Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer. Michael White
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to clarify such matters for himself.
He acquired some of these notions from books available in the extensive library at Trinity College, which contained works by the great natural philosophers of the day. Here could be found texts by Descartes, Boyle, Thomas More, Hobbes, Copernicus, Tycho Brahe and Galileo (with the exception of Galileo’s two most important works, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems and Dialogue Concerning Two New Sciences, both of which appear to have been too risqué for the conservative thinkers who authorised the purchase of books for the library). The problem for Newton was not the range of material to be found in Cambridge university libraries: it was that students could use the libraries only at special times, and then only when supervised by a tutor. From what we know of Newton’s tutor, Pulleyn, who was usually unavailable and quite uninterested in natural philosophy, it would seem most likely that Newton gained access to these all-important works through the agency of another fellow, almost certainly Humphrey Babington.
Although at first inspired and influenced by Descartes, Newton quickly rejected the Frenchman’s mechanical theory as a concept that denied the omnipotence of the Creator. He was able to accept Pierre Gassendi’s Christianised atomism, but even this was with reservations. In the ‘Quaestiones’ he wrote:
Of Atoms
It remains therefore that the first matter must be atoms and that matter may be so small as to be indiscernible. The excellent Dr More [the Cambridge fellow Henry More] in his book of the soul’s immortality has proved this beyond all controversy, yet I shall use one argument to show that it cannot be divisible in infinitum & that is this: Nothing can be divided into more parts than it can possibly be constituted of. But matter (i.e. finite) cannot be constituted of infinite parts.18
Newton is here using logic to dispel the possibility of anyone taking the atomic theory too far. Matter being a finite thing, it cannot, he reasoned, be divided forever into infinitesimally small parts. (If Newton sounds overconfident here and seems to be treating the issue with the same overzealousness that Aristotle might have employed, we can perhaps put it down to his relative youth. These were, after all, musings in a private notebook.)
The key influence in guiding Newton towards a view of the universe that maintained a supreme role for the Creator was the Cambridge philosopher Henry More, a man who was interested in all areas of natural philosophy and mysticism and a leading member of the group of fellows known as the Cambridge Platonists.
Born a gentleman, More had gained the finest education at Eton and was elected a fellow of Christ’s College in 1639. Believing in the pursuit of knowledge as a means of exalting God, and upholding the Scholastics’ edict ‘Understand so that you may believe, believe so that you may understand’, More declined all offers of ecclesiastical positions and even the mastership of Christ’s College in order to lead an academic life unhindered by other responsibilities.
He and the other Cambridge Platonists believed that the world was permeated by spirit, which More termed the ‘Spirit of Nature’. This esoteric ‘force’, he believed, mediated between God – who controlled all actions, all purpose and all outcomes – and a purely mechanical universe – the mundane physical world in which we live and conduct our lives.
As a young scholar, More had shared many of Descartes’s ideas and had initially seen Cartesian philosophy as a means of reconciling theology and natural philosophy; but gradually he had turned away from this view, later becoming its vehement opponent. At the root of More’s ideology, and of his influence on Newton, was an amalgamation of atomism and Christian Platonism. Plato had believed in the notion of spirit, an essence within all things, manifest in man as the soul, but also an extension of God, a force at work in Nature, guiding the universe. In Descartes’s philosophy there appeared to be no continuing need for God. Descartes never intended this interpretation and was himself a devout Christian, but to More, and later to Newton, the mechanisms and ideas portrayed in Descartes’s Discourse on the Method and Principles of Philosophy could easily be interpreted as atheistic. In More’s universe, matter was guided by spirit, manipulated by God entirely at his discretion.
More, who was born in Grantham, had tutored Joseph Clark (the brother of Clark the apothecary) at Cambridge. He visited Grantham occasionally, and it is possible that he may thus have met Newton several years before the young man entered university. It is clear from entries in his philosophical notebook that Newton came under More’s influence quite early in his university career. As well as the mention of a text by ‘the excellent Dr More’ in his notes on atomism, Newton has listed headings clearly influenced by More’s main areas of interest, such as ‘Of the Creation’, ‘Of the Soule’ and ‘Of God’.19 These may have been prompted by Newton’s natural curiosity for things spiritual, but it is also likely that they stemmed from reading More’s most important book, The Immortality of the Soul, to which Newton had referred in the earlier entry ‘Of Atoms’.
More’s influence upon Newton extended beyond the inspiration provided by his writings.20 Newton’s ideas and loyalties changed so radically within such a short period of time during his second year at university that the influence of at least one academic guide is likely. Having been Clark’s tutor and an associate of Babington, More probably talked to Newton on a number of occasions during the young man’s final years in Grantham and Woolsthorpe and may even have singled him out upon his entry into the university. He was another father-figure within the academic and social network forming around the serious-minded and inquisitive young man. Although Babington was more of a practical guide (and almost certainly provided access to his private library), he was in Cambridge only rarely. More provided a greater and more lasting intellectual foundation.
But, if More’s influence was strong, to the modern mind he seems to have offered a confusing philosophy. To us, atomism is the foundation of modern physics, but the seminal work of Rutherford, who first postulated the existence of smaller particles within the atom, early in the twentieth century, led to the oddities of quantum theory. From this derives indeterminism, as expressed in Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, leading to theories of unpredictability and a philosophical viewpoint far removed from the image of a universe manipulated by a benign God. Though some have managed to visualise and have faith in a strange marriage between quantum theory and God, mainstream modern atomism could not be further removed from More’s idea of a personal, all-pervading deity. Yet, to More – naturally unaware of where it would one day lead – atomism was a way of proving the actions of an omnipresent Creator, a confirmation of the Testaments; because, as Newton had underscored in his notebook, matter could be divided only to a finite degree, and the resulting fundamental particles must have been created and guided by a divine hand.
If More offered a theoretical foundation which combined natural philosophy with theology, from reading Galileo and Bacon contemporaneously Newton had also learned how to construct a working system with which to verify his ideas. By the summer of 1664 he was able to state in his notebook that ‘The nature of things is more securely and naturally deduced from their operations one upon another than upon the senses. And when by the former experiments we have found the nature of bodies … we may more clearly find the nature of the senses.’21 What he means by this is that scientists cannot simply trust what they observe with their senses, but need to experiment before attempting to deduce the nature of the universe and the objects that fill it – that there may be more going on than we know from the information our senses give us by superficial observation.
Newton’s first experiments, begun during the summer of 1664, were probably his investigations into the nature of light. Years later these appeared in the Opticks, first published in 1704.
His earliest interest in light began when he bought a glass prism at the Stourbridge fair, held on a piece of land beside the river about a mile from the centre of Cambridge. Amid stages for the jugglers and clowns, minstrels and children’s games, dancers and actors stood stalls selling all manner of oddities – trinkets