was based on
hundreds of experiments. Newtons main experiment was neither crucial, nor was
his theory as certain as a mathematical demonstration. While Newton took the
heterogeneity of white light and the constant index of refraction of specic colourmaking rays to be necessarily implied by his crucial experiment, Hooke took the
former to be a hypothesis epistemologically on a par with whatever Newton took
to be the physical cause of lightwhich, Hooke claimed (with some justice),
Newton had as good as armed to be corporeal.22
As the year wore on, Newtons theory was described on a number of occasions
by critics as an hypothesis and the combination of their criticisms and requests
from others for more information forced him to reconsider the advisability of publishing at all. However, gripped by the conviction that his approach was the only
one that would deliver absolutely certain truths about nature, he composed a
lengthy response to Hooke. He denied that he had made the corporeity of light a
fundamental presupposition of his theory and had propounded it without any
absolute positivenesse, as the word perhaps intimates:
I knew that the Properties wch I declared of light were in some measure capable
of being explicated not onely by that, but by many other Mechanicall Hypotheses. And therefore I chose to decline them all, & speake of light in generall
termes, considering it abstractedly as something or other propagated every way
in streight lines from luminous bodies, without determining what that thing is
. . . and for the same reason I chose to speake of colours according to the information of our senses, as if they were qualities of light without us.
Here Newton combined a mixed mathematical approach with a standard antiessentialist feature of the mechanical philosophy as it was conventionally under22
Newton to Oldenburg, 10 February 1671/1672, Newton to Oldenburg, 8 July 1672, and Hooke to
Oldenburg, 15 February 1671/1672, in Newton (19591977), Vol. I, pp. 108109, 212, 110111.
Newtons comment about the inadvisability of merely trying to save the phenomena had been excised
from the printed version.
439
stood. He immediately followed this with the claim that rays of light were actually
small bodies emitted every way from shining substances that could excite vibrations in the aether, though this was presented as an hypothesis that was being
assumed. His response to Hooke was a public statement that he could produce
dierent sorts of aether-based accounts as well as anybody, although most of the
letter was taken up with criticisms of hypothetical explanations in general and
Hookes own views in particular.23
When this reply was printed in the Transactions, Oldenburg again removed a
section in which Newton rearmed his belief that the science of colours was mathematicall & as certain as any other part of Optiques. Everyone knows, Newton
had continued, that Optiques & many other Mathematicall Sciences depend as
well on Physicall Principles as on Mathematicall Demonstrations: And the absolute
certainty of a science cannot exceed the certainty of its Principles. Although the
principles of the propositions in his original letters had been physical, he wrote, if
a mathematician could determine every feature of refractions by computing or
demonstrating after what manner & how much those refractions doe separate or
mingle the rays in wch severall colours are originally inherent, then the science of
colours could be considered mathematical and as certain as any other part of
optics. Far from being cowed by his critics, this was a still more strident presentation of his mathematical approach although it was a somewhat toned down version of an earlier draft. Alan Shapiro has pointed out that in an earlier version of
this letter, Newton had called Properties Theorems and after referring to light
in generall termes had added the qualier after the mode of the Mathematicians.24
Newtons unwillingness to deal with the physical cause or nature of light was deeply and genuinely perplexing to contemporariesjust as later, his phenomenalist
treatment of Universal Gravitation and other forces would be puzzling to readers
of the Principia. In an account of his own theory given to a Society grandee in the
wake of Newtons retort, Hooke apologised for the fact that his own explanations
seemed unintelligible to Newton and sarcastically remarked that he was sure
Newton understood how it was that individual primary rays always had a constant
degree of refrangibility when they entered a new refracting medium, and how it
transpired that these rays could be brought together again and keep on their way
Direct & undisturbed as if they had never mett. In a draft of a reply to Newtons
critique, Hooke remarked that Newton seemed to be very shy of supposing by
what means these motions were performed but in the last version as it stands he
made the related but dierent pointusing Newtons own wordsthat Newton
seemed now to be afraid of saying What a ray of light is. As Newton shied away
from public dispute over his theory, so his account of light became still more
23
Newton to Oldenburg, 11 June 1672, in Newton (19591977), Vol. I, pp. 171193 (esp. pp. 173174);
my italics.
24
Ibid., pp. 187188 (and the discussion on p. 190 n. 18); Shapiro (1993), p. 23 n. 34.
440
abstract and was further clothed in a mathematical garb. In the autumn of 1672 he
drew up a list of experiments that would clarify his theory, and did so in a way
that reduced the theory to propositionsproving each proposition from one or
more of those Expts by the assistance of common notions set down in the form of
Denitions & Axioms in imitation of the Method by wch Mathematitians are wont
to prove their doctrines. At heart Newton believed that he had mathematically
demonstrated his theory beyond cavil, but when even Christiaan Huygens failed to
appreciate his approach to natural philosophy, he lost interest in playing the game
any further. He remained mired in what he took to be futile disputes with a group
of Lie`ge Jesuits who were unable to reproduce the most basic features of his
experiments.25
5. The development of Newtons cosmology

Privately, Newton had long explored aspects of the nature of vision, the physical
nature of light, and its role in a rich cosmology. In the 1666 essay on colours he
combined elements of the historical and instructional narrative styles with physical
and anatomical explanations of various phenomena. From this period he was committed to the optical role played by a vibrating aetherial medium, and continued to
be so when he returned to analyse the periodicity of thin lms in 1671. In 1672 he
composed a dissertation on this topic (the Discourse on observations), which he
had promised to send to Oldenburg along with the New theory and in an appendix to the 1672 essay, he described a physical hypothesis involving light corpuscles
exciting vibrations in the aether.26
In 1675, when he was much more keenly aware about the reasons for distinguishing between hypothetical conjectures and knowledge that was mathematically
certain, he sent Oldenburg a package containing his musings on the nature of light
as well as a revised Discourse on observations composed of twenty-four observations on thin plates along with nine propositions that resulted from them. An
original draft of the Observations contained the view that his doctrine of heterogeneity had met with the most universall & obstinate Prejudice, although to Newton
it appeared as infallibly true & certaine, as it can seem extravagant to others.
Neither this, nor a powerful statement to the eect that the science of colours
deserved rather to be esteemed Mathematicall then Physicall were included in the
version read out to the Royal Society over three weeks in early 1676 and indeed
25
Hooke to Lord Brouncker [?], late June 1672; Huygens to Oldenburg, 17 September 1672, Newton to
Oldenburg, 21 September 1672, Oldenburg to Newton, 18 January 1672/1673, Newton to Oldenburg, 3
April 1673, in Newton (19591977), Vol. I, pp. 174, 198205 (esp. pp. 201, 205 n. 21), 235236, 237,
255256, 264. For the replication of Newtons crucial experiment see Schaer (1989) and Shapiro
(1996). For comprehensibility and intelligibility see Ilie (2003).
26
CUL Add. Ms. 3975 fols. 122; Newton (1983), pp. 466489; Shapiro (1993), pp. 4960; Ilie (1995);
Bechler (1973). For contemporary matter theory see Henry (1986).
441
none of the main enclosures in the parcel sent to Oldenburg actually appeared in
the pages of the Transactions.27
The physicalist explanation of his views on the nature of light constituted a substantial enlargement of the hypothesis appended to the 1672 paper. Newton told
Oldenburg, as he had done three years earlier, that the discourse might have done
better to have been accompanied by more diagrams and that he was sending the
Hypothesis despite worries about becoming embroiled in vain disputes. In the
main body of the text he expanded his reservations about hypotheses in general
and about releasing this one in particular, but complained that he had felt the
need to send his private views because I have observed the heads of some
great virtuosos to run much upon Hypotheses, as if my discourses wanted an
Hypothesis to explain them by, & found, that some when I could not make them
take my meaning, when I spake of the nature of light & colours abstractedly, have
readily apprehended it when I illustrated my Discourse by an Hypothesis. Containing novel data gleaned from experiments with air-pumps, the new account of
the natural world was substantially larger than that composed three years earlier.
He supposed that there was an theriall Medium of approximately the same
constitution as air but rarer, subtler and more elastic; it could vibrate much faster
than air and its vibrations were present in reexion and refraction just as they were
in fermentation, putrefaction and re. This medium was composed of the maine
egmatic body of aether but also other theriall Spirits, just as air was
compounded of the egmatic body of Air intermixt with various vapours & exhalations. This heterogeneous constitution of the aether could help explain electricity,
magnetism and gravitationthe last caused by an aetherial spirit very thinly &
subtly diused through it, perhaps of an unctuous or Gummy, tenacous & Springy
naturewhile another subtle spirit could be controlled by the soul to eect muscular contraction and hence animal motion. Finally, light was a dierent entity from
the aether and they acted mutually, light warming the aether, and aether refracting
light.28
Much of Newtons depiction of the aetherial spirit can be plausibly related to
another programme of work on which he was engaged at the same time, a project
that used a dierent language to describe the internal workings of nature. In a
paper that has been tentatively dated to the early/mid-1670s, Newton formulated a
cosmology that explicitly used standard alchemical terminology. He argued that
metals vegetated and that this vegetation could be promoted by art, but he
armed that it was ultimately ye sole eect of a latent sp[iri]t & that this sp[iri]t is
the same in all things only discriminated by its dierent degrees of maturity & the
rude matter. He went on to discuss processes such as putrefaction and nourishment, and linked the means by which metals grew or could be made to work on
27
Newton to Oldenburg, 7 December 1675, in Newton (19591977), Vol. I, pp. 36292 (esp. pp. 385386),
for extracts removed from the later versions.
28
Newton (19591977), Vol. I, pp. 360361, 363372. For other treatments of these themes see Dobbs
(1991), pp. 89121, and Kubrin (1967).
442
each other to the growth of an animal from the egg. Growth took place in both
cases by a slow nourishment or imbibing, and the connection between the two
kingdoms was shown by the fact that nothing had so great an inuence on animals
as minerals. Minerals could only unite with our bodies and become part of them if
they too had a principle of vegetation within them, and when this happened the
two were conjoyned like male & female.29
Despite the overtly alchemical language in the vegetation of metals manuscript,
Newton almost certainly drew from this work in the 1675 Hypothesis and publicly expressed his view that nature was a perpetuall circulatory worker, generating
uids out of solids, and solids out of uids, xed things out of volatile, & volatile
out of xed, subtile out of gross, & gross out of subtile. According to Newton,
some elements in this cyclical cosmos were made to rise and make the upper juices, Rivers and the Atmosphere; & by consequence others to descend for a Requitall to the former. Employing virtually identical concepts to those used in his
alchemical manuscript, he argued that the sun might also imbibe this spirit to
conserve his Shining and prevent the planets from careering o into space, while
he thought that it was likely that the spirit aords or carryes with it thither the
solary fewell & materiall Principle of Light.30
In February 1679 Newton wrote to Robert Boyle regarding a discussion that
they had conducted earlier, probably in spring 1675. He told Boyle that there was
diused through all places an thereal substance capable of contraction & dilatation, strongly elastick, & in a word much like air in all respects, but far more
subtile. He claimed that by considering how from the continual fermentations
made in ye bowels of ye earth there are aereal substances raised out of all kinds of
bodies, then the true permanent Air might well be metallic. All of this could
serve towards explaining gravity, and indeed virtually any other phenomenon he
could think of. Outside his private sphere, proferious of caution were closely linked
to the neutralisation of entities such as light; in his letter to Boyle he told him
that he would only set down my apprehensions in ye form of suppositions, while
in the 1675 Hypothesis he protested that his aetherial explanation was merely an
illustrative hypothesis:
Though I shall not assume this or any other Hypothesis, nor thinking it necessary to concerne my selfe whether the properties of Light, discovered by me, be
explained by this or Mr Hooks or any other Hypothesis capable of explaining
them; yet while I am describing this, I shall sometimes to avoyde Circumlocution & to represent it more conveniently speak of it as if I assumed it & propounded it to be believed.
29
Of natures obvious laws & processes in vegetation, Dibner Ms. 1031B, Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology, Special Collections Branch, Smithsonian Institution; reproduced in
Dobbs (1991), pp. 256270, 258259.
30
Newton to Oldenburg, 7 December 1675 and 25 January 1675/1676, in Newton (19591977), Vol. I,
pp. 360361, 362389, 413415.
443
Although he continued to apply these caveats when referring to aethers, spirits and
active principles in public, Newton retained an intense commitment to this general
cosmology throughout his life.31
6. From vortices to voids

The development of the dynamics of the Principia embraced a completely distinct philosophical tradition and was expressed in a very dierent language from
that used to describe the aetherial and spirituous cosmologies. In this parallel
world, the Principia represented as much a discursive and disciplinary transformation within mixed mathematics as it did a conceptual revolution in dynamics.
However, his treatment of various natural phenomena in the Principia did not fundamentally change his private commitment to the basic cosmological accounts
articulated in the 1670s, which also included explanations of gravitation. Although
the dynamics of the Principia was unformed in the early 1680s, the resources for
his achievement were partly laid down by his momentous work in the mid-1660s
on determining g and on comparing the forces required to keep the Moon in its
orbit with Galileos law of terrestrial free fall. At the same time, he famously combined his discovery that the centrally-directed force keeping a globe in orbit along
a circle of radius r (ignoring the quantity of body) was v2/r with Keplers socalled Third Law to determine that the forces that kept planets in their orbits were
reciprocally as the squares of their distances from the sun. Newton did not yet possess the notion of Universal Gravitation, and equally signicant clues were provided by other natural philosophers in the early 1680s who provoked him to
reconsider his cosmology and dynamics.32
At the end of 1679, Hooke famously wrote to Newton suggesting that the orbital
motions of a planet could be compounded of rectilinear motion (direct motion by
the tangent) and a centrally-directed attracting force (originally stated in his
Attempt to prove the motion of the earth of 1674 and recently reprinted in his
Cutlerian Lectures). In reply Newton produced a model in which orbital motions
were accounted for according to an analysis in which deviation from a circular
orbit was caused by the overballancing of either gravity or the countervailing vis
centrifuga. More specically, he argued that at any point on the badly drawn curve
described in his letter, motion of a body was compounded of the tangential motion
at the start of the motion, & of all ye innumerable converging motions successively
generated by ye impresses of gravity in every moment of its passage. This impulsemodel analysis, and indeed the precise interpretation of vis centrifuga, has received
substantial attention in recent literature, not least because Newton appears to be
31
Newton to Boyle, 28 Feb 1678/1679 and Hypothesis, in Newton (19591977), Vol. II, pp. 288295
(esp. pp. 288289), and Vol. I, pp. 363364.
32
For the development of Newtons dynamics between 1664 and 1687, see Herivel (1965) and
Whiteside (1989), pp. xxvii. For the correspondence with Hooke, see Lohne (1960); Nauenberg (1994);
Gandt (1995), pp. 151161; Brackenridge (2001), esp. pp. 114115.
444
ignorant of Keplers area law, which would have allowed him to equate time intervals to the area of orbital segments and which was the central dynamical insight
underlining the analysis in his De motu corporum in gyrum of late 1684. Whatever its underlying mathematical foundation, Newton said little or nothing about
the possible physical causes of motion despite later being asked by Hooke to supply a physicall Reason for planetary orbits.33
Newton remained wedded to a vortex, or at least a non-magnetic account of
planetary motion. In early 1680, he responded to a request from Thomas Burnet
for his views concerning a philosophical explanation of Genesis and told Burnet
that the rugged nature of the Earths surface might have been caused by the heat
of the Sun or the vortex of the Moon on the surface waters of the Earth.34 In
November of the same year a brilliant comet became visible to astronomers while
another appeared the following month. In a letter passed on to Newton, the
Astronomer Royal John Flamsteed argued that these were the same object and
that the comet was turned from its original path by the magnetic attraction of the
sun, but directed away from this path by the rotation of the solar vortex. The
attractive force ultimately overpowered the eect of the vortex but by the time the
comet was at perihelion it was travelling directly counter to the ow of the vortex
and was in the process of turning around in front of the sun. Once twisted around,
the opposite pole of the body would present itself to the sun and be repelled by
it.35
Newton replied that he accepted that the sun exerted some centrally attracting
force whereby the Planets are kept in their courses about him from going away in
tangent lines, but that this could not be magnetic since hot loadstones (natural
magnets) lost their vertue, or power. Even if the attractive power of the sun were
like a magnet, and the comet like a piece of iron, Flamsteed had still not oered a
mechanism whereby the sun would suddenly switch from attraction to repulsion.
As with a mariners compass, the power of the sun to direct (that is, inuence the
N or S alignment of) an object was greater than its power to attract or repel, so
that once so directed the Comet will be always attracted by ye Sun & never
repelled.36 Newton later noted that if the comet were subject to a continuous
directing and attracting force, the continuous attraction would serve to decelerate
the comet in its recess and make the comet travel along an orbit close to that
33
Hooke to Newton, 24 November 1679, Newton to Hooke, 28 November 1679; Hooke to Newton, 9
December 1679, Newton to Hooke, 13 December 1679, Hooke to Newton 6 January and 17 January
1679/1680; in Newton (19591977), Vol. II, pp. 297298, 300303, 304306, 307308, 309310, 312313.
Borellis theory, relying on a balance between centrally attracting and centrifugal forces, is outlined in
his Theoric mediceorum planetarum ex causis physicis deduct (Florence, 1666).
34
Newton to Burnet, 24 December 1680 and January 1680/1681, in Newton (19591977), Vol. II,
pp. 319, 329334.
35
Flamsteed to Crompton for Newton, 15 December 1680, Flamsteed to Crompton, 12 February
1680/1681, Flamsteed to Halley, 17 February 1680/1681, in Newton (19591977), Vol. II, pp. 315316,
336, 336339. The observations in the Waste Book are CUL Add. Ms. 4004 fols. 97r101v.
36
Newton to Crompton for Flamsteed, 28 February 1680/1681, in Newton (19591977), Vol. II,
pp. 340347.
445
observed. At perihelion, the centrifugal force would then have overpowerd the
attraction, forcing the comet to recede from the sun despite the still acting magnetic attraction. Again, something resembling the Borellian model was used to
model the forces operating on the orbiting body although magnetism would never
satisfy Newton as an adequate mechanism for explaining celestial motions. In a
vitally important exchange at the end of 1684 he asked Flamsteed for data concerning the deviation of planets from their positions in Keplers Rudolphine
Tables and also for information on the possible eect of Jupiter on the orbit of
Saturn. Flamsteed remarked that the distance between the planets was too great
for any magnetic force to operate while he also noted that in such yielding matter
as our ther, I can not conceave that any impression made by ye one planet upon
it can disturbe ye motion of the other. In reply Newton spoke only generally of
Jupiters inuence and of the fact that these eects of the planets on one another
seemed to be inadequate to explain observed deviations from Keplers Third Law.
Flamsteed noted in return that determining Saturns deviation from its predicted
orbit was beyond the limits of observational accuracy.37
By the time he wrote the early mixed mathematical papers that formed the basis
of the Principia, Newtons dynamical tools and techniques had been dramatically
recast. His rst response to Halleys request in 1684 to link elliptical planetary
orbits to an inverse-square force law was sent to the Royal Society in November of
that year. In this rst text, called De motu corporum in gyrum, he invoked the
notion of both rectilinear inertia and a centripetal force that varied according the
square of the distance. Newton termed centripetal force in Denition 1 as that by
which a body is impelled or attracted towards some point regarded as a centre and
in Denition 3 he called the resisting force that arising from the steadily
impeding medium. While the theorems began with a simple set of two-body problems, the scholia dealt with problems in the concrete world. The scholium to
Problem 4 dealt with the fact that many observations taken over a long period of
time might determine whether a comet was periodic, while in the scholium to Problem 5 he mentioned that gravity was a type of centripetal force.38
In a revision of this text composed soon afterwards and entitled De motu
sphricorum corporum in uidis, Newton added two scholia that dealt more
directly with the consequences of both mutual gravitational attraction in the heavens, and the existence of a resisting medium. The addition of these scholia shows
that Newton was more explicitly trying to incorporate the observed phenomena
into his analysis, ne-tuning the mathematical model with novel empirical data. In
the rst scholium, he argued that the fact that the sun was not always at the centre
37
Flamsteed to Crompton for Newton, 7 March 1680/1681, Newton to Crompton for Flamsteed, ?
April 1681, Flamsteed to Newton, 27 December 1684, Newton to Flamsteed, 30 December 1684,
Flamsteed to Newton, 5 January 1684/1685 and Newton to Flamsteed, 12 January 1684/1685, Flamsteed
to Newton, 27 January 1684/1685, in Newton (19591977), Vol. II, pp. 348358, 358361, 403405,
406408, 408412, 412414, 414415.
38
Herivel (1965), pp. 277289 (esp. pp. 277, 283, 285); Newton (19671981), Vol. 6, pp. 3075 (esp. pp.
3033); Newton (1962), pp. 214228; Dobbs (1991), pp. 130136.
446
of gravity of the solar system meant that planets carved out new orbits at each new
revolution, and the orbit of any one planet depends on the combined motion of all
the planets, not to mention the action of all these on each other. In the second, he
set out to determine the motion of celestial bodies in the aether, except that he now
remarked that the resistance of pure aether was either nothing or excessively
small. Aether ought to resist more, as it could penetrate the inner parts of bodies,
and yet it appeared to oer no sensible resistance; comets are carried with
immense speed indierently in all parts of our heavens yet do not lose their tail nor
the vapour surrounding their heads [by having them] impeded or torn away by the
resistance of the aether. Ignoring the fact that he had shown that planets always
deviated from perfect elliptical trajectories (on the grounds that small deviations
from such orbits could be ignored), Newton also mentioned that the planets had
continued in their motion for thousands of years, so far are they from experiencing any resistance.39
Newton worked intensively over the next two years, expanding what at one
point was a two book opus into its nal tripartite form. As a work whose title
claimed that it revealed the mathematical principles of natural philosophy, the very
rationale of the published Principia went boldly against the grain of most contemporary approaches to natural philosophy. As an example of mixed mathematics
and mathematics, the Principia was the latest and perhaps the last in a genre whose
closest antecedents included Galileos Two new sciences, and Huygenss Horologium
oscillatorium. The bold disciplinary transformation that the work represented, the
substantial amount of pure mathematics that permeated Book One, and the mathematical carapace that cloaked Book Three, all made it a dicult object to classify
for contemporaries. However radically innovative the Principia was conceptually,
its general mixed mathematical structure had been a staple of Newtons natural
philosophy since the Waste Book. As betted such a text, the concept of force
even for short-range forceswas ruthlessly neutralised. In a partial draft of the
Preface to the 1687 Principia, Newton wrote that he suspected that chemical
phenomena were based on certain forces by which the particles of bodies, through
causes still unknown, either are impelled towards one another and cohere, or repel
each other and y apart. As in the published version of the Principia, he held out
the promise that there might be numerous forces of this kind, and what remained
for philosophers was to devise experiments to nd these forces and then their
properties, causes and eects.40
By maintaining ontological neutrality, Newton could hedge over the precise
cause of attraction or gravitation, yet even within the mathematical analysis the
dimensional incompatibility between innitesimal-impulse and continuous notions
of force created an abiding tension. In other ways too, the Principia itself was by
39
Herivel (1965), pp. 301303; Newton (1962), pp. 214228, 90156 (esp. pp. 146147); see in particular Dobbs (1991), pp. 136145.
40
Newton (1962), pp. 302308, 320347 (esp. pp. 333334). The demolition of vortices occurs in Book
Two, Props. 5153 in Newton (1999), pp. 779790.
447
no means a coherent mixed mathematical opus. Newton constructed the Principia

so that it embodied the division between the abstract mathematical world of centripetal attractions and inertia, and the more philosophical discussion concerning
the real system of the world that constituted Book Three. This distinction was
also respected in other ostensibly mixed mathematical works. In De gravitatione
for example, he suggested that there were two ways of treating the science of gravitation and hydrodynamics. In so far as the subject pertained to the mathematical
sciences and was largely abstract[ed] from physical considerations, Newton wrote,
I have undertaken to demonstrate its individual propositions from abstract principles, suciently well known to the student, strictly and geometrically. In so far as
the work could make clear many of the phenomena of natural philosophy however, to conrm the certainty of its principles, he was prepared to deal with the
topic in the form of scholia that constituted a freer form of discussion not to be
confused with the former which is treated in Lemmas, propositions and corollaries.41
In the Preface to the Principia Newton commented that the moderns were
attempting to reduce the phenomena of nature to mathematical laws and that the
subject of the work as a whole was rational mechanics, that is, the science,
expressed in exact propositions and demonstrations, of the motions that result
from any forces whatever and of the forces that are required for any motions whatever. Both here and at the start of Book Three, Newton clearly distinguished
between the principles of the rst two books, which were not philosophical but
strictly mathematical (not including the illustrative philosophical scholia) and the
nal book, which exhibited the system of the world from the same principles. As
Cohen points out, the physically neutralised term gravitatio appears nowhere in
the rst two books in any of the editions but rather Newton used the mathematically neutralised term attractio. Despite this inherent distinction, he went on to
say that in the nal book he had shelved the approach adopted in the more popular liber secundus (a draft of Book Three rejected in Autumn, 1685) and had
translated the substance of the earlier version into propositions in a mathematical
style. It was thisas much as mathematical treatment of the rst two books and
the ontological neutrality observed throughout the workthat contributed to the
widely held view that the Principia as a whole was essentially mathematics.42
Although Newton described the rst two books as primarily mathematical,
partly because the geometry had already become physicalised he occasionally used
ontologically neutral expressions that were ostensibly about the material world but
that were nevertheless supposed to be read as pertaining to a virtual, mathematical
environment. All of these terms occurred outside the main propositional framework, and are to be found in the denitions or more philosophical scholia. As
early as Denition 8, for example, he remarked that he would not consider the
physical causes and sites of forces involved in the basic concepts of his system,
41
42
Newton (1962), pp. 121122.

Newton (1999), pp. 381382, 793; Cohen (1980), pp. 8283; Gingras (2001).
448
since the concept of force was purely mathematical: let the reader beware of
thinking that by words of this kind I am anywhere dening a species or mode of
action or a physical cause or reason, or that I am attributing forces in a true and
physical sense to centres (which are mathematical points) if I happen to say that
centres attract or that centres have forces. In the introduction to Section 11, when
he referred to centripetally attracting bodies at rest, he claimed that such a situation could hardly exist in the real world because of the Third Law of Motion. He
stated that he was about to discuss centripetal forces as attractions although perhapsif we speak in the language of physicsthey might more truly be called
impulses. He remarked that his recourse to the language of impulses was because
we are here concerned with mathematics; and therefore, putting aside any debates
concerning physics, we are using familiar language so as to be more easily understood by mathematical readers. In the scholium to Proposition 69 he repeated his
nescience about the cause of attraction, again dividing up between mathematics,
which requires an investigation of those quantities of forces and their proportions
that follow from any conditions that may be supposed, and a methodologically
deferred process that would compare these proportions with the phenomena.
Finally, in the scholium to Proposition 23 of Book Two, he cautioned that the
question of whether the elastic uids of which he had been speaking actually consisted of particles that repel one another was a question for physics. We have
mathematically demonstrated a property of uids consisting of particles of this
sort so as to provide natural philosophers with the means with which to treat the
question.43
7. Aetherial languages
Whatever the language deployed in the Principia, Newton continued to believe in
the existence of real non-Principia-type forces. Even in his masterwork, a decidedly
non-mathematical analysis appeared in Proposition 41 of Book Three where he
launched into a substantial excursus regarding the function of comets tails. Newton
had broached the nature and function of comets with Flamsteed at the start of the
decade and in the Principia he determined that the tail arose from the heating by
the Sun of the comets head. Tails dissipated in aphelion and then grew again as
the comet approached the Sun, and the euvia generated thereby would in time be
captured by the gravitating power of the planets. This eux had a life-giving force,
replenishing whatever liquid is consumed by vegetation and putrefaction and converted to dry earth. Without this outside source of increase, uids would disappear entirely, while Newton also suspected that comets supplied that spirit which
is the smallest but most subtle and excellent part of the air. Although Newton
43
Newton (1999), pp. 407408, 560561, 699; McMullin (1985), pp. 252254; Cohen (1980), pp. 7273;
Herivel (1965), p. 319. Newton proposed an analogy between the propagation of rays of light and the
motion of bodies in Book One, Prop. 96, while not arguing at all about the nature of the rays (that is,
whether they are bodies or not); see Newton (1999), pp. 625626.
449
might treat certain phenomena in terms of ontologically neutral short-range forces,

here (with only a mild hesitancy) was a clear statement, using very dierent language, of a philosophical programme that was alien to that of mixed mathematics.44
Famously, despite being prompted to give a comprehensible physical explanation
of gravitation by philosophers such as Huygens and Leibniz (who refused to
understand attraction phenomenalistically), Newton refused to do so. His public
mixed mathematical treatment of action-at-a-distance demanded such silence about
its putative causes, but elsewhere he freely used the language of active principles
and aethers. In drafts for the 1706 Optice, for example, he argued that active principles were necessary for conserving and recruiting motion, which was otherwise
prone to decrease. However, he went on to say that since bodies were intrinsically
passive, there had to be some other principle in the world other than the vis inertiae. Referring to the power humans had to move their own bodies, he noted that
by this instance & that of gravity it appears that there are other laws of motion
(unknown to us) than those wch arise from Vis inertiae (unknown to us) wch is
enough to justify & encourage our search after them. We cannot, he concluded,
say that all nature is not alive.45
As it had done in his alchemical program, light continued to provide a source of
agency for Newton and he dealt with the connections between light and matter in
some of the Queries to the 1704 Opticks. As remnants of private research programmes such as alchemy, which had not been susceptible to mathematical treatment, these could only appear under the guise of questions. Accordingly,
speculations that light might be the chief principle of activity in matter were suppressed before publication, expressed as conjectures or recast in ontologically neutral terms. In print (Query 30 in the 1717/1718 Opticks) he remarked that as the
smallest particles, light might be the active principles described above, and he
asked whether light and matter might be interconvertible. Nevertheless, in the rst
Opticks and in Optice (1706) he remained deliberately vague about the presence of
some intermediate entity between the two, referring only in a phenomenalistic way
to a vis (in Optice) or Principle whose cause was not yet known.46
However, after 1707, experiments performed by Francis Hauksbee at the Royal
Society suggested to Newton that short-range forces might be primarily electrical
in nature. Before the second edition of the Principia appeared in 1713 he referred
to an electrical spirit that caused electrical attractions and argued that it was
unphilosophical to appeal to any other force. Harking back to his work on the
vegetation of metals, he suggested that this force was implicated in the union of
soul and body, as well as in generation, nutrition and the preparation of nourishment: by being stronger in the particles of living substances then in others it may
44
Newton (1999), pp. 403404, 918927 (esp. p. 926); see also Cohen (1980), p. 315 n. 18; Kubrin
(1967); Schechner Genuth (1985); Schaer (1987).
45
See McMullin (1978), pp. 6, 4955; Dobbs (1991), pp. 218230; McGuire (1996) (citations from CUL
Add. Ms. 3970 fols. 255r56r and 620r).
46
Dobbs (1991), pp. 218222; Kubrin (1967); McMullin (1978), pp. 8494; McGuire (1996), pp. 206,
208209 (from CUL Add. Ms. 3970 fols. 235v and 620r).
450
preserve them from corruption & act upon the nourishment to make it of like form
& vertue wth the living particles as a magnet turns iron to a magnet & re turns its
nourishment to re. Even in the General Scholium to the 1713 Principia, Newton
accounted for various phenomena by means of a certain most subtle spirit that
pervades and lies hid in all gross bodies. Finally, in connection with the new Queries to the second 1717/1718 English edition of Opticks, he introduced an optical
aether to account for light and described it as an agent that could act (by whatever
means) over both long and short distances. This was clearly distinguished from the
subtle matter that gave rise to electrical motions in Query 22.47
Aside from the question of how they relate to statements in the various editions
of the Principia, historians have found it dicult to explain these changes and to
account for the fact that the various queries as found in the 1717/1718 Opticks
appear to be deeply at odds with each other with regard to the nature of aethers,
spirits and forces and the relationships between them. However one deals with the
apparently unbridgeable gap between the aether- and spirit-dense world of his private natural philosophy, and the force-lled spaces of the Principia, Rod Home is
surely right to say that Newtons ideas about a quasi-mechanistic cause of electricity and magnetism changed scarcely at all from the 1670s to the end of his life
[and] the consistency with which he maintained these particular opinions over
many years suggests a rm belief that they were nevertheless correct. I have
argued that we should envisage him being capable of working simultaneously in
dierent and largely incompatible elds. If it is true that the Principia project
remained publicly dominant after the late 1680s, nevertheless he continued to work
on alchemy until about 1700 and indeed on more conventional natural philosophy
until the 1720s.48
Educated in a Barrovian mixed mathematical culture, and attached to this
approach throughout his career, he nevertheless pursued apparently incompatible
projects in private. The distinctions between these elds, and even the dierent
ways in which he deployed ontological neutralityspeaking generallyare manifold and subtle. By the time Newton wrote the various forms of the Queries in the
early eighteenth century, he had a bewildering repertoire of techniques for presenting his views to dierent audiences. Although the patchwork eect of some of these
writings can provoke the cry of confusion, this view is premissed on the notion
that Newton was in possession of an integrated mind, and that all of his research
was essentially the same thing. In fact the obvious tensions in his work more likely
represent the junk residue of the audiences, projects, genres, disciplinary formations and linguistic styles in and for whom they were rst written. His creative
achievement was much more than the conceptual innovations that were contained
within the Principia and Opticks. Since concepts were attached to specic disciplinary structures, all conceptual changes had implications for the nature of the disci47
Heilbron (1983), pp. 5266; Dobbs (1991), pp. 222225; Guerlac (1967); Home (1985), esp. p. 111
(citation from CUL Add. Ms. 3970 fol. 241r); Home (1993), esp. pp. 195198.
48
Home (1985), pp. 99101; (1993), pp. 197198.
451
pline to which they were appropriate. I do not of course, rule out the importance
of nding conceptual links between dierent areas of Newtons work, but suggest
only that an essentialised and psychologised mind should not be thoughtlessly
invoked as the nescio quid that underpins the connectedness of his work. The intellectualist concentration on concepts, along with the continuing attachment to the
unities of oeuvre and mind do scant justice to Newtons subtle manipulations of
discipline, setting and audience.
Acknowledgements
For comments on previous versions of this paper I would like to thank Michael
Hawkins, Nick Jardine, Scott Mandelbrote, Moti Feingold, Stephen Snobelen and
Andrew Warwick.
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Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci.

Abstract considerations: disciplines and the

E-mail address: r.ilie@imperial.ac.uk (R. Ilie).

R. Ilie / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 35 (2004) 427454

R. Ilie / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 35 (2004) 427454

R. Ilie / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 35 (2004) 427454

2. The power of discipline

R. Ilie / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 35 (2004) 427454

R. Ilie / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 35 (2004) 427454

3. The Barrovian programme

R. Ilie / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 35 (2004) 427454

R. Ilie / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 35 (2004) 427454

Notably, many of the so-called Problems he laid out as part of a potential

4. The mathematical theory of colours

R. Ilie / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 35 (2004) 427454

R. Ilie / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 35 (2004) 427454

that dierent primary rays have dierent degrees of refrangibility, Newton

Newton (1984), Vol. 1, pp. 7577, 309.

R. Ilie / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 35 (2004) 427454

This mathematicist approach clashed with the dominant probabilistic approach

R. Ilie / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 35 (2004) 427454

R. Ilie / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 35 (2004) 427454

R. Ilie / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 35 (2004) 427454

5. The development of Newtons cosmology

R. Ilie / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 35 (2004) 427454

R. Ilie / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 35 (2004) 427454

R. Ilie / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 35 (2004) 427454

6. From vortices to voids

R. Ilie / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 35 (2004) 427454

R. Ilie / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 35 (2004) 427454

R. Ilie / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 35 (2004) 427454

R. Ilie / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 35 (2004) 427454

no means a coherent mixed mathematical opus. Newton constructed the Principia

Newton (1962), pp. 121122.

R. Ilie / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 35 (2004) 427454

R. Ilie / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 35 (2004) 427454

might treat certain phenomena in terms of ontologically neutral short-range forces,

R. Ilie / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 35 (2004) 427454

R. Ilie / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 35 (2004) 427454

R. Ilie / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 35 (2004) 427454

R. Ilie / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 35 (2004) 427454

R. Ilie / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 35 (2004) 427454

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