ARCHIVES INTERNATIONALES D'HISTOIRE DES IDEES NEWTON AND RELIGION. Context, Nature, and Influence. edited by. JAMES E. FORCE and RICHARD H.

Transcription

1 NEWTON AND RELIGION

2 ARCHIVES INTERNATIONALES D'HISTOIRE DES IDEES INTERNATIONAL ARCHIVES OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS 161 NEWTON AND RELIGION Context, Nature, and Influence edited by JAMES E. FORCE and RICHARD H. POPKIN Founding Directors: P. Dibont (Paris) and R.H. Popkin (Washington University, St. Louis & UCLA) Director: Sarah Hutton (The University of Hertfordshire, United Kingdom) Assistant Directors: J.E. Force (Lexington); J.C. Laursen (Riverside) Editorial Board: J.F. Battail (Paris); F. Duchesneau (Montreal); A. Gabbey (New York); T. Gregory (Rome); J.D. North (Groningen); M.J. Petry (Rotterdam); J. Popkin (Lexington); G.A.J. Rogers (Keele); Th. Verbeek (Utrecht) Advisory Editorial Board: J. Aubin (Paris); B. Copenhaver (Los Angeles); A. Crombie (Oxford); H. Gadamer (Heidelberg); H. Gouhier (Paris); K. Hanada (Hokkaido University); W. Kirsop (Melbourne); P.O. Kristeller (Columbia University); E. Labrousse (Paris); A. Lossky (Los Angeles); J. Malarczyk (Lublin); J. Orcibal (Paris); W. ROd (MUnchen); G. Rousseau (Los Angeles); H. Rowen (Rutgers University. N.J.); J.P. Schobinger (ZUrich); J. Tans (Groningen)

3 NEWTON AND RELIGION Context, Nature, and Influence edited by JAMES E. FORCE University of Kentucky, Lexington, U.S.A and RICHARD H. POPKIN University of California, Los Angeles, U.S.A u " SPRINGER-SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.V.

4 A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN ISBN (ebook) DOI / Printed on acid-free paper All Rights Reserved 1999 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1999 Sof'tcover reprint of the hardcover 1 st edition 1999 No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner

5 CONTENTS FOREWORD -J. E. Force... INTRODUCTION - R. H. Popkin ix ESSAY 1 I Alchemy and Eschatology: Exploring the Connections between John Dee and Isaac Newton - D. E. Harkness.... ESSAY 2 I Newton and the Rosicrucian Enlightenment - A. P. Couderl 17 ESSAY 3 I From Paracelsus to Newton: The Word of God, the Book ofnature, and the Eclipse of the "Emblematic World View" -J. J. Bono ESSAY 4 I "Acceptable to inquisitive men": Some Simonian Contexts for Newton's Biblical Criticism, J. A.I Champion ESSAY 5 I Those "Whose Business It Is To Cavill": Newton's Anti- Catholicism - R. Iliffe ESSAY 6 I Newton, Corruption, and the Tradition of Universal History - R. Markley ESSAY 7 I Newton's O/the Church: Its Contents and Implications - M Goldish ESSAY 8 I The Seven Trumpets and the Seven Vials: Apocalypticism and Christology in Newton's Theological Writings -SO Hutton ESSAY 9 I Interpretive Strategies in Newton's Theologiae gentilis origines philosophiae-k. J. Knoespel ESSAY 10 I Newton's Apocalypse -M. Murrin ESSAY 11 I Newton and the Guaranteeing God - G. A. J. Rogers ESSAY 12 I Newton, the "Ancients,"and the "Moderns" -J. E. Force. 237 ESSAY 13 I The Logic of Millennia 1 Thought: Sir Isaac Newton Among His Contemporaries -R. Smolinski INDEX vii v

6 FOREWORD JAMES E. FORCE University of Kentucky In 1990, when Richard H. Popkin and I published our Essays on the Context, Nature, and Influence of Isaac Newton's Theology (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers), my friend and mentor, the "grand sceptic of the West Coast," Richard H. Popkin, wrote in the Introduction that "perhaps, some years hence, we will have greater distance from the material, and from the exciting chases involved in uncovering it, can go back and write a consecutive narrative." The time for such a comprehensive overview has not yet arrived. The indefatigable Professor Popkin and I still find ourselves gripped by the excitement of the chase. Too many new and fruitful perspectives beckon before any such synthetic, comprehensive overview might become possible. In this interim volume, we take pride in presenting essays which point to some of the most enticing new directions in Newton scholarship. The authors of these essays attempt to trace aspects of both the wider intellectual context in which Newton wrote-including predecessors as diverse as John Dee, Paracelsus, and contemporary archaeologists (or, "antiquarians"}---and the nature and, occasionally, the influence of Newton's religious thought upon thinkers and schools as disparate as the Anglican Church, English anti-catholics, the Alchemists, and Cotton Mather. All of these papers have, as their original point of genesis, a conference on the topic of "Newton and Religion" held on February 9lh and lolh, 1996, at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library under the sponsorship of the University of California, Los Angeles, Center for 17 th - & 18lh -Century Studies which is directed by Professor Peter H. Reill of the University of California, Los Angeles. For scholars discouraged by the bland, business-asusual, pretend-professionalism of "junk bond" conferences put on by "professional" organizations which are really more akin to meat markets than to any genuine marketplace of ideas, we heartily recommend the conferences put on at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library as a sovereign anti-dote. An audience and a group of speakers composed of people who have respect and affection for, broad knowledge of, and critical talent in the history of ideas make for a genuinely unique and exciting intellectual venue. We do not mean to claim that one had to be there to appreciate or understand the following essays; finally, by their essays, you shall know them. But we cannot deny the very special ambiance of the Clark vii

7 Vlll Foreword Library and the critical contributions, within that noble venue, of such commentators as Peter H. Reill of UCLA and Hartmut Lehmann of the Max Planck-Institut fur Geschichte. Finally, we would like to extend our thanks to the extremely thorough and hard-working experts chosen by Kluwer as the outside referees for this volume. Their critical diligence has done much to improve this volume and to make it as good as it has, with their help, become.

8 INTRODUCTION RICHARD H. POPKIN Washington University and the University of California, Los Angeles This collection of essays grew out of a conference held at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library of UCLA in Over the years several of the people involved in this conference had discussed research developments concerning Newton's alchemical and theological papers. During the last twenty-five years------since the very large collection in Jerusalem became publicly available and supplemented the Keynes collection at Cambridge and some other, smaller collections--the beginnings of a new picture of what Newton might have been up to has emerged. The 1936 Sotheby auction of the Newton papers, held by the Earl of Portsmouth and described in the auction catalogue, revealed the breadth and depth of Newton's interests in alchemy and theology. A very large number of the items listed disappeared from public view into private collections. The largest number of these manuscripts, purchased by the Palestinian Jewish Arabist, A. S. Yahuda, was carted to the United States in 1940 where Yahuda became a refugee. He and his friend Albert Einstein tried to get Harvard, Princeton, or Yale to house the collection but to no avail. Yahuda and Einstein were told that nobody would care about Newton's opinions on these subjects, that these papers were not scientific, and also that there was a war on. (The letters from these institutions to Einstein are themselves in the Yahuda collection.) So the Newton papers remained in Yahuda's house in New Haven along with his very very rich collection of Middle Eastern documents. Yahuda had been the first Jewish Palestinian Zionist but had broken with the movement at the time of the Balfour Declaration. Over the years, he became more and more anti-zionist. He privately printed a polemical work against Chaim Weitzman and inveighed against other Israeli leaders and scholars. Yahuda debated about to whom he ought to leave his manuscript collection. Upon Yahuda's death-bed, one of his students apparently convinced him to leave it to the National Library of Israel in spite of his grave misgivings about the new country. When Yahuda died in 1951, his family tried to block sending the bequest to Jerusalem. A long court case ensued in New Haven which ended in Crates and crates of papers and books were then shipped to the library in Jerusalem. Fortunately for us all, the Newton scholar, David Castillejo was there when the boxes were lx

9 x Introduction opened. He compiled an inventory which has made it possible for later scholars to find their way through the many, many files. Professor Richard S. Westfall, the late Newton biographer, read about the Yahuda collection and wrote to Jerusalem to obtain a microfilm of the holdings. Westfall, with his microfilm which he received in 1972, inaugurated a new era of Newton studies in which scholars attempted, for the first time, to incorporate Newton-the-alchemist and Newton-thetheologian into the commonplace view of Newton as the revolutionary progenitor of modern science. Westfall, I. B. Cohen, Frank Manuel, and others looked at the manuscripts and gave their views on Newton's religion and its relation to his science. The late Betty Jo Teeters Dobbs studied the alchemical materials in her books on the subject and revolutionized our understanding of this side of Newton's work. Since the eighteenth century, the problem had existed of understanding how one and the same person, the greatest genius of his age, could have written such brilliant mathematics and physics and still have dabbled in arcane and occult nonsense such as alchemy, astrology, polytheistic mythologies, early Christian Church history, radical religious heresies such as Arianism, and the interpretation of Biblical prophecies. Voltaire and others in the eighteenth century had offered theories that the great man became senile and stopped being a scientist. Perhaps, it was suggested, an accident, when he tripped over his cat, led to this premature senility. Another suggestion was that the great Newton was poisoned by mercury when doing some silly alchemical experiment and that this addled his brain and led to his writing on nonsensical topics. This kind of simplistic "two-newton" interpretation-one a young, brilliant scientist, the second a senile religious nut case--went by the boards when the Yahuda materials, and others, which were auctioned at Sotheby's in 1936 showed that Newton was working on these "unscientific" topics throughout his adult life and was, in fact, working on them at the very times that he did his greatest scientific writings. A large part of the scholarly world up to this very day continues to insist that no matter why Newton worked on alchemy, astrology, religious topics, or Bible prophecies, it had nothing whatever to do with his scientific achievements and, therefore, did not deserve serious study by historians of science. Wesrfall himself developed a version of the "two-newton" position in which he attempted to take into account all the diverse topics which interested Newton during his long life but concluded that, towards the end, Newton was, blessedly, moving to a rational, deistic view and was discarding his earlier bizarre interests. Westfall offered as his proof texts lines from an unfinished collections of notes and writings in the Yahuda collection entitled Theologiae gentiles origines philosophiae. Others have contended that this work is really a jumble of notes from various commentators on the varieties of religions at the time and that

10 Introduction xi Newton was not really breaking any new ground in this vast compendium of notes. In the last decade or so there have been many studies arguing for and against Westfall's final view. In our collection of essays in this volume, there are some new readings of the Yahuda manuscripts which offer new hypotheses about how they may fit with Newton's overall views. In recent years, quite a few younger scholars have emerged who have been examining the vast corpus of unpublished Newton papers, a process made more easily possible by the generally available Chadwick-Healey microfilm project, a large number of microfilm reels containing most of the unpublished papers including the Bodmer Library manuscript in Geneva (which had not been available to Westfall.) More and more people have examined the great Yahuda manuscripts in the Jewish National and University Library in Israel as well as on the microfilm copy. Finally, the Clark Library's ninety-two page Newton manuscript attacking St. Athanasius and Trinitarianism was studied seriously, especially by James E. Force and Rob Iliffe. The interest and concern in the context and background of what interested Newton in these areas seemed to provide a much richer background for interpreting what Newton had written and how it might relate to his mathematical and scientific concerns. Finally, James E. Force, Kenneth Knoespel, and I decided to plan what we thought would be an exciting conference which would bring together scholars in the history of alchemy, religion, astrology, science, philosophy, and theology. The Center for 17th_ and 18th-Century Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, through its director, Peter H. Reill, agreed to fund the conference and to hold it at the lovely facilities of the Clark Library. In preparing for such a conference, we felt the need to place what Newton was doing in his most puzzling papers on alchemy, astrology, theology, and various religious subjects into the context of the mix of disciplines that existed and co-existed all during the 17th century. In the period often interpreted as the scientific "revolution" when, according to long hallowed tradition, rational science "rose" and replaced medieval superstitions, we must remember some facts. This was also the period when Johannes Kepler could be one of the makers of modern astronomy as well as a leading astrologer; when the prophetic interpreter, John Dury, could discuss how best to discover a basis for certainty with Rene Descartes, whether in mathematics or in the discovery of the proper method for interpreting Scriptural prophecies; when Isaac Newton and Henry More could have had a monumental falling out over how to interpret the vials and the trumpets in the Book of Revelation; when Newton could undertake a trip to visit John Locke just to present him a chart for interpreting the symbols in Revelation and the chronological consequences thereof; and when Newton's chosen successor as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge,

11 xii Introduction William Whiston, could deliver the Boyle Lectures on The Accomplishment of Scripture Prophecy, using the best modern mathematical techniques to estimate the probabilities as to when the remaining unfulfilled prophecies would be fulfilled. All of these events probably seemed normal to the 17'h_ century participants though we today, now brainwashed by Whiggish interpretations of the Enlightenment, may find it difficult to fathom how our intellectual heroes of the past could have been so misguided. We sought, in this conference, to look into the background of so-called esoteric and prophetic religious thought from the late-l7'h century until the time of Newton. We decided to bring together younger, as well as established, scholars in the history of science, the history of religion, and the history of theology so that they could present and discuss their views about the "new" Newton who was emerging after twenty-five years of studying his manuscripts: the Newton who wrote the Principia and the Opticks and who also did alchemical experiments and, for about sixty years as a scriptural exegete, tried to figure out the prophetic messages in the books of Daniel and Revelation. The Clark Library provides a delightful forum for such exchanges, with its formal drawing room, elegantly appointed in art treasures, providing a setting for lectures and discussions, and the garden providing an informal place for further discussion over lunch and refreshments. The problem of whether there is just one Newton, or two, or more still needs to be worked out. We hope that the range of topics dealt with in these papers will contribute to this task by showing some of the context, concerns, and influences of Newton's contributions in his time. These essays represent the authors' refined version of their presentations based on the lively discussions at the Clark conference as well as editorial suggestions from some very helpful referees. In the first essay, Deborah Harkness, a student of the late Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs, presents the achievements of the great British astrologer, alchemist, and natural philosopher, John Dee, who was active a century before Newton. Dee tried, through conversations with angels over many years, to understand Nature and to learn how to perfect it and to prepare for the conclusion of the divine cosmic drama. Dee saw comets and special astronomical configurations as important portents of God's messages to mankind. His accounts of his conversations with angels might constitute a merely isolated case of a late-renaissance magus run amok were it not for the fact that much of his corpus of conversations was published in 1659 and was studied and discussed by several of the natural philosophers in the circle of the Royal Society in the latter decades of the seventeenth century. Newton, with his great interests in matters occult and supernatural, might have felt less alone ifhe was aware of Dee as a partial predecessor.

12 Introduction xiii In the second essay, Allison Coudert, who studied at the Warburg Institute in London with Frances Yates and D. P. Walker, undertakes to place Newton's work into the context of a revised version of the Yates thesis according to which modem science "rose" out of occultism. Yates had claimed that it was revived Henneticism which launched the modem scientific world. In the last decades there has been much criticism of the Yates thesis from au sides. Coudert offers a different interpretation. She argues that it was not Henneticism but rather a revived Gnosticism in combination with ancient science which launched the outlook of Bacon, Comenius, Hartlib, and, later, Newton. According to this revived synthesis of Gnosticism and science, man was able to comprehend the universe by returning to a prisca theologia or prisca sapientia uncorrupted by the centuries of pagan metaphysics, kabbalah, etc. In the third essay, James Bono examines the primary way of conceiving God's "Book of Nature" during the Renaissance, the Emblematic World View, in which natural things--in tenns of their descriptions, associations, habits, names, representations---are seen as conveying something about the prelapsarian knowledge of things and their essences. Paracelsus and many others studied natural things in terms of their emblematic significance. This way of looking at the natural world-with its embedded, emblematic representations of the original divine truths--graduauy gave way to seeing the world in mathematical terms. Bono argues that Newton, though one of the great practitioners of mathematical science, was also firmly looking back to the emblematic way of seeing nature in his search for origins of human religious behavior, science, etc., in ancient records and in mythological expressions. Newton was, as Betty Jo Dobbs said, "Janus-faced", looking forward and backward at the same time. In the fourth essay, Justin Champion examines the role of Father Richard Simon's biblical criticism on both Newton and John Locke. Newton had sent Locke some letters about the fact that there was no scriptural authority for the Doctrine of the Trinity. Locke forwarded these letters to Jean LeClerc in The Netherlands for publication without telling LeClerc the name of their author. Through Locke, Newton withdrew them from publication probably because he feared that he would be recognized as the author and punished for his anti-trinitarianism. Two of these letters became public only in the mid-18 th century and the other in the mid-20 th Leclerc told Locke that the "anonymous" author would profit from the study of Simon's Critical History o/the New Testament. Champion follows Leclerc's advice to the unknown author, i.e., to Newton. Champion surveys Simon's critical examination of the Scriptures and shows how both Newton and Locke, strong Protestants, could find aid and comfort for their views in Father Simon's evidence that there was no original or authentic text of the Bible and that private interpretation must be permitted. Champion shows that both

13 xiv Introduction Newton and Locke had the major works of Simon in their libraries and used them extensively while also following Simon's advice to study many Bibles in many languages. In the fifth essay, working mainly from unpublished manuscript texts, Rob Iliffe examines the nature and profound depth of Newton's anti Catholicism. Newton's basic rejection of idolatry in its ancient pagan forms led him to see Catholicism as a new and even worse form of idolatry with its worship of saints, its adoption of various pagan elements, its corruption of Scripture (to justify Trinitarianism), and the many more corruptions introduced by Athanasius when he crushed the Arians. Newton's life-long study of church history provided him with an enormous amount of ammunition about the wickedness of Popery from ancient times to the present. Iliffe shows that Newton's deep-seated anti-catholicism led him to refuse to take seriously Jesuit criticisms of some of Newton's scientific work and to heap insults upon his Jesuit detractors. Lastly Newton, in 1687, dropped his work on the Principia to lead the fight at Cambridge against James II's attempt to appoint a Catholic Fellow. Iliffe shows that "hatred of Catholicism permeated every aspect of Newton' s life." In the sixth essay, Robert Markley places Newton's historical efforts into the context of the "universal histories" of the world that were being written from the late Renaissance onward. Such "universal histories" portrayed ancient history as a lost Golden Age and, reflecting the loss of social and economic stability in the early modem world, pessimistically portrayed the present age as decadent, corrupt, and incapable of sustaining itself physically, economically, or morally. In contrast to the world-view assumed within this tradition, Markley shows that Newton, in his own version of universal history, was committed to looking for a pure beginning which could be recaptured or reconstituted through religious reform and natural science. In the seventh essay, Matt Goldish analyzes the most finished of Newton's manuscripts, Of the Church. This manuscript exists in two versions, one in the Bodmer Library in Geneva, the other in Jerusalem. Goldish shows that Newton's careful examination of ancient religion, Judaism, and early Church history stresses how original, pure religious doctrines became corrupted by additions of pagan ideas, gnosticism, kabbalism, and human errors. The early church was infected by metaphysical misinterpretations of doctrines and, finally, was taken over by Trinitarianism. Goldish also reveals the amazing scholarship which underlies Newton's analysis and underscores how Newton used his historical reconstruction of what Christianity should be to develop his basis for remaining within the Anglican Church while simultaneously opposing Latitudinarianism, deism, and the theosophy of Leibniz (which, for Newton,

14 Introduction xv was nothing more than the emanationist metaphysics of the kabbalah all over again.) In the eighth essay, Sarah Hutton examines what is usually brushed aside, Newton's interpretation of the Vials and the Trumpets in the Book of Revelation. Newton and Henry More had a falling out about how to interpret these texts and Newton felt it necessary to construct a diagram for Locke and Lady Masham so that they could understand his point. Hutton puts the discussion in terms of what the great exegete, Joseph Mede, had said about the relationship of Daniel, and about the symbolism therein, to the Book of Revelation. Both Newton and More broke with Mede on this issue. Hutton shows that Newton's interpretation of these texts was crucial for his Arianian theology and explains Newton's understanding of the crucially pivotal role of the non-divine Christ in Providential history. For Newton, the fights about these symbols was crucial in defining the essentials of the true faith. In the ninth essay, Kenneth Knoespel shows us the fruits of his careful examination of one of the most puzzling of Newton's manuscripts, the Theologiae gentilis origines philosophiae, Yahuda MS 16 in Jerusalem. This unfinished writing, which Newton was working on for decades, has been seen lately as crucial for understanding Newton's thought. But the unfinished character, the mass of notes and corrections, has made it difficult to penetrate. Knoespel puts forth its structure and its relationship to the earlier work with a similar title by J. G. Vossius. Knoespel then traces Newton's picture of how ancient science and religion, so intimately connected, developed and sadly became corrupted. Knoespel suggests that "Viewed with the Principia, the Origines then provides historical justification for Newton's own momentous discoveries." The discoveries made by Newton in natural philosophy may be seen, from the perspective of this manuscript, as part of the rediscovery of ancient revelations. In the tenth essay, Michael Murrin traces the history of the status of the Book of Revelation from ancient to early modem times. He points out that it was disowned by most of the early eastern Christian churches and only taken seriously in the West. During the Reformation it was at first disowned by Luther and only gradually became all important because it could be used to show that the Church of Rome was about to be overthrown. Some of the most important modem commentators on the Book of Revelation were Spanish Jesuits who connected its symbolism and content with current events and saw in it a map into the future. The moderate interpretations of these Spanish Jesuits were then rebutted by the 17 th -century Millenarian Protestants, Joseph Mede, and his followers, Henry More, and Isaac Newton. In Murrin's analysis, Newton finally secularized its content and eliminated the possibility of genuinely prophesying when the events of the end times would occur.

15 xvi Introduction In the eleventh essay, John Rogers treats the relationship between Newton's conception of empirical induction in science and its relation to his theology. Rogers shows that Newton did not get into the problem of trying to justify empirical induction against sceptical doubts on the subject because, for Newton, God was always active in the world and in making it possible for human beings to know enough about the world. Hume's type of puzzle about whether there could be any guarantee that the future will resemble the past could only be broached when and if the Newtonian God of total dominion vanished from the cosmos. In the twelfth paper, my collaborator, James E. Force, seeks to locate Newton in the famous quarrel between the ancients and the moderns. In the 18th century, Newton was made commander-in-chief of the modernists. But Force shows that Newton himself strongly held that ancient wisdom was far superior to modern views except for those of the very few moderns, such as himself, who were busy recapturing the ancient wisdom. And Newton held this view about both science and religion. The true religion and the true science were known to the Patriarchs but was corrupted as pagans identified natural objects with historical figures and introduced human metaphysical views into theology. The corruptions of Christianity, especially from Athanasius onward, also corrupted the understanding of nature. Newton was concerned to find this ancient religious and scientific understanding in ancient monuments such as Solomon'S Temple and in the circle of stones at Stonehenge. In understanding Newton's place in the controversy of the ancients and moderns, one can begin to see how the religious and the scientific Newton fitted together as the unified outlook of one man. In the thirteenth, and last essay, Reiner Smolinski examines the actual theological physics of several of the leading Millenarians of the late-17th century and traces how they interpret what is supposed to happen at the end of the Book of Revelation in connection with their knowledge of modern physics. Newton's explanations are compared and contrasted with those of John Ray, Thomas Burnet, and the New England millenarian, Cotton Mather. Smolinski follows out, in fascinating detail, just how each of these thinkers seriously tried to figure out where the destructive fire would take place, how the elect would escape, where the New Jerusalem would come from, what its dimensions would be, etc. Newton is shown to be as concerned as these other millennial theorists about these problems. All of them were well aware of the latest developments in physics, geology, etc. These thirteen essays show, we think, that the "other" Newton was part of a context, mostly lost by now, in which religious and scientific concerns went hand in hand. And for Newton, as well as many others of his time, the understanding of the Book of Nature and the Book of Scripture were complimentary exercises. We hope that the reader will see that one does not have to construct a Newton who had an internal switch by which he could

16 Introduction xvii turn off the scientific Newton and turn on the religious Newton, and vice versa. Instead some of us engaged in studying the vast corpus of Newton's theological and alchemical manuscript, can see the possibility that one man, a product of many intellectual and religious currents in the 17th century, could write great scientific works, great works in church history, in Biblical interpretation, etc., as part of one great enterprise, that of understanding man and his place in the grand scheme of God's creation. Professor Force and I also hope that this collection of essays will lead to further conferences and collections of studies about Newton and his time and help us recapture the vision that animated his whole intellectual life.