SOURCE: "Newton and His Society," in The Annus Mirabilis of Sir Isaac Newton, 1666-1966, edited by Robert Palter, The M.I.T. Press, 1970, pp. 26-47.

[In the following essay, Hill reviews the social and personal influences on Newton's life and work, suggesting that the most potent influences were Newton's Puritan upbringing and the post-revolutionary society in which he lived.]

I

One way for me to approach the subject of Newton and his society would be to quote Professor Alexandre Koyré: "The social structure of England in the 17th century cannot explain Newton."¹ Then I could sit down. But of course we must gloss Koyré by emphasizing the word "explain." A complete explanation of Newton cannot be given in social terms. The historian, however, qua historian, is not interested in single causal explanations. The questions he asks are "Why here?", "Why now?" If science were a self-evolving chain of intellectual development, then it would be irrelevant that it was Newton, living in post-revolutionary England, who won international fame by following up Galileo, a persecuted Italian, and Descartes, a Frenchman living in exile in the Dutch republic. But for the historian the where, when, and why questions are vital. It is no more possible to treat the history of science as something uncontaminated by the world in which the scientists lived than it is to write the history of, say, philosophy or literature or the English constitution in isolation from the societies which gave birth to them.²

Often the important thing for scientific advance is asking new questions, approaching a given body of material from a fresh angle.³ All the factors which precede and make possible such a breakthrough are therefore relevant. The real problem often is not How do men come to look at familiar facts in a fresh way? but How do they liberate themselves from looking at them in the old way? And here the history of the society in which the scientist lived, as well as the facts of his personal biography, may frequently be suggestive, if rarely conclusive. Newton shared much of the outlook of his scientific contemporaries, their limitations as well as their strengths. But I want to suggest that his Puritan upbringing, combined with the postrevolutionary environment of Cambridge, and possibly certain psychological factors which are both personal and social, may have helped him to ask fresh questions and so to break through to his new synthesis.

II

Newton was born in 1642, the year in which the English civil war broke out. The first twenty-four years of his life saw a great revolution, culminating in the execution of Charles I and the proclamation of a republic. They saw the abolition of episcopacy, the execution of the Archbishop of Canterbury, and fifteen years of greater religious and political liberty than were to be seen again in England until the nineteenth century. The censorship broke down, church courts ceased to persecute. Hitherto proscribed sects preached and proselytized in public, and religious speculation ran riot, culminating in the democratic theories of the Levellers, the communism of Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers, the scientific materialism of Hobbes and the economic determinism of Harrington. Books and pamphlets were published on a scale hitherto unprecedented on all subjects, including science, mathematics, and medicine; for the natural sciences, too, benefited from Parliament's victory. Oldenburg rightly said in 1659 that science got more encouragement in England than in France.⁴ Bacon was popular among the Parliamentarians, and from 1640 onwards began that climb to fame which soon caused him to be hailed as "the dictator of philosophy"—an ascent which the Royal Society materially assisted.

The first two decades of Newton's life, then, saw a political revolution which was also a religious and intellectual revolution, the climax in England of a transformation in ways of thought which had been proceeding for a century and a half, and of which Renaissance, Reformation and the scientific revolution were all part. Protestantism, by its hostility to magic and ceremonial, its emphasis on experience against authority, on simplicity in theology, helped to prepare an intellectual climate receptive to science—not least in the covenant theology, so popular in Newton's Cambridge, with its rejection of arbitrary interference with law, its insistence that God normally works through second causes, not by miracles.⁵ In England transubstantiation was publicly ridiculed from the pulpit; in Roman Catholic Europe the miracle of the mass was believed to be a daily event, to be treated with awe and reverence. In the sixteen sixties Sprat was arguing, in defence of the Royal Society, that it was only doing for philosophy what the Reformation had done for religion. Samuel Butler, an enemy of the Society, was arguing at the same time that Protestantism led to atheism.⁶ Both saw connections between protestant and scientific revolutions.

But the years immediately before 1666 had seen a reaction. In 1660 Charles II, the House of Lords, and the bishops came back to England. An ecclesiastical censorship was restored. Oxford and Cambridge were purged again. The scientists regrouped in London around Gresham College, and succeeded in winning the patronage of Charles II. But it was not all plain sailing. In the early years of its existence the Royal Society had continually to defend itself against the accusation that science led to atheism and social subversion—the latter charge made plausible by the Parliamentarian past of the leading scientists. "The Act of Indemnity and Oblivion," the renegade Henry Stubbe sourly reminded his readers in 1670, had been "necessary to many of the Royal Society."⁷ Next year Stubbe denounced Bacon's philosophy as the root cause of "contempt of the ancient ecclesiastical and civil jurisdiction and the old government, as well as the governors of the realm."⁸ The fact that John Wilkins, the Society's secretary, conformed to the episcopal church in 1660 seemed less important to contemporaries than that he had been Oliver Cromwell's brother-in-law and that he had been intruded by the Parliamentary Commissioners as Warden of Wadham, where he gathered around him the group which later formed the nucleus of the Royal Society. In 1667 his fellow Secretary, Henry Oldenburg, was arrested on suspicion of treasonable correspondence. Conservatives and turncoats in the universities and among the bishops attacked both science and the Royal Society.

III

The mechanical philosophy suffered from its very name. The word mechanic was ambiguous. In one sense it meant "like a machine": the mechanic philosophy was what we should call the mechanistic philosophy. In this sense Oldenburg spoke of "the mechanical or Cartesian philosophy."⁹ But not all Englishmen were Cartesians, and this meaning crystallized only in the later seventeenth century. When Dudley North in 1691 said "Knowledge in great measure is become mechanical" he thought it necessary to add a definition: "built upon clear and evident truths."¹⁰ Long before Descartes wrote Bacon had been urging Englishmen to learn from mechanics, from artisans, and to draw a philosophy from their fumbling and unco-ordinated but successful practice. "The most acute and ingenious part of men being by custom and education engaged in empty speculations, the improvement of useful arts was left to the meaner sort of people, who had weaker parts and less opportunity to do it, and were therefore branded with the disgraceful name of mechanics." But chance or well-designed experiments led them on. (I quote not from Bacon but from Thomas Sydenham, who like Sprat learnt his Baconianism at Wadham in the sixteen fifties under Wilkins.¹¹)

Bacon too was only summing up a pre-existent ideology which held up to admiration "expert artisans, or any sensible industrious practitioners, howsoever unlectured in schools or unlettered in books" (Gabriel Harvey, 1593). John Dee referred to himself as "this mechanician." Marlowe expressed this ideology in heightened form in Doctor Faustus:

O what a world of profit and delight,
Of power, of honor and omnipotence,
Is promised to the studious artisan!

Here the artisan was also a magician. But then so too was Dee; so, Lord Keynes would persuade us, was Newton.¹² We recall John Wilkins' Mathematical Magick, or the Wonders that may be performed by Mechanical Geometry (1648). Fulke Greville spoke of "the grace and disgrace of… arithmetic, geometry, astronomy" as resting "in the artisans' industry or vein." We recall also Wallis' reference to mathematics in the sixteen thirties as a "mechanical" study, meaning by that "the business of traders, merchants, seamen, carpenters, surveyors of lands and the like."

This ideology was shared by many of the early Fellows of the Royal Society, and expressed most forcibly by Boyle—no magician, but anxious to learn from alchemists. Boyle insisted that scientists must "converse with practitioners in their workhouses and shops," "carry philosophic materials from the shops to the schools"; it was "childish and unworthy of a philosopher" to refuse to learn from mechanics. Professor M. B. Hall is right to stress Boyle's good fortune in having not been subjected to the sort of academic education he would have got at a university before the Parliamentarian purges.¹³ Hooke too consistently took counsel with skilled craftsmen. Cowley, in his Ode to the Royal Society, rejoiced that Bacon had directed our study "the mechanic way," to things not words. Newton himself was a skilled craftsman, who had already constructed a water clock, sundials, and a windmill while still a boy. Later he ground his own lenses, made his own grinding and polishing machines and his own telescopes, and conducted his own alchemical experiments. As late as the eighteenth century he was issuing specific and detailed instructions to Royal Society experimenters.

Yet the word "mechanic" was not neutral. It had other overtones. It conveyed the idea of social vulgarity, and also sometimes of atheism. The Copemican theory, said an archdeacon in 1618, "may go current in a mechanical tradesman's shop," but not with scholars and Christians. During the interregnum the word came into new prominence when applied as a pejorative adjective to "mechanic preachers," those doctrinally heretical and socially subversive laymen of the lower classes who took advantage of religious toleration to air their own disturbing views. Such men appealed to their own experience, and the experiences of their auditors, to confute authority, just as the scientists appealed to experiment. ("Faithfulness to experiment is not so different a discipline from faithfulness to experience," wrote Professor Longuet-Higgins recently.¹⁴ "This I knew experimentally," said George Fox of his spiritual experiences in 1647.¹⁵) There is no need to labor the importance of the mechanic preachers, nor the consternation which they caused to their betters: this has been demonstrated in Professor Tyndall's admirable John Bunyan, Mechanick Preacher, analyzing both the genus and its supreme exemplar, who was safely in jail from 1660 to 1672, with many of his fellows. From 1641 onwards it had been a familiar royalist sneer that Parliament's supporters were "turbulent spirits, backed by rude and tumultuous mechanic persons," who "would have the total subversion of the government of the state"; "those whom many of our nation, in a contemptuous folly, term mechanics," wrote Marchamont Nedham defensively.¹⁶ Many of the educational reforms proposed in the revolutionary decades were aimed at benefiting this class. Thus Petty proposed "colleges of tradesmen," where able mechanicians should be subsidized while performing experiments; William Dell wanted better educational opportunities for "townsmen's children."

So there were dangerous ambiguities in the word "mechanic," of which the Royal Society was painfully aware. (If its members ever forgot, Henry Stubbe was ready to remind them by denouncing them as "pitiful Mechanicks!")¹⁷ Sprat in his History, in Baconian vein, spoke of "mechanics and artificers (for whom the true natural philosophy should be primarily intended)," and defined the Society's ideal of prose style as "the language of artisans, countrymen and merchants." But—consistently with his propagandist purpose—he was careful to insist that the technological problems of industry must be approached by "men of freer lives," gentlemen, unencumbered by "dull and unavoidable employments." "If mechanics alone were to make a philosophy, they would bring it all into their shops; and force it wholly to consist of springs and wheels and weights." This was part of a campaign to make the Royal Society respectable. The atheist Hobbes and the radical Parliamentarian Samuel Hartlib were kept out. Anyone of the rank of baron or over was automatically eligible for a Fellowship. A number of courtiers and gentlemen were made Fellows, some of whom were genuinely interested in science, but many of whom were not. The Society prepared pretty tricks for Charles II, Newton had to pretend that James II could be interested in the Principia, and that epoch-making work was issued over the imprimatur of Samuel Pepys as president of the Royal Society—an estimable man, but hardly Newton's peer.

In the long run, this had of course deplorable consequences for science. Despite Boyle's insistence, a gentleman dilettante like Evelyn could not lower himself to "conversing with mechanical, capricious persons."¹⁸ Even Seth Ward, intruded professor of astronomy at Oxford during the interregnum, thought that "mechanic chemistry" was an unsuitable subject for the sons of the nobility and gentry to study at universities. But in the short am it was essential to free the scientists from the "mechanic atheism" which Cudworth scented in Cartesianism,¹⁹ and from the stigma of sedition which clung around the word "mechanical." "Plebeians and mechanics," said a Restoration bishop, "have philosophized themselves into principles of impiety, and read their lectures of atheism in the streets and highways." Glanvill in his dedication to the Royal Society of Scepsis Scientifica in 1664 emphasized the Society's role in "securing the foundations of religion against all attempts of mechanical atheism"; "the mechanic philosophy yields no security to irreligion."

But there was a narrow tightrope here. Boyle, the "restorer of the mechanical philosophy," was opposed to occult qualities, wanted to expel mystery from the universe as far as was compatible with the retention of God. Wren had told a London audience in 1657: "Neither need we fear to diminish a miracle by explaining it."²⁰ "What cannot be understood is no object of belief," Newton said. "A man may imagine things that are false, but he can only understand things that are true."²¹ But there were still many who held the view denounced by Bacon "in men of a devout policy"—"an inclination to have the people depend upon God the more, when they are less acquainted with second causes; and to have no stirring in philosophy, lest it may lead to an innovation in divinity, or else should discover matter of further contradiction to divinity." Experience of the interregnum had strengthened the prejudices of those who thought like that. And there were very real intellectual problems in combining scientific atomism with Christianity—problems which Boyle, the defenders of the Royal Society and Newton himself spent their lives trying to solve. Newton once referred, revealingly, to "this notion of bodies having as it were a complete, absolute and independent reality in themselves, such as almost all of us, through negligence, are accustomed to have in our minds from childhood." This was a main reason for atheism: we do not think of matter as created or dependent on the continuous action of the divine will.²²

Professor Westfall has plausibly suggested that the violence of the scientists' attacks on atheism may spring from the fact that "the virtuosi nourished the atheists within their own minds."²³ Given the general social anxiety of the Restoration period, how were men to frame a theory of the universe which would accommodate both God and the new science? The problem was acute, "the vulgar opinion of the unity of the world being now exploded" (the words are those of Henry Oldenburg) "and that doctrine thought absurd which teacheth the sun and all the heavenly host, which are so many times bigger than our earth, to be made only to enlighten us."²⁴ Mechanic philosophy, purged of the atheism and enthusiasm of the rude mechanicals, offered the best hope. Newton ultimately supplied the acceptable answer; but he was only one of many trying to find it. The question would have been asked if Newton had never lived.

IV

We do not know how far Newton was aware of the great revolution which was going on while he was growing up, but it is difficult to think that it left him untouched. His country, Lincolnshire, was a center of strong pro-Parliamentarian feeling. His mother was an Ayscough, and Edward Ayscough was M. P. for Lincolnshire in the Long Parliament, a staunch Parliamentarian. Newton's maternal uncle became rector of Burton Coggles in 1642; the stepfather whom his mother married was rector of another Lincolnshire parish.²⁵ Both apparently remained on good terms with the Parliamentary ecclesiastical authorities. Newton lived for many years at Grantham while attending its grammar school. Until 1655 the leading ecclesiastical figure in Grantham was its lecturer, John Angell, a noted Puritan.²⁶ After his death, the tone was set by two more Puritans, both ejected for nonconformity at the Restoration, both praised by Richard Baxter. Over the church porch was a library given to the town fifty years earlier by Francis Trigge, another eminent Puritan, who wrote a treatise on the Apocalypse.²⁷ Newton almost certainly used this library; he may even have acquired his interest in the mysteries of the Book of Revelation from it.

I emphasize these points because there used to be a mistaken impression, based on a poem which he was believed to have written, that Newton was in some sense a royalist. Even L. T. More, Newton's best biographer, repeats this error. But this poem was not Newton's; he copied it from Eikon Basilike for his girl friend, Miss Storey. There is no evidence that Newton sympathized with the sentiments expressed in the poem. Even if he did regard Charles I as a martyr, this would not make him a royalist in any technical sense. Most of those who fought against Charles I in the civil war deplored his execution. The Army had first to purge the Presbyterians from Parliament. Indeed the author of Eikon Basilike was himself a Presbyterian divine, a popular preacher before Parliament during the civil war. It was only after the Restoration that he (like Wilkins and so many other Puritans) conformed to the episcopal church and took his reward in a bishopric.

Newton's whole education, then, was in the radical Protestant tradition, and we may assume that his outlook was Puritan when he went up to Cambridge in 1661. This helps to make sense of his later beliefs and interests; he did not take to theology after a mental breakdown in the sixteen nineties. Before 1661 he was learning Hebrew. In 1664-65, if not earlier, he was keeping notebooks on theology and on the ecclesiastical calendar.²⁸ He later argued that bishops and presbyters should be of equal status, and that elders should be elected by the people.²⁹ Newton conformed indeed to the restored episcopal church—as he had to do if he wanted an academic career. But he abandoned belief in the Trinity very early in life and resisted all pressure to be ordained. He seldom attended Trinity College chapel. He had a typically Puritan dislike of oaths, shared with Boyle and Ray. In Newton's scheme for tuition at Trinity he went out of his way to insist "No oaths of office to be imposed on the lecturers. I do not know a greater abuse of religion than that sort of oaths." In later life he was alleged to be "hearty for the Baptists."³⁰

If Newton went up to Cambridge with Puritan inclinations, he can hardly have been happy in his first two years. John Wilkins had just been expelled from the mastership of Newton's College, despite the wishes of the fellows. We do not know how many fellows were ejected or forced to resign; the number may be of the order of twenty.³¹ They included John Ray, who resigned in 1662, perhaps not before Newton had heard him preach sermons in the college chapel which were later written up as The Wisdom of God manifested in the Works of the Creation and Miscellaneous Discourses concerning the Dissolution and Changes of the World. (Those ejected also included John Davis, Fellow, Librarian and Hebrew Lecturer, and William Disney from Newton's county of Lincolnshire.) Ray had originally preached his sermons as a layman, but after 1660 ordination was insisted on for all fellows after their first seven years.³²

As early as 1660 Ray had deplored the lack of interest in experimental philosophy and mathematics at Cambridge,³³ and the expulsion and withdrawal of men like himself and Wilkins did not help. By 1669, when the university entertained Cosimo de' Medici with a Latin disputation, the subject was "an examination of the experimental philosophy and a condemnation of the Copernican system." Newton can hardly have found this a congenial atmosphere.

Nevertheless, the interregnum left its mark on Cambridge. Isaac Barrow, who came up to Trinity in 1647, spoke of mathematics as then "neglected and all but unknown, even on the outward surface by most." A decade earlier Wallis and Seth Ward had both left Cambridge in order to learn mathematics from William Oughtred, a country parson. "The study of mathematics," Wallis said in an oft-quoted phrase, "was at that time more cultivated in London than in the universities." Wallis did not hear of the new philosophy till years after he went down. Barrow claimed to have introduced it to Cambridge, and in the sixteen fifties there was rapid progress there, as in Oxford. By 1654 or 1655 we find Barrow congratulating his university on escaping from traditional servility to scholasticism. "You have very recently begun to cultivate the mathematical sciences"; and natural philosophy (anatomy, medicine, chemistry) had lately started to be studied seriously. Barrow was one of the strongest early influences on Newton.³⁴

Above all Cambridge had become interested in the Cartesian philosophy, and was the scene of the most elaborate attempt to adapt traditional Puritan covenant theology to accommodate the findings of the new science. This was the school misleadingly known as the Cambridge Platonists, which derived from Joseph Mede, whom we shall meet again when we discuss Newton's interest in the Apocalypse. Its members included Ralph Cudworth, Puritan and Parliamentarian, who had links with Newton; like Newton, he was accused of being unsound on the Trinity. The outstanding figure among the Cambridge Platonists when Newton came up to Trinity was Henry More, old boy of Newton's school at Grantham and tutor to two of his teachers there. More—later a Fellow of the Royal Society, like Cudworth—was strongly influenced by Descartes. But in 1659 More published The Immortality of the Soul, in which, he said, "I have demonstrated with evidence no less than mathematical, that there are substances incorporeal."³⁵ He hoped to become the Galileo of a new science of the spirit world. Newton was an intimate associate of More's, became an adherent of the atomic philosophy in his undergraduate days, and was influenced by Descartes. But in the sixties More came to reject the Cartesian mechanical philosophy because it led to atheism³⁶; and Newton followed suit.

V

If we try to think ourselves back into the position of men living in this postrevolutionary world, we can see that there were various intellectual possibilities.

1. The older generation of revolutionaries, who had seen their hopes of building God's kingdom betrayed, necessarily withdrew from politics. Most of them, like George Fox and the Quakers, decided that it had been a mistake to try to build God's kingdom on earth. They turned pacifist, their religion became a religion of personal morality, not of social reform. They accepted the position of minority sects, asking only for freedom from persecution. Bunyan, writing in jail, saw his pilgrim oppressed by the burden of sin, and concerned only to get rid of it; even wife and children are secondary to that consideration. The toughest of all the revolutionaries, Milton, still wrestled with God and history to justify God's ways to men. He completed Paradise Lost in 1665, published it in 1667; even he looked for "a Paradise within thee, happier far."
2. The more intellectual among the returned royalists, their high hopes equally disappointed, found consolation in a cynical and mocking materialist atheism, which was probably only skin deep. Many, like Rochester, abandoned it when they believed they were on their deathbeds. But at court, and among the court dramatists, sceptical Hobbism was fashionable, if only to epater the bourgeois and the Puritans. "There is nothing," wrote Samuel Butler, whose Hudibras was a best seller in 1662-63, "that can prevail more to persuade a man to be an atheist as to see such unreasonable beasts pretend to religion."³⁷ His reference was probably to mechanic preachers. Oldham in 1682 wrote:

   There are, who disavow all Providence
   And think the world is only steered by chance;
   Make God at best an idle looker-on,
   A lazy monarch lolling on his throne.³⁸

3. Others among the returned royalists found that their authoritarian leanings could best be expressed by a return to Catholicism. Laudianism was dead in Restoration England, despite the apparent importance of some former Laudians in 1660. The revolution had made impossible any revival of the independent economic or political power of either church or crown. Henceforth both were subject to the ruling class in Parliament. Charles II and James II had to look for support from Catholic and absolutist France—or, still more desperately, from papist Ireland. Many men of authoritarian temperament were impressed by the achievements, military and cultural, of Louis XIV's France. Some ultimately were converted to Catholicism, like the former Trinity undergraduate Dry den; others, like Archbishop Sheldon, had abandoned the traditional Anglican doctrine that the Pope was Antichrist. Such men were in a dilemma in Restoration England, since most Englishmen regarded France as the national enemy. After 1688 this dilemma could be resolved by rallying to the Protestant William and Mary. But there was a time earlier when Catholicism was both intellectually and politically attractive, to the horror of traditional Protestant patriots. It was in this intellectual climate that Nell Gwyn claimed that, if she was a whore, at least she was a Protestant whore—unlike her French rival, the Duchess of Portsmouth. Newton would have applauded the theological part of her claim.
4. The main group of middle of the road Parliamentarians adhered to a lay, secularized Puritanism. They accepted restored episcopacy in the Church, purged of Laudianism. They had no difficulty in joining hands with moderate and patriotic ex-Cavaliers. Both were enemies of enthusiasm (remembering the mechanic preachers) and of Hobbist atheism; but they were even more opposed to the much more real danger of popery. Atheism had no respectable support; it was a fashion, a whim. It was perhaps more important as a charge to hurl at the Royal Society and the scientists than in itself; and even here Henry Stubbe thought it necessary to accuse the Society of opening the door to popery as well as to atheism.³⁹

Newton was of the postrevolutionary generation, and so had not known the former enthusiasm and present guilt of the revolutionaries. His Puritan upbringing ensured that by and large he shared the outlook of my last group—Puritans with the temperature reduced.

Caution was a natural result of the shock of the Restoration. Pepys was afraid someone might remember that after Charles I's execution in 1649 he had said that the right text to preach from would be "The memory of the wicked shall rot."⁴⁰ Men like Dryden, Waller, Cudworth, Henry More, no less than scientists like Wilkins, Wallis, Seth Ward, Goddard, and Petty, had complied with the revolutionary regimes far enough to be worried after 1660. Anyone with Puritan sympathies plus a reasonable desire to get on in the world would learn in the early sixties not to talk too much. Newton did want to get on, and he was cautious; yet there were limits beyond which he would not compromise. He refused to be ordained, and I think we must reasonably refer back to this period the very strong antipapist feelings which he always showed. On principle he was very tolerant, but he would never extend toleration to papists or atheists—any more than Milton or Locke would.

This is something which Newton's liberal biographers have found rather shocking and have tended to underestimate. I have already stressed the patriotic reasons for opposing popery. In view of the crypto-popery in high places under Charles and James II, Newton's attitude was also anti-court. In one of his manuscripts he declared that idolatry (i.e., popery) was even more dangerous than atheism "because apt by the authority of kings and under very specious pretences to insinuate itself into mankind." He added, prudently, that he referred to pre-Christian kings who enjoined ancestor worship, but the application to Charles and James was clear enough.⁴¹ "Was it the interest of the people to cheat themselves into slavery… or was it not rather the business of the court to do it?" Newton asked in a passage about Assyria which Professor Manuel very properly relates to the conflict with James II.⁴²

I should like to emphasize Newton's behavior in 1687, when in his first overt political action he led the antipapal party in Cambridge in opposition to James II's measures, at a time when such action needed a great deal of courage. It is in this light too I think that we should see his acceptance of public service after 1688. It need not have resulted merely from political or social ambition. Perhaps Newton really did think something important was at stake in the wars of the sixteen nineties. If England had been defeated, Catholicism and absolutism might have triumphed on a world scale. Newton believed that the Pope was Antichrist, for which he had sound Anglican backing; and all the best interpreters of the Biblical prophecies agreed that the sixteen nineties would be a climacteric decade: I return to this later. The Mint was not just a reward—or only in the sense that the reward of service is more service. We should think of Newton in the same terms as of Milton, sacrificing his eyes in the service of the English republic, or of Locke, going into exile with Shaftesbury—and also taking office after 1688; or of the gentle John Ray, who like Newton seldom referred to politics, which makes his paean on 1688 all the more noteworthy: "the yoke of slavery has been broken.… If only God grants us peace, we can rely upon prosperity and a real age of gold."⁴³ In 1714 Newton tried to get an act of Parliament passed declaring that Rome was a false church.⁴⁴ It must have been with considerable pleasure that in 1717 he used—to support a telescope—a maypole which had just been taken down from the Strand. For its erection in 1661 had been a symbol of the victory of those "popish elements" in church and state whose final defeat in 1714-15 must have delighted Newton.

VI

Nor was antipopery irrelevant to Newton's science. Copernicus' treatise was still on the papal Index; so were the writings of Descartes. Newton's dislike of mysteries and superstition is in the Protestant as well as the scientific tradition. And it also relates to his anti-Trinitarianism. In his Quaeries regarding the word óμoωσις his object was just as much to draw attention to papal corruptions as to argue a positive case. Anti-Trinitarianism seemed to Newton the logical consequence of Protestantism. He referred to Luther, Bullinger, Grotius, and others when discussing papal cor, ruptions of Scripture. But like so many others of Protestantism's logical consequences, this one had been drawn mainly by the most radical and socially subversive lower-class sects.⁴⁵ In England from 1583 to 1612 a number of anti-Trinitarians were burnt, including (1589) Francis Kett, grandson of the leader of the Norfolk rebels in 1549 and Christopher Marlowe's friend; and in 1612 Bartholomew Legate, cloth merchant, the last Englishman burnt for religious heresy.

Anti-Trinitarianism seems to have been endemic in England, despite this persecution. One of the abortive Laudian canons of 1640 was directed against its prevalence among the "younger or unsettled sort of people," and undergraduates were forbidden to own or read Socinian books. Like so many other heresies, anti-Trinitarianism flourished during the interregnum. In 1644 there was a Unitarian group in Coleman Street, that nest of heretics. In 1652 the first English translation of the Racovian' catechism was published; next year a life of Socinus appeared in English translation.⁴⁶ The most notorious anti-Trinitarian was John Bidle, son of a Gloucestershire tailor, who was in prison more often than not from 1645 onwards, and was the cause of a storm in the Parliament of 1654-55. Bidle was saved from savage punishment only by Cromwell's sending him, quite illegally, to the Scilly Isles. Released in 1658, he was arrested again after the Restoration and in 1662 died in prison at the age of 46.⁴⁷

One reason for the virulent persecution was the notorious fact that denial of the divinity of Christ had often been associated with social heresies. At the trial of Servetus in 1553 the subversive consequences of his heresy were strongly emphasized. The doctrines of Socinianism, thought an Oxford don in 1636, "are repugnant to our state and government"; he referred specifically to the pacifism and anarchism of its adherents.⁴⁸ "The fear of Socinianism," wrote Sir John Suckling in 1641, "renders every man that offers to give an account of religion by reason, suspected to have none at all."⁴⁹ In 1651 John Pordage was accused both of anti-Trinitarianism and of saying there would soon be no government in England; the saints would take over the property of the wicked. Pordage had connections with William Everard the Digger.⁵⁰ Socinus was a Mortalist, Mede warned Hartlib; the chief English Mortalist was the Leveller leader, Richard Overton.⁵¹

Conservatives were alarmed by the spread of anti-Trinitarianism. Bishop Joseph Hall in 1648.thought that Socinians should be exempted from the toleration he was prepared to extend to all other Christians (now that he was no longer in a position to do so). Twelve years later the London Baptists were equally intolerant of Socinianism.⁵² Nevertheless, anti-Trinitarians continued to exist, if only in small groups. But they were outlaws, specifically excluded from such toleration as was granted in 1689; in 1698 those who wrote or spoke against the Trinity were disabled from any office or employment. A Unitarian was executed in 1697, another imprisoned in 1703. In 1711 Newton's friend Whiston was expelled from Cambridge for Arianism. There was every reason for not proclaiming anti-Trinitarian sentiments. Milton and Locke shared Newton's caution in this respect.

VII

Newton's theology thus had radical associations. So had his studies of the Hebrew prophecies. Thanks to the work of Professor Manuel it is now recognized that this was a serious scholarly subject, occupying the best minds of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Once grant, indeed, that the whole of the Bible is an inspired book and to be taken literally, it is difficult to see how a Christian could fail to be interested in trying to date the end of the world and the last judgment. Servetus had expected the end of the world to come soon. An official declaration of Elizabeth's government in 1589 spoke of "this declining age of the world."⁵³ Leading British mathematicians, from Napier through Oughtred to Newton, worked on the problem. (Napier's Plaine Discovery of the Whole Revelation of St. John ran to twenty-one editions between 1593 and 1700.)

The quest received especial stimulus and a new twist from the revolution of the sixteen forties: eighty tracts are said to have been published on the subject by 1649. "The Second Coming is each day and hour to be expected," said one published in 1647.⁵⁴ "Though men be of divers minds as to the precise time," claimed another of 1653, "yet all concur in the nighness and swiftness of its coming upon us."⁵⁵ The raison d'etre of the sect of Muggletonians, the last witnesses, was that the end of the world was at hand. And many excited radicals thought it their duty to expedite the Second Coming of Christ by political action. "Men variously impoverished by the long troubles," observed the mathematician John Pell, "full of discontents and tried by long expectation of amendment, must needs have great propensions to hearken to those that proclaim times of refreshing—a golden age—at hand."⁵⁶ There were two not very significant military risings in London, in 1657 and 1661. Militant Fifth Monarchists were an embarrassment to the scholarly interpreters of the prophecies, just as plebeian atheists were an embarrassment to mechanic philosophers; but the two activities were quite distinct in each case.

In England the best known scholarly interpreters were Thomas Brightman and Joseph Mede. Brightmain, a supporter of the Presbyterian discipline, published his Revelation of St. John Illustrated in 1615; it was in its fourth English edition by 1644. He thought that the saints' reign of a thousand years had begun in 1300, that the Reformation had been a great turning point, and that now "truth doth get ground and strengthens every day more."⁵⁷ The abomination would be set up in 1650, and the year 1695 should see the utter destruction of Turkish power by the conversion of the Jews. "Then shall be indeed that golden age."⁵⁸

Mede was a botanist, an anatomist, a mathematician, and an astronomer, as well as a precursor of the Cambridge Platonists.⁵⁹ He too saw the years since about 1300 as a continuous upward movement whose phases were (1) the Albigensian and Waldensian heresies; (2) the Lutheran Reformation; (3) the reign of Elizabeth: (4) the Thirty Years' War; (5) would be the destruction of Rome—the Pope being of course Antichrist, (6) the destruction of the Turkish Empire and the conversion of the Jews; (7) the final judgment and the millennium."⁰ Mede was a Fellow of Christ's College. Cambridge, the college of the great Puritan William Perkins. At the time of his election (1602, the year of "our Mr. Perkins's" death) Mede was "thought to look too much to Geneva," and he was wary of publishing in the Laudian thirties; but he seems to have been a middle-of-the-road man.⁶" In 1642 Mede's Key of tl'e Revelation was published in English translation by order of the Long Parliament. The translator was Richard More, himself an M. P. and a Puritan writer, and the official character of the publication was enhanced by the inclusion of a preface by William Twisse, the Presbyterian divine who was Prolocutor of Parliamenit's Assembly of Divines gathered at Westminster, and who was so much of a Parliamentarian that in 1661 his remains were dug up from Westminster Abbey by royal command and thrown with others into a common pit. In 1635 William Twisse had said in a letter to his friend Mede "This old world of ours is almost at an end."⁶² In his Preface Twisse, in Baconian vein, observed that the opening of the world by navigation and commerce met at one and the same time with an increase of scientific and Biblical knowledge.

So though the Long Parliament encouraged this belief for its own propagandist purposes, perfectly sane and respectable scholars were taking the prophecies very seriously, and were concluding that they would soon be fulfilled. Milton spoke of Christ as "shortly-expected king"; Henry More thought the ruin of Antichrist was near.⁶³ In 1651 a scholarly friend of Brian Duppa, future bishop, expected the end of the world within a year;' in 1655 the great mathematician William Oughtred, a royalist, had "strong apprehensions of some extraordinary event to happen the following year, from the calculation of coincidence with the diluvian period." Perhaps Jesus Christ would appear to judge the world.⁶⁵

On dating testimony converged. Napier was believed to have predicted 1639 as the year of the destruction of the enemies of the church⁶⁶—a prophecy which must have been noted when episcopacy was overthrown in his native Scotland in that year. Vavasor Powell thought "1650.. is to be the saints' year of jubilee."⁶⁷ In Sweden and Germany the downfall of the Beast was widely expected in 1654 or 1655.⁶⁸ Not only Brightman and Mede had foretold great events in the sixteen fifties; so too had Christopher Columbus, George Wither, Samuel Hartlib, Sir Henry Vane, and Lady Eleanor Davies (though this volatile lady had predicted catastrophe for many earlier dates).⁶⁹

Once the sixteen fifties had passed, the next crucial period appeared likely to be the nineties. Brightman and Mede had both plumped for them. So did Nicholas of Cusa, Napier, Alsted, Henry Archer, Hanserd Knollys, Thomas Goodwin, Thomas Beverly the Behmenist, and John Mason.⁷⁰ The sixteen nineties saw Newton in the service of an English state now resolutely antipopish. The French Huguenot Jurieu thought that the destruction of Antichrist would occur between 1710 and 1715, following the defeat and protestantization of France.⁷¹ Mede and Whiston expected the world to end in 1715.

It is thus not so odd as it used to be thought that Newton's theological manuscripts are as bulky as his mathematical and scientific writings. Perry Miller was perhaps a little bold to conclude positively that, from about 1693, Newton wanted to find out exactly how close he was to the end of the world.⁷² Newton held, cautiously, that the prophecies would not be fully understood "before the last age of the world." But "amongst the interpreters of the last age," amongst whom he included Mede, "there is scarce one of note who hath not made some discovery worth knowing." "The great successes of late interpreters" suggested to Newton that "the last age, the age of opening these things," is "now approaching"; that God is about opening these mysteries." This gave him "more encouragement than ever to look into" them.⁷³ The point to emphasize is that this was an area of investigation which had traditionally attracted mathematical chronologists; Newton would have been in good company if he wished to throw light on the end of the world as well as on its beginning. And a number of serious scholars whom Newton respected, including Mede, had thought that great events might begin in the nineties. But again it was a subject which had radical associations and overtones; caution was needed.

VIII

By 1665-66 the Restoration honeymoon, such as it was, was over. Charles II's genuine attempt to continue Cromwell's policy of religious toleration had been defeated by Parliament. Between 1660 and 1662, 1760 ministers were driven out of the church. The Conventicle Act of 1664 and the Five Mile Act of 1665 expelled them from the towns which were the main centers of opposition. In 1665 England was involved in an aggressive commercial war with the Dutch ("What matters this or that reason? What we want is more of the trade the Dutch now have," said the Duke of Albermarle, with soldierly frankness⁷⁴). This war was such a fiasco that men began to look back to the days when Oliver Cromwell had led England to victory. The city turned against Charles II as Dutch ships sailed up the Medway. Even Dryden, even in "Annus Mirabilis," said of the king

He grieved the land he freed should be oppressed,
And he less for it than usurpers do.

(Dryden no doubt recalled his fulsome praise of Cromwell seven years earlier, in "Heroic Stanzas to the Glorious Memory of Cromwell.") Samuel Pepys, another former Cromwellian who now looked back nostalgically, recorded in February 1666 that his old patron the Earl of Sandwich feared there would be some very great revolutions in the coming months. Pepys himself was full of forebodings, and was getting money in against a foul day.⁷⁵ Fifteen years earlier the famous William Lilly had quoted a prophecy that "in 1666 there will be no king here or pretending to the crown of England." The Plague in 1665 and the Great Fire of London in 1666, together with the comets of 1664 and 1665, again made men think that the end of the world was at hand. Lilly was in trouble for having predicted the Fire.⁷⁶

In these troubled years 1665-66, Newton, in his retirement at Woolsthorpe, was discovering the calculus, the nature of white light, and universal gravitation. He made another discovery when the Heralds visited Lincolnshire in 1666: that whereas his father had never claimed to be more than a yeoman, he, Isaac, was a gentleman.

I tread warily in discussing Newton's elusive personality. There are some aspects of genius which it is futile to try to explain. But if we recall that Shakespeare abandoned the theatre just as soon as he could afford to, and set himself up as a gentleman in his native Warwickshire, we shall perhaps be the less surprised by the young Newton's improvement on his illiterate father's social aspirations in 1666, or by Newton's apparent abandonment of science for more gentlemanly activities from the nineties.

By 1666, too, or soon afterwards, Newton had decided not to marry Miss Storey. Why? "Her portion being not considerable," Stukeley tells us, "and he being a fellow of a college, it was incompatible with his fortunes to marry."⁷⁷ The reasoning is ungallant and unromantic, but it makes sense. Marriage would either have necessitated ordination and taking a living (to which we know Newton's objections); or else would have condemned him to the kind of vagabond life, dependent on the charity of others, which a man like John Ray led for twenty years after 1660.

I feign no Freudian hypotheses. But the fact that Newton, a posthumous child, never had a father, is surely relevant. He saw little enough of his mother after he was two years old, living first with his grandmother and then with an apothecary at Grantham. Only for a couple of years between the ages of sixteen and eighteen did he live with his mother, now widowed for the second time. So the decision not to marry Miss Storey would seem finally to have cut love out of Newton's life. Newton's later complaisance to his niece's affair with Halifax, which so bothered nineteenth-century biographers, may have been simply due to his not noticing.

Newton's theology denied the sonship of Christ, and though the Father exists he is a deus absconditus, in no close personal relation with his creatures. He is the first cause of a universe lacking all secondary qualities, all warmth and light and color. The eternal silence of those infinite spaces seems never to have frightened Newton. Professor Manuel comments on his history: "Newton never wrote a history of men.… The individuals mentioned in his histories … have no distinctive human qualities … Nations are … neutral as astronomical bodies; they invade and they are in their turn conquered … An interest in man's creations for their own sake, the aesthetic and the sensuous, is totally absent in his writings."⁷⁸

It would be naïve to suppose that these things would have been different if Newton had married Miss Storey. But the decision not to, apparently so easily taken and accepted, on prudential economic grounds, fits in with all we know of Newton's personality—his careful and minute keeping of accounts from boyhood until he became a very rich man indeed. Fontenelle in his Eloge rightly singled out Newton's frugality and carefulness for very special mention.⁷⁹

This leads on to consideration of Newton's caution. Again a little history dispels some of the legends that have grown up around it. Many men—like Pepys—had reason to be cautious in the Restoration period. Newton's reluctance to publish, moreover, was no more than was expected of someone who had aspirations to be thought a gentleman. The part played by Halley in getting the Principia published repeats almost verbatim Ent's description of his role in persuading Harvey to allow his De Generatione Aninmaliuni to be printed in 1651. One may suspect that both accounts are highly stylized, remembering how many seventeenth-century poets claimed to publish only under great pressure or after alleged attempts to pirate their poems. There were parallels among the scientists. Ralph Bathurst, physician, F.R.S., and president of Trinity College, Oxford, had a wife who "scorns that he should be in print."⁸⁰ Francis Willughby died reluctant to publish his Ornithology, which Ray issued posthumously.⁸¹

And of course in Newton's case there were very special reasons for caution. His anti-Trinitarian writings would have been dangerous to publish. For the same reason Milton, not normally averse to seeing himself in print, held back the De Doctrina Christiana; and Locke showed a similar reticence. Hobbes thought the bishops would like to bum him; Waller dared not praise Hobbes publicly. After 1688 Newton did once consider publishing his Historical Account of Two Notable Corruptions of Scripture, anonymously, in French, and on the continent; but he thought better even of that. His theological heresies had other consequences. Newton was firm enough in his convictions to refuse to be ordained; but not to risk leaving Cambridge. In 1675 the Royal Society induced Charles II to issue letters patent authorizing Newton to retain his fellowship although not a clergyman. By accepting this quite exceptional use of the dispensing power Newton gave hostages to fortune. Any scandal attaching to his name would certainly be made the occasion for drawing attention to his anomalous position, and might call the retention of his fellowship in question. This did not prevent Newton taking serious political risks in 1687, and all credit to him; but on that occasion his deepest convictions were stirred. On any lesser issue he would be likely to play safe. This, combined with a natural furtiveness of temperament, seems an entirely adequate explanation of his early reluctance to publish. By 1694 he was uninhibitedly discussing with David Gregory a whole range of projects for mathematical publications.⁸²

IX

Many of Newton's attitudes can, I suggest, be related to the post-Restoration desire for order, an order which should be as uncomplicated as possible. Puritanism and Baconian science had for many years been preparing for this ordered simplicity which Newton triumphantly achieved in the Principia, where the watchmaker God, "very well skilled in mechanics and geometry," presided over an abstract mathematical universe.⁸³ Similarly, Newton thought, there is a natural religion, "one law for all nations, dictated … to all mankind by the light of reason."⁸⁴ The same simplification informs Newton's anti-Trinitarianism, with its denial of the mystery of the Incarnation. Newton thought he found in the writings of Joseph Mede a single key which would likewise dispel the apparent mystery of the Biblical prophecies. "The prophets," Newton believed, "wrote in a language as certain and definite in its significance as any vulgar language." The heavens, the sun and moon, signify kings and rulers; the earth signifies inferior people; hades or hell "the lowest and most miserable of the people."⁸⁵ ("In Newton's pragmatization of myth and reduction of prophecy to plain history," said Professor Manuel, we can see "a reflection of the new realities of middle-class society"—the society which triumphed in England after the revolution of the mid-century.)⁸⁶ Similarly Mr. Forbes and Mr. Sherwood Taylor have suggested that in Newton's alchemical experiments he may have hoped to find a key to the presumed common language of the alchemical writings, and a synthesis of the micro-structure of matter which would have been the counterpart to his celestial and terrestrial mechanics.⁸⁷ In his concern with spelling reform, which goes back to his pre-Cambridge days, Newton wanted to find a "real character" which should replace Latin and be truly international because as abstract as mathematics. This was an interest he shared with Wallis, Evelyn, Wilkins, and many other Fellows of the Royal Society.⁸⁸ The quest for a simplified order in all intellectual spheres was very topical.

It is not unreasonable to compare Hobbes's simplification of the universe to matter and motion, of political science to individuals accepting sovereign power in the interests of order; or the literary classicism which was invented by the defeated royalists during the interregnum, yearning for decorum and order, and which became fashionable in the Restoration years of French influence, with the order-loving Dryden as its high priest.⁸⁹

And yet—and yet. As has often been pointed out, Newton was not wholly a Newtonian. Though he stripped the universe of secondary qualities, his experiments with colors enabled eighteenth-century landscape painters and poets to paint far more brightly than before. Contradictions lurk in the heart of his universe. In his desire to refute the Cartesian mechanism, Newton, like Pascal, postulated an irrational God behind the irrational force of gravity, a Deus absconditus but very real. "A continual miracle is needed to prevent the sun and the fixed stars from rushing together through gravity."⁹⁰ "A Being eternal, infinite, all-wise and most perfect, without dominion, is not God but only Nature," Newton wrote.⁹¹ Newton's God is as arbitrary as Hobbes's sovereign. Newton brought back into physics the notion of "attraction" which Boyle had devoted so much energy to expelling.⁹² (It is ironical that the lectures in which Bentley used Newton's new "occult qualities" to confute atheism should have been endowed by Boyle; and not untypical of the difficulties in which seventeenth-century scientists found themselves in their determination to have both God and science.)

"Those things which men understand by improper and contradictious phrases," Newton assured the too impetuous Dr. Bentley, "may be sometimes really in nature without any contradiction at all."⁹³ Newton accepted, dogmatically, experimental science and Biblical revelation as equally self-validating. "Religion and philosophy are to be preserved distinct. We are not to introduce divine revelations into philosophy, nor philosophical opinions into religion."⁹⁴ Science deals with second causes. The experimental method itself assumes that there is an intelligible order in nature which is law-abiding, "simple and always consonant to itself."⁹⁵ The first cause is a matter of revelation. Perhaps one day, when the Baconian program has been completed, science and revelation can be linked. Newton never doubted that there was an ultimate mechanical cause of gravitation, though he could not discover it experimentally. But he had realized that this was a far longer-term program than Bacon had ever dreamed. "The great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered" before the "boy playing on the sea-shore … now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary."⁹⁶ Newton may have worried lest the ocean itself might be annihilated before it was fully explored; but in fact the hope of linking science and revelation was abandoned before the explorers were out of sight of land.

Notes

¹ Ed. M. Claggett, Critical Problems in the History of Science (Madison, 1959), p. 855.

² For an example of the egregious misunderstanding into which ignorance of the historical context has led commentators on Thomas Hobbes, see Quentin Skinner, "The Ideological Context of Hobbes's Political Thought," Historical Journal, IX (1966), esp. pp. 313-17.

³ A. R. Hall, "Merton Revisited," History of Science, II (1963), passim.

⁴ Ed. A. R. and M. B. Hall, The Correspondence of Henry Oldenburg (University of Wisconsin Press, 1965-), I, p. 278.

⁵ Perry Miller, "The Marrow of Puritan Divinity," Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, XXXII (1935), p. 266.

⁶ T. Sprat, History of the Royal Society (1667), pp. 371-2; S. Butler, Characters and Passages from Notebooks (ed. A. R. Waller, Cambridge University Press, 1908), p. 458. Sprat's comparison was pretty trite by this date: see my Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution (Oxford University Press, 1965), pp. 25-6, which gives sources for quotations unidentified above.

⁷ H. Stubbe, Legends no Histories (1670), Sig. +2.

⁸ H. Stubbe, The Lord Bacons Relation of the Sweating-sickness examined (1671), Preface.

⁹ Oldenburg, Correspondence, II, p. 630.

¹⁰ North, Discourses upon Trade (1691), in J. R. McCulloch, Early English Tracts on Commerce (1952), p. 511.

¹¹ Sydenham, De Arte Medica (1669), in K. Dewhurst, Dr. Thomas Sydenham (Wellcome Historical Medical Library, 1966), p. 82.

¹² Lord Keynes, "Newton the Man," in the Royal Society's Newton Tercentenary Celebrations (Cambridge University Press, 1947), p. 27.

¹³ M. Boas, "The Establishment of the Mechanical Philosophy," Osiris, X (1952), p. 418.

¹⁴ The Times Literary Supplement, 25 October, 1963.

¹⁵ G. Fox, Journal (1901), I, p. 11.

¹⁶ Sir John Coniers, quoted by B. Manning, "The Nobles, the People and the Constitution," Past and Present, No. 9, p. 61; Mercurius Britannicus, No. 107, November 24-December 1, 1645. 1 owe this reference to the kindness of Mr. Ian McCalman.

¹⁷ Stubbe, Legends no Histories, Sig. + Iv.

¹⁸ R. Boyle, Works (1772), V, p. 397.

¹⁹ J. Tulloch, Rational Theology and Christian Philosophy in England in the 17th century (1874), II, pp. 278-9.

²⁰ C. Wren, Parentalia (1700), p. 201.

²¹ Ed. H. McLachlan, Sir Isaac Newton's Theological Manuscripts (Liverpool University Press, 1950), p. 17.

²² Ed. A. R. and M. B. Hall, Unpublished Scientific Papers of Isaac Newton (Cambridge University Press, 1961), p. 197.

²³ R. S. Westfall, Science and Religion in 17th century England (Yale University Press, 1958), pp. 107-11, 205-6, 219-20.

²⁴ Oldenburg to Samuel Hartlib, in The Correspondence of Henry Oldenburg, I, p. 277.

²⁵ See C. W. Foster, "Sir Isaac Newton's Family," Associated Architectural Societies' Reports and Papers, XXXIX (1928), pp. 1-62.

²⁶ See Joan Simon, "The Two John Angels," Transactions of the Leicestershire Archaeological and Historical Society, XXX I (1955), pp. 38-41.

²⁷ H. McLachlan, The Religious Opinions of Milton, Locke and Newton (Manchester University Press, 1941), P. 119.

²⁸ Sir D. Brewster, Memoirs of the Life, Writings and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton (Edinburgh, 1855), II, p. 318; F. E. Manuel, Isaac Newton, Historian (Cambridge University Press, 1963), pp. 16, 268.

²⁹ H. McLachlan, Sir Isaac Newton's Theological Manuscripts, pp. 55, 137.

³⁰ W. W. Rouse Ball, Cambridge Notes (Cambridge, 1921), p. 258; Brewster, op. cit., II, p. 338. The source for the last quotation (Whiston) is not of the most reliable.

³¹ H. M. Innes, Fellows of Trinity College (Cambridge University Press, 1941).

³² C. E. Raven, John Ray (2nd ed., 1950), pp. 57-8, 441, 461, 457. Ray reluctantly agreed to be ordained in December 1660, when he still hoped for a reasonable religious settlement.

³³Ibid., p. 28 and passim.

³⁴ I. Barrow, Theological Works (ed. A. Napier, 1859), IX, pp. 41-7; cf. R. H. Kargon, Atomism in England from Hariot to Newton (Oxford, 1966), pp. 78-9 and Chapter XI, passim.

³⁵ H. More, The Immortality of the Soul (1659), passim; Collection of Several Philosophical Writings. (1662), p. xv.

³⁶ Hall and Hall, Unpublished Scientific Papers of Isaac Newton, pp. 75, 187; A. R. Hall, "Sir Isaac Newton's Note-Book, 1661-5," Cambridge Historical Journal, IX (1948), pp. 243-4; Boas, "The Establishment of the Mechanical Philosophy," p. 505.

³⁷ Butler, Characters and Passages from Notebooks, p. 466.

³⁸ J. Oldham, Poems (Centaur Press, 1960), p. 178.

³⁹ Stubbe, Legends no Histories, Sig.*

⁴⁰ Pepys, Diary (ed. H. B. Wheatley, 1946), I, p. 253.

⁴¹ McLachlan, Sir Isaac Newton's Theological Manuscripts, pp. 49-51, 131-2. Cf. Pepys's fear of Catholicism in the early sixties—all the more significant in a man who was later himself to be accused of papist leanings.

⁴² Manuel, Isaac Newton, Historian, p. 116.

⁴³ Raven, John Ray, pp. 251-2.

⁴⁴ Brewster, op. cit., II, pp. 351-2.

⁴⁵ E. M. Wilbur, A History of Unitarianism (Harvard University Press, 1946), chapter 2 and passim.

⁴⁶ [Anon.], The Life of that Incomparable man Faustus Socinlus (1653).

⁴⁷ J. Bidle, The Apostolical and True Opinion concerning the Holy Trinity (1653), passim. I have used the 1691 edition, which contains a Life of Bidle.

⁴⁸ Ed. F. S. Boas, The Diary of Thomas Crosfield (1935), pp. 85-6.

⁴⁹ Sir J. Suckling, An Account of Religion by Reason (1641), The Preface. Cf. F. Osbom, Advice to a Son (1656): the Socinians are "looked upon as the most chemical and rational part of our many divisions" (in Miscellaneous Works, 11th ed., 1722, p. 91).

⁵⁰ J. Pordage, Innocence appearing through the dark Mists of Pretended Guilt (1655), passim; cf G. P. Gooch, The History of English Democratic Ideas in the 17th century (1927), p. 266. Pordage denied the accusations.

⁵¹ J. Mede, Works (ed. J. Worthington, 1664), II, p. 1082; [Richard Overton], Mans Mortallitie (Amsterdam, 1644), passim.

⁵² J. Hall, Pax Terris (1648); J. Waddington, Congregational History, 1567-1700 (1874), p. 559.

⁵³ H. S. Bennett, English Books and Readers, 1558 to 1603 (Cambridge University Press, 1965), p. 225.

⁵⁴ [Anon.], Doomes-Day (1647), p. 6.

⁵⁵ J. Rogers, Sagrir (1653). By 1666 the Fifth Monarchy, Rogers predicted, "must be visible in all the earth."

⁵⁶ John Pell to Secretary Thurloe, March 1655, in The Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell (ed. R. Vaughan, 1839), I, p. 156.

⁵⁷ T. Brightman, The Revelation of St. John Illustrated (4th ed., 1644), pp. 378-81, 520, 824; cf. pp. 109-12, 124-5, 136-7, 157 and passim.

⁵⁸ Brightman. A most Comfortable Exposition of the last and most difficult pages of the Prophecies of Daniel (1644), pp. 966-7; A Commentary on Canticles (1644), p. 1077 (pagination of these last two is continuous with Brightman's Revelation, with which they are bound).

⁵⁹ Mede, Works, 1, p. lxv.

⁶⁰ Mede, The Key of The Revelation (2nd ed., 1656), pp. 114-25; Works, I, pp. xlviii-li.

⁶¹ Mede, Works, I, pp. lxv, xxxiv; II, pp. 978, 995.

⁶² Mede, Works, 11, p. 979; cf. pp. 1006-7.

⁶³ H. More, Theological Works (1708), p. 633.

⁶⁴ Ed. Sir Gyles Isham, The Correspondence of Bishop Brian Duppa and Sir Justinian Isham, 1650-60 (Northamptonshire Record Society, 1955), p. 37.

⁶⁵ Ed. E. S. de Beer, The Diary of John Evelyn (Oxford University Press, 1955), III, p. 158.

⁶⁶ [Anon.], The Popes Spectacles (1623), p. 1083.

⁶⁷ V. Powell, Saving Faith (1651), p. 92.

⁶⁸ M. Roberts, review in Journal of Ecclesiastical History, VIII (1957), pp. 112-15.

⁶⁹ Brightman, Daniel, p. 967; Mede, Remaines on some Passages in Revelation (1650), p. 33; J. Merrien, Christopher Columbus (1958), p. 223; Wither, Camnpo-Musae (1643); Hartlib, Clavis Apocalyptica (1651); my Puritanism and Revolution (1958), p. 327; I owe Lady Eleanor Davies to the kindness of Professor Ivan Roots.

⁷⁰ J. Trapp, Commentary of the New Testament (1958—first published 1647), pp. 250, 420; my Puritanism and Revolution, p. 329; G. F. Nuttall, The Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith and Experience (1946), p. 109; D. P. Walker, The Decline of Hell (Chicago University Press, 1964), p. 245.

⁷¹ G. H. Dodge, The Political Theory of the Huguenots of the Dispersion (Columbia University Press, 1947), pp. 35-8.

⁷² P. Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (Harvard University Press, 1956), p. 228.

⁷³ Newton, Opera Quae Exstant Omnia (ed. S. Horsley, 1775), V. pp. 448, 450, 474.

⁷⁴ A. T. Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783 (1890), p. 107.

⁷⁵ Pepys, Diary, IV, p. 366, V, pp. 218, 283-4, 328, VI, p. 113.

⁷⁶ W. Lilly, The Lord Merlins Prophecy Concerning the King of Scots (1651), p. 4; Monarchy or no Monarchy in England (1651), passim.

⁷⁷ E. Turnor, Collections for the History of the Town and Soke of Grantham (1806), p. 179.

⁷⁸ Manuel, op. cit., pp. 137-8, 193.

⁷⁹The Elogium of Sir Isaac Newton, by Monsieur Fontenelle (1728), p. 32.

⁸⁰ A. Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, I, Life of Wood (Ecclesiastical History Society, Oxford, 1848), p. 188.

⁸¹Op. cit., Preface.

⁸² Ed. H. W. Turnbull, Correspondence of Sir Isaac Newton, (1959-), III, pp. 335-6, 338.

⁸³Opera Quae Exstant Omnia, V, p. 432.

⁸⁴ McLachlan, Sir Isaac Newton's Theological Manuscripts, p. 52. Wilkins has been described as "the English godfather of natural or moral religion" (G. McColley, "The Ross Wilkins Controversy," Annals of Science, III, pp. 155, 186).

⁸⁵ McLachlan, Sir Isaac Newton's Theological Manuscripts, pp. 119-21; Newton, Opera Quae Exstant Omnia. V, pp. 306-10; cf. T. Brightman, The Revelation of St. John Illustrated, pp. 232-3, 273-92; J. Mede, Works, I, Sig.* xxx 4; J. Mede, The Key of the Revelation (1656), Sig. A4.

⁸⁶ Manuel, op. cit., p. 121.

⁸⁷ R. J. Forbes, "Was Newton an Alchemist?," Chymia, II (1949), pp. 35-6; F. Sherwood Taylor, "An Alchemical Work of Sir Isaac Newton," Ambix, V (1956), p. 64; cf. I. B. Cohen, "Newton in the Light of Recent Scholarship," Isis, LI (1960), pp. 503-4.

⁸⁸ R. W. V. Elliott, "Isaac Newton's 'Of an Universall Language,'" Modern Language Review, LII (1957), pp. 1-18; cf. Elliott, "Isaac Newton as Phonetician," ibid., XLIX (1954), pp. 5-12.

⁸⁹ P. W. Thomas, "John Berkenhead in Literature and Politics, 1640-1663" (unpublished Oxford D.Phil. Thesis, 1962), passim.

⁹⁰Correspondence of Sir Isaac Newton, III, pp. 334, 336, 355; cf. A. J. Snow, Matter and Gravity in Newton's Physical Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 1926), passim.

⁹¹ Hall and Hall, Unpublished Scientific Papers of Isaac Newton, p. 363 (my italics).

⁹² Boas, "The Establishment of the Mechanical Philosophy," pp. 420-2, 479, 489 and passim; cf. Turnor, Collections for the History of the Town and Soke of Grantham, pp. 172-3.

⁹³Opera Quae Exstant Omnia, IV, p. 439.

⁹⁴ McLachlan, Sir Isaac Newton's Theological Manuscripts, p. 58.

⁹⁵ Newton, Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (transl. A. Motte, ed. F. Cajori, University of California Press, 1934), pp. 398-9.

⁹⁶ L. T. More, Isaac Newton: A Biography (New York, 1962), p. 664. The famous phrase curiously recalls one of Donne's sermons: "Divers men may walk by the sea-side and, the same beams of the sun giving light to them all, one gathereth by the benefit of that light pebbles or speckled shells for curious vanity, and another gathers precious pearl or medicinal amber by the same light. So the common light of reason illumines us all; but one employs this light upon the searching of impertinent vanities, another by a better use of the same light finds out the mysteries of religion; and when he hath found them, loves them not for the light's sake, but for the natural and true worth of the thing itself.… But … if thou attend the light of natural reason, and cherish that and exalt that, so that that bring thee to a love of the Scriptures, and that love to a belief of the truth thereof… thou shalt see that thou by thy small light hast gathered pearl and amber, and they [worldly men] by their great lights nothing but shells and pebbles; they have determined the light of nature upon the book of nature, this world; and thou hast carried the light of nature higher" (ed. G. R. Potter and E. M. Simpson, The Sermons of John Donne, California University Press, III, 1957, pp. 359, 361). It is too dreadful to think of Newton reading Donne, even Donne's sermons; but the passage was so relevant to the problems of the scientists that it was no doubt borrowed by many preachers in the Cambridge of Newton's youth.