SOURCE: "Newton's God of Dominion: The Unity of Newton's Theological Scientific, and Political Thought," in Essays on the Context, Nature, and Influence of Isaac Newton's Theology, by James E. Force and Richard H. Popkin, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990, pp. 75-102.

[In the following essay, Force argues that Newton's conception of a "God of Dominion" is the key factor that unites and informs all aspects of Newton's studies.]

Introduction: The Hues and Shades of Newton's Genius (or Torturing a Metaphor)

Today, when we consider Newton and his work, there is a tendency among both popularizers and scholars to see Newton through a prism, so to speak, and to study Newton in refraction just as Newton studies light by passing it through a prism and breaking it down into its primary colors. Newton is seen, at different times, as a heretical theologian, a scientific genius, or a politically connected man of affairs. There often seem to be as many Newtons as there are primary colors and we study Newton by studying the many manifestations of his multi-hued genius independently. Failing to appreciate the synthetic unity in Newton's thought is the inevitable result of overemphasizing one or another of its integrated components.

Primarily, of course, Newton is for us the father of modern, i.e., of our, physics. We mean it as a compliment to Newton when we induct him into our Pantheon of scientific heroes whose work has culminated in our scientific world-view and our splendid technological achievements. In his recent trashing of American universities and American university students, Allan Bloom unhesitatingly enlists Newton in his personal cult of the custodians of our civilization. Bloom explains that the differences between ancients and moderns

is not like the differences between Moses and Socrates, or Jesus and Lucretius, where there is no common universe of discourse but more like the differences between Newton and Einstein. It is a struggle for the possession of rationalism by the rationalists.'

In Bloom's view, Newton and Einstein share a "common universe of discourse" which is rational and, therefore, scientific. Newton is one of the intellectually respectable elite because of hisrationality; he certainly would have hated rock and roll.

The three-hundredth anniversary of the publication of Newton's Principia on July 5, 1987, has provided the occasion for a number of conferences and lectures celebrating that "watershed work" with its rigorous experimental method in alliance with an elegant mathematical description of the natural forces at work in the frame of nature. To quote one elegy commemorating this tricentenary:

In short, Newton opened up one of the main avenues of modern scientific research and showed how to follow it. No other figure in the history of science has done as much except Charles Darwin, whose 19th-century work with evolution established an equally rigorous strategy for the scientific study of the development of organic life. This is why even the greatest scientists today hold Newton in awe.

Earlier, the same writer states:

The next time you're flying, you might give a thought to Sir Isaac Newton. Engineers need modern quantum theory to design the aircraft's electronics. But Newton's classical mechanics still accounts for the jet engine's thrust, the aerodynamic forces that hold the craft up, and gravity's tug, which tries to pull it down. Furthermore, were your plane forced down in the wildemess or at sea, the satellite that would relay its search and rescue signal travels on an orbit that Newton showed how to calculate 300 years ago.²

Color the right stuff of Newton's steely-eyed, essentially modern, scientific rationalism the blue of the wild blue yonder or the jet black of deep space. One refracted image of Newton as seen through the prism of anachronism, then, is Newton the heroic scientist who has, with other scientific hall-of-famers (Darwin, Einstein) "charted the course" of modern thought. An intermediate shade is, of course, the blue-black of Newton the mathematician.³

There is a second Newton: the heretical theologian who disbelieves in the Holy Trinity and believes in the literal fulfillment of the apocalyptic scenario in the book of Revelation. The pioneers in revealing this second Newton have been Frank E. Manuel and Richard S. Westfall. Westfall's work has been particularly valuable both in its gargantuan scope and in its absolutely meticulous precision. Westfall's glorious biography of Newton, Never At Rest,4 establishes a new paradigm of excellence and comprehensiveness in the study of Newton. Westfall is the only writer in the world today who knows intimately all the hues and shades in Newton's rainbow: the blues of his scientific rationalism, the reds of his theological concerns ("reds," perhaps, because of the apocalyptic destruction of the earth by fire [Rev. 20:9] or, perhaps, because of Newton's identification of the woman arrayed in purple and scarlet [Rev. 17:4] as the Church of Rome), the greens of a former member of parliament who perhaps owes his job at the Mint to his political connections among influential Court Whigs.

But, in considering the relationship between Newton's theology and Newton's science, for example, Westfall holds to studying each hue separately. It is highly significant when a scholar of Westfall's attainments and stature writes:

Having studied the entire corpus of his theological papers, I remain unconvinced that it isvalid to speak of a theological influence on Newton's science. I say specifically "theological influences," not "religious influence." The second can, I believe, be readily shown and is generally admitted. A theological influence, by which I mean the influence of Newton's central Arian position and his allied view of the prophecies, is another matter. As I indicated earlier, perhaps we can find the source of the God of the General Scholium in his Arianism. It is not clear which came first, however, his view of God or his Arianism; and even if we grant the influence we remain still on a plane of high generality from which it is difficult if not impossible to demonstrate an influence on some concrete element of his science.

Westfall concludes that he is

inclined to examine the relation [between Newton's "theology" and his science] from the other side. At the end of the 17th century, theology was the study with a firmly established, long dominant role of [sic] European civilization, a role then beginning to be challenged by the early success of modern science. It appears to me that we are more likely to find the flow of influence moving from science, the rising enterprise, toward theology, the old and (as we know from hindsight) fading one.⁵

Westfall's view on this point issues from his complete mastery of all the sources, manuscript and printed, primary and secondary. It is not a view to be lightly challenged. On Westfall's view, Newton probably must remain permanently refracted into scientist and theologian. If there is any leakage across wavelengths, it is Newton's science which colors his theology and not vice-versa.

Refracted, finally, through the prism of our 20th-century perspective is a third Newton who is a political appointee (Master of the Mint) in his nation's capital. In his biography, Westfall has detailed Newton's political life and involvements: his efforts to obstruct James II's Catholic candidates for positions in the university, his service as a member of parliament, his interest in the success of the Revolution, and his (and his niece's) relationship—whatever it may have been—with the Whig minister, Baron Halifax of Halifax (Charles Montague).

Regarding the case of Newton and Halifax, Westfall recounts Voltaire's story of his London visit in the 1720's (first published by Voltaire in 1757) in which Voltaire writes:

I thought in my youth that Newton made his fortune by his merit. I supposed that the Court and the City of London named him Master of the Mint by acclamation. No such thing. Isaac Newton has a very charming niece, Madame Conduitt, who made a conquest of the minister Halifax. Fluxions and gravitation would have been of no use without a pretty niece.⁶

Westfall examines the tangled skein of evidence surrounding this allegation and concludes that it seems to be dubious but that we lack the necessary data to pass final judgement. The important point for Westfall is that "The Principia remains the Principia for us whatever the relation of Catherine Barton to Halifax and whatever Newton's role in the affair."⁷ Newton's science remains as uncolored by his politics as his theology.

By way of contrast, Margaret C. Jacob has shown how Newton's science, in the hands oflatitudinarian churchmen between 1689 and 1721, becomes the basis for a political argument to support the status quo and, consequently, their own position, together with their Whig sponsors, in the ruling elite. From the orderly and law-abiding behavior of matter in Newton's frame of nature, these latitudinarian churchmen argue by analogy to the fittingness of order and law-abiding behavior in the socio-political fabric. As above in the "world natural," so below in the "world politic."⁸ Jacob is the first writer to have emphasized the connection between Newtonian science and the political theorizing of his day and to have treated the subject in depth. Nevertheless, Jacob's focus is on the latitudinarians and their use of Newtonian science to bolster the established church and state and not on any connection which Newton may have held between his theology or his science and his political viewpoint.

Having briefly traced how Newton has been refracted into various shades and hues, my project in this essay is to take these shades of Newton and to send them back through the lens of Newton's incandescent genius. As Newton himself demonstrates, the whiteness of the sun's light is compounded of all the primary colors⁹ and so, too, is the blinding white light of Newton's intellect.

I want to argue that Newton's theology, not just his religion, influences his science every bit as much as his science influences the rigorous textual scholarship of his theology. The key to understanding the integrated nature of Newton's thought is to appreciate fully his view about the nature of God. His God is the Lord God of Dominion. Westfall is quite right to observe that it is possible to find the "source" for Newton's God of Dominion, articulated so clearly in the General Scholium, in Newton's Arianism. But, if that is the case, then one must acknowledge a true influence of theology upon all aspects of Newton's thought if it can be demonstrated that Newton's God of Dominion finally comes to be seen by Newton as underlying his various other theories in science, metaphysics, epistemology, and politics. At least a sketch of the possible role of Newton's Lord God as the metaphysical underpinning for his theology, science, and politics is the purpose of this paper. I maintain that Newton's God of Dominion is the key to understanding how he finally integrates his world and his theories in whatever field into a synthetic unity of a startling coherence. I do not claim that this voluntaristic theory of the nature of God develops first in any historical sense although it seems clear that Newton comes to this view early in his career at the time when he becomes a committed Arian in the early 1670's. I claim only that Newton's view concerning God's dominion—a theory in which Newton emphasizes God's totally free will in conjunction with his absolute power—finally becomes the common denominator in all his intellectual work of whatever shade or hue and so provides the key to understanding the systematic unity and coherence of all of his thought. It doesn't matter whether Newton's science or his mathematics precede, in any temporal sense, his theory of the nature of God. Once he comes to that metaphysical view—and he comes to it quite early—it provides the background for all his other work and provides the key to seeing how Newton's true genius is greater in the aggregate whole than it is in any of its refracted parts.

Theology: Newton's God of Dominion

Westfall rightly argues that it is impossible to determine whether Newton's philosophical conception of the nature of God precedes his Christological doctrine of Arianism.'" It probably is the case that they develop in Newton's thought simultaneously because they are two sides to the same coin.

The doctrines of Arius began to emerge following the year 31 8 A.D., when Arius, Presbyter of Alexandria (260-336 A. D.), first challenged the eternity of Christ thus precipitating the "Arian Crisis" in the early church which culminated, in one sense, with the rejection of Arius' doctrines and the adoption of the Trinitarian Athanasian creed in 325 A. D. at the Council of Nicaea. In fact, this controversy continued to rage throughout the fourth century.

For Arius, there is a fundamental distinction between God, the Creator, and all his creation. Jesus is one of God's creatures, he is a "work" of God, who is neither co-eternal nor co-substantial with God the Father. Jesus is sinful mankind's redeemer, the divine son of God, but only because of the power and will of the Lord God.

The diminution of Christ's nature and powers in the Arian doctrine involves necessarily the augmentation of the powers and nature of God the Father. All God's creatures, even Jesus Christ, are under the dominion of God the Father, the true Lord God.

But whether Newton's' theological doctrine of Arianism precedes or follows Newton's voluntaristic theory of the dominion of God (again, I think it more likely that they are logically connected and, hence, emerge together) both emerge early. Faced with the necessity of entering the Anglican priesthood to retain his fellowship at Trinity College, in the early 1670's Newton began an intensive study of theology and of the history of the early church. From the period between 1672 and 1675 there is a sheet summarizing Newton's conclusions about both the nature of Christ and the nature of God and Father. Proposition 5, for example, proclaims that "The Son in several places confesseth his dependance on the will of the father."¹¹ Proposition 10 is even more instructive:

It is a proper epithete of ye father to be called almighty. For by God almighty we always understand yc Father. Yet this is not to limit the power of ye Son, for he doth what soever he seeth ye Father do; but to acknowledge y' all power is originally in ye Father & that ye son hath no power in him but w' derives from ye father for he professes that of himself he can do nothing.¹²

Forty years later, we find Newton repeating this combined Arian Christology and voluntaristic metaphysical theory emphasizing the ultimate will and power of the Lord God of Dominion. And we find it both in his manuscripts and in his General Scholium to the second edition of the Principia published in 1713. No more clear statement of Newton's view of the nature of God's dominion exists than the General Scholium:

The Supreme God is a Being eternal, infinite, absolutely perfect; but a being, however perfect, without dominion, cannot be said to be Lord God; for we say, my God, your God, the God of Israel, the God of Gods, and Lord of Lords; but we do not say, my Eternal, your Eternal, the Eternal of Israel, the Eternal of God; we do not say, my Infinite, or my Perfect: these are titles which have no respect to servants. The word God usually signifies Lord; but every lord is not a God. It is the dominion of a spiritual being which constitutes a God: a true, supreme, or imaginary dominion makes a true, supreme, or imaginary God.¹³

For Newton, only a God of true and supreme dominion is a supreme and true God. A manuscript note from 1710 reaffirms the Christological consequences of this metaphysicalvoluntarism regarding the deity. Newton still, forty years after his intensive theological researches of the early 70's, views Jesus as deriving from God a

unity of dominion, the Son receiving all things from the Father, being subject to him executing his will, sitting in his throne and calling him his God, and so is but one God with the Father as a King and viceroy are but one King. For the word God relates not to the metaphysical nature of God but to dominion.¹⁴

Ordinary mortals are no less under the dominion of God than Jesus Christ. In an entry to his theological notebook from the 1670's there is a tantalizing hint that Newton is much impressed by St. Paul's comparison of the relation between God and man to that between a potter and his clay. In an entry entitled simply "Predestinatio," Newton quotes the famous ninth chapter of Romans where St. Paul places the eternal fate of men under the dominion of their supreme Lord God:

What shall we say then? Is there unrighteousness with God? God forbid. For he saith to Moses, I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, & I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion. So than it is not of him that willeth, or of him y^t runneth, but of God that sheweth merch. For y^e scripture saith unto Pharoh Even for this same purpose have I raised thee up that I might shew my power in thee, & that my name might be declared throughout all ye Earth. Therefore he hath mercy on whom he will have mercy, & whom he will he hardeneth. Thou wilt say then unto me; why doth he yet find fault? For who hath resisted his will? Nay but 0 man, who art thou that repliest against God? Shall ye thing formed say to him y' formed it why hast thou made me thus? Hath not the potter power over the clay of ye same lump to make one vessel unto honour and another unto dishonour?¹⁵

God's very "deitas" results, on Newton's view, from his "dominium" over the whole of his creation. For Newton, the nature of God's "dominium" is his infinite will and omnipotent power over everything else that there is. Everything that God created in the world of physical nature such as drops of dew (Job 38:28), the world of natural inconstant creatures (Deut. 32:18), the human world including inconstant sons (Isa. 1:2), even Jesus Christ, falls under the dominion of God. All his creatures are consequently his servants and all the rest of his physical creation, the fabric of nature itself, is likewise owned, possessed, and used in accord with the dictates of God's will and power.

Newton's theory about the dominion of God is central to all the other aspects of his theology in particular and to the rest of his thought in general. For example, one of his central theological concerns throughout his life is to combat what he calls idolatry. Worshipping anything but the Lord God of true and supreme dominion lessens the absolute nature of God's dominion and constitutes idolatry. The Roman Church is his chief target beginning with his theological notebook of the early 70's owing to its Trinitarian creed which lessens the Father's dominion by promoting the co-eternality and co-substantiality of the Son. "Never," he writes, "was Pagan Idolatry so bad as the Roman."¹⁶

Newton's studies in the early 70's render him incapable of submitting to ordination in the Church of England which would have required him to subscribe to the 39 Articles (including its loathsomely idolatrous Trinitarian creed.) Yet, in Newton's day, most fellowships required ordination. By early 1675, as his deadline for taking orders approached, Newton fully expected to have to leave Cambridge and vacate his fellowship. At the eleventh hour, by nothing less than a Royal dispensation exempting in perpetuity holders of the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics from the necessity of entering the church, Newton, who had held the Lucasian Chair since 1669, was enabled to remain in the university as a very low-profile, i.e., silent, Arian heretic and not as a public, if insincere, subscriber to an idolatrous creed.¹⁷

Even more importantly, Newton's voluntaristic God of Dominion, with his concomitant Arian Christology, directly influences his views on Biblical prophecy. Newton begins an intensive study of prophetic language in the very early 1680's and returns to it between 1705 and 1710. Newton is vitally concerned with what the language of the prophets means because the prophecies, properly interpreted, illustrate the extent of God's dominion over his creation. Westfall is absolutely right that all the theological manuscripts on the interpretation of prophecy, with Newton's emphasis on "methodising" the prophetic language, reveal the rigor and orderliness of a great scientific mind. But the most important aspect of the prophetic prediction of events to come and the cataloging of the historical fulfillment of them is that it is Newton's favorite method for demonstrating God's providential dominion. In the famous reply to Bentley of December 10, 1692, when Newton rejoices in Bentley's adaptation of his Principia for the purposes of developing a design argument, he goes on to say that, in addition to the design argument of natural religion,

There is yet another argument for a Deity wch I take to be a very strong one, but till y' principles on wch tis grounded be better received I think it advisable to let it sleep.¹⁸

It seems clear to me that behind this passing reference are the many years of disciplined and historical work revealed only in the many manuscripts on the interpretation of fulfilled prophecies. Newton permitted their argument to continue sleeping for political reasons.

For Newton, the central point in studying the prophecies in such detail over so many years is just because they illustrate the dominion of God over nature and man. As Westfall rightly puts it:

To Newton, the correspondence of prophecy with fact demonstrated the dominion of God, a dominion exercised over human history even as it is exercised over the natural world.¹⁹

In addition to prophetic predictions regarding natural and political events already fulfilled and of which we have testimony from the sacred prophets, there are those prophecies regarding natural and political events predicted for the future but which remain unfulfilled. It is within this context that one must understand Newton's keen interest in the millennial prophecies. By the 1670's he regards the future prophecies recorded in Revelation to be especially preserved by God for mankind's instruction: "There [is] no book in all the scriptures so much recommended & guarded by providence as this."²⁰

In the 80's, Newton begins to spell out his differences with the standard interpretation of the Apocalypse of St. John. In the standard view of the Puritans in the preceding generation, the opening of the seventh and final seal (Rev. 8:1-5) is often identified with the diplomatic and political triumph of the Catholic Church at the Council of Constantinople in 381 A. D. To this date is often added 1260years, the "time, two times, and half a time" of Daniel 8:25 when, it is hoped, the messianic kingdom will commence.

The equation of this obscure text from Daniel with the figure of 1260 years results from interpreting one "time" to equal one year. "Time, two times, and half a time," therefore, equals 3 and Vi years. Assuming a year to equal 360 days, 3 and V2 such years equals 1260 days. This figure corresponds to Rev. 12:6 according to which:

And the woman [identified as God's persecuted apostolic church] fled into the wilderness, where she hath a place prepared of God, that they should feed her there a thousand two hundred and threescore days.

One obtains 1260 years from the figure of 1260 days by the simple and widespread expedient among Biblical interpreters in Newton's day of assuming that one day equals one year. This dating places the advent of Christ's messianic kingdom at 1641 A. D. (381 A. D. + 1260 years.) As the decades slip by the date is adjusted forward by dating the opening of the seventh seal forward from the year 381 A. D.

By Newton's day, scholars try to preserve the framework of the Book of Revelation by accommodating it to a new date for the opening of the seventh seal. William Whiston, Newton's hand-picked successor in the Lucasian Chair at Cambridge, dates the opening of the seventh seal from 476 A. D. when Odoacer and his Goths capture the last Emperor of the West, Romulus Augustulus and relegate him to a Campenian villa on a pension. By 1736, consequently (476 A. D. + 1260 years), Whiston expects momentous events at least to begin which will lead subsequently to the millennial reign of Christ on earth and the rest of the apocalyptic scenario described in Revelation. Up to and after that date, Whiston is busily engaged in illustrating how the penultimate events in Revelation have come to pass in the events of contemporary history, a current history project which he states is first suggested to him by Isaac Newton and which results in Whiston's set of Boyle Lectures The Accomplishment of Scripture Prophecy (London, 1708).²¹

In the early 70's, Newton spells out his own differences with other millennial interpreters. Newton dates the beginning of the 1260 year period to begin with the year 607 A. D. (an event he correlates with the blowing of the fourth trumpet in Rev. 8:12-3) when the idolatrous Trinitarianism of the Roman Church triumphs. Because of his intensive historical research into the barbarian invasions of the fifth and sixth centuries, Newton reckons that by 607 A. D. the invading barbarians—all of whom were Arian Christians when they began despoiling the empire—had been converted to the idolatrous trinitarian apostasy of the conquered empire.²² In the 80's at least, Newton does not expect the second coming and the subsequent messianic kingdom to begin until the middle of the nineteenth century (607 A. D. + 1260 years).

The central point behind this recounting of Newton's basic view of prophecies is to show that the scriptural histories of these prophesied events, predicted by God and then—through his will and power—brought to pass, illustrate God's dominion and providential control over creation. Scriptural history reveals a continuously present God, not simply a God who observes events. His will and power direct both the "world politic" and, as we shall see in the next section, the "world natural."One extremely important consequence of this view is that God has permitted the spread of apostasy, with its eternally damning consequences, through his dominion. Just as God permits the apostasies of the scribes and pharisees in Christ's day and those of the Trinitarian Catholic Church in the 4th century (a virulent apostasy which continues down to his own day), so he permits those of any Trinitarian Protestant sect in Newton's time. Newton writes of his contemporary leamed apostates:

Are not these men like the Scribes and Pharisees who would not attend to the law and the prophets but required a signe of Christ? Wherefore if Christ thought it just to deny a signe to that wicked and adulterate generation notwithstanding that they were God's own people, [even] and the Catholique Church; much more may God think it just that this generation should be permitted to dy in their sins, who do not onely like the Scribes neglect but trample upon the law and the Prophets …

And from this consideration may also appear the vanity of those men who regard splendor of churches and measure them by the external form and constitution. Whereas it is more agreeable to God's designe that his church appear contemptible and scandalous to the world of men. For this end doubtless he suffered the many revoltings of the Jewish Church under the Law, and for the same end was the grand Apostasy to happen under the Gospel. Rev. [sic].²³

Newton is convinced that God possesses dominion over the wise who will understand as well as over the wicked who, through vanity and idolatry, will not. Newton does not cite which text he has in mind from Revelation in the above quotation, but I would suggest the following from Chap. 17, verses 17-8, which suggests Newton's point that the forces of iniquity fulfill the purposes of the Lord God because God chooses them for that purpose and enables them to succeed in their iniquities. Of the success of the harlot sitting astride the beast, St. John writes:

God has put it into their hearts to carry out his purpose by being of one mind and giving over their royal power to the beast, until the words of God be fulfilled. And the woman that you saw is the great city which has dominion over the kings of the earth.

But, so what? So what if Newton is an extreme metaphysical voluntarist who emphasizes the absolute primacy of God's will and power over creation (even at the expense of God's love and, apparently, God's intellect), who therefore simultaneously adopts an Arian Christology, and who is also, consequently, keenly interested in understanding historically fulfilled events in prophetic history and prophetically predicted future acts of God as testimony to God's dominion? Is not the Principia still the Principia? What has Newton's science really got to do, beyond the superficial level of the Newtonian design argument, with Newton's voluntaristic theory of the absolute dominion of the Lord God?

The short answer is that, for us, Newton's theology is not necessarily related to his science in any way. The longer, less anachronistically refracting, answer is that, for Newton, God's real and absolute dominion profoundly affects his metaphysical view of nature and of how we can know nature.

Newton's God of Dominion, Matter, and Knowledge

It is perhaps Hume who first systematically undertakes to sever Newton's physics from Newton's theology in the middle of the 18th century. By the end of the 18th century, a confident natural philosopher of the Enlightenment such as Laplace remarks that he has no need of the "hypothesis" of God in his physical system. Since then generations of critics have celebrated Newton's "gift" to the modern world of a pre-eminently rational material order which mechanically flies along obedient to necessary natural laws and to nothing else. A recent writer exults that

Newton's universe, when stripped of metaphysical considerations, as stripped it would be, is an infinite void of which only an infinitesimal part is occupied by unattached material bodies moving freely through the boundless and bottomless abyss, a colossal machine made up of components whose only attributes are position, extension, and mass. Life and the sensate world have no effect upon it and are banished, a la Descartes, from its rigorously mechanical operations. And yet, for all its lack of feeling, Newton's universe is a precise, harmonious, and rationally ordered whole. Mathematical law binds each particle of matter to every other particle, barring the gate to chaos and disunity. By flinging gravity across the infinite void, he was able to unite physics and astronomy in a single science of matter in motion, fulfilling the dream of Pythagoras.… And even though Newton was unable to discover a demonstrable principle with which actually to explain the phenomenon of gravitation, the laws he formulated provided convincing proof that man inhabits a preeminently orderly world. We remember and honor him today not for providing us with ultimate answers to the most profound scientific questions but because, in apprehending the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux, Isaac Newton contributed more than any other individual of the modern age to the establishment and acceptance of a rational world view.²⁴

Hume first argues that metaphysics is a "shelter to superstition" and finally urges the burning of any volume "of divinity or school metaphysics."²⁵ On the above interpretation, given in citation 24, Newton is part of Hume's brave new positivistic world in which superstitious metaphysics is banished and replaced by the mathematical study of the principles of natural philosophy.

I will argue that the above reading is a misunderstanding of the role of metaphysics and, consequently, of epistemology in the natural philosophy of Isaac Newton. It has been time honored tradition since Hume to banish metaphysics from natural philosophy, but it has nothing to do with Newton's position. What the impact of theology and metaphysics is upon Newton's conception of matter and upon how we can gain knowledge about the laws governing matter we shall see. Newton's thought is a seamless unity of theology, metaphysics, and natural science. Newton's view of God's Dominion, i.e., the total supremacy of God's power and will over every aspect of creation, colors every aspect of his views about how matter (and the laws regulating the ordinary operation of matter) is created, preserved, reformed, and, occasionally, interdicted by a voluntary and direct act of God's sovereign will and power. Newton's commitment to the Lord God of Dominion issues necessarily in the dependence of nature upon God's will. He creates it and (at the same time) he creates it to operate by the ordinary concourse of the laws of nature. He preserves it, he reforms it, from time to time he directly suspends its ordinary operation through a specially provident act of will, and he has promised in prophecy to destroy it as the wise have good reason to understand and to believe. Hume's universe is stripped of metaphysical considerations, not Newton's.

Matter does not move, as it generally does, in accord with mathematically precise laws of naturesuch as those described in the Principia because of any Neoplatonic overflow of God's being into the world or because of any Hobbist, Cartesian, or Leibnizian notion of necessary rational order intrinsically immanent within matter or imposed once and for all long ago by a deity who long since has absented himself from the daily operations of creation. Such metaphysical views dilute the total subordination of matter to the will of God and are the metaphysical equivalent of theological idolatry. Rather, matter exists and ordinarily operates in accord with natural law for one reason: God wills it so by divine fiat. Both matter and natural law originate in the will and power of God. God's dominion is the fundamental first metaphysical principle underlying Newtonian mechanics. Newton writes (in Query 31), therefore, that because

Matter is not necessarily in all places, it may be also allow'd that God is able to create Particles of Matter of several Sizes and Figures, and in several Proportions to Space, and perhaps of difference Densities and Forces, and thereby to vary the Laws of Nature, and make Worlds of several Sorts in several Parts of the Universe.²⁶

God is the Lord God, the "Pantocrator," as Newton styles him in the General Scholium, of creation. God, exercising the dominion which makes him to be God, chooses one material system by an act of his will. That is the system which we study through mathematical empiricism for the time being. In future, it might be that God chooses to reorder his "new heaven and new earth," predicted in prophecy (Rev. 21:1), into a physical system totally beyond the current grasp of our limited human reason. The mathematically demonstrable, necessary, "universal" laws of nature operate as they ordinarily do only in this particular creation and, even then, as we shall see, there are specially provident exceptions. Truly, there are more things possible in Newton's philosophy, on heaven and on earth, than are dreamed of in Hume's philosophy.

Having chosen matter of particular densities and forces of particular sorts (chiefly, gravity) this time around, God's ordained frame of nature has since been wheeling routinely along betraying in almost every motion the generally provident dominion of the Lord God of creation. God's will and power are detectable in the routine, everyday operation of secondary causes as described in the laws of nature. At the heart of this view is the medieval distinction between God's "potentia ordinata" and "potentia absoluta." These terms have been happily translated by J. E. McGuire, the most philosophically sophisticated of all of Newton's many commentators, as "ordinary concourse" and "extraordinary concourse," respectively.²⁷

One measure of God's dominion, then, is the regularity, persistence, and mathematically describable and predictable recurrence of natural phenomena in accordance with the laws of nature established at the creation by the Lord God of Dominion. God's Dominion over the material world which he chose to create is further demonstrated by the nearly continuous operation of the forces governing matter since that time. Preserving this order in being is one more aspect of the Lord God's dominion. In his sermon on 2 Kings 17:15-6, which Westfall dates from the 80's, Newton foreshadows the General Scholium while pointing out the preserving role which the Lord God of Dominion continuously has exercised over physical nature. God requires us, writes Newton, to worship him not because we can fathom his innermost essence. Rather, God,

the wisest of beings require[s] of us to be celebrated not so much for his essences as for hisactions, the creating, preserving, and governing of all things according to his good will and pleasure.²⁸

God's preservation of the created order is necessary owing to the original forces he created. Because of gravity, he writes, "a continual miracle is needed to prevent the sun and fixed stars from rushing together through gravity."²⁹ The most important use of Divine Will since the creation is God's usual maintenance, in continuous routine operation, of the laws governing the forces and densities of matter which he created. As William Whiston, Newton's successor in the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge writes:

'Tis now evident, that Gravity the most mechanical affection of Bodies, and which seems most natural, depends entirely on the constant and efficacious, and, if you will, the supernatural and miraculous Influence of Almighty God.³⁰

The physical world of creation, with all its demonstrable regularity and its nearly continuous operation since the creation, betokens God's voluntary dominion. A more lengthy quote from Whiston drives home the Newtonian view of God's will and power as both "potentia ordinata" and "potentia absoluta" while simultaneously dispelling the myth that Newtonian voluntarism emphasizes God's power at the expense of God's intellect. Whiston notes how even the most religious and philosophical persons are perplexed about the interaction between God's special, direct, interventionist providence (his "potentia absoluta") and God's ordinary providence displayed in the lawful operations of secondary causes (his "potentia ordinata"):

… while the Philosopher was in Danger of doubting of the Success, and so ready to grow cold in his Devotions; and the more unthinking, yet more religious Man rejected the Consideration of the Manner, or the Operation of second Causes, and more wisely look'd up only to God, and imagin'd him immediately concern'd in every Occurrence, and on that Principle doubted not the Effect of his Prayers. But 'tis, methinks, evident that neither of these were exactly in the Right… 'Tis true that Natural Causes will operate as usual. 'Tis also true that Miracles are not ordinarily to be expected: But withal 'tis as true that the same all-wise Creator, who appointed that constant Course of Nature, foresaw at the same time all those Dispositions of Men, and in particular those Devotions of his Worshippers, to which suitable Rewards were to be provided, and suitable Answers retumed.³¹

In short,

God's Prescience enables him to act after a more sublime manner, and by a constant Course of Nature, and Chain of Mechanical Causes, to do everything so, as it shall not be distinguishable from a particular Interposition of his Power.…³²

The nearly continuous, daily, routine operation of the secondary mechanical causes mathematically described by natural laws, such as that of gravity, reveal God's dominion in "a more sublime manner" than the extraordinary concourse of God's will interposing itself in a miraculous fashion involving the breaking or suspending of the ordinary concourse of the laws of nature. Nevertheless, when pressed (as in the case of Leibniz who chides Newton and his followers forreducing God to the status of an inferior clock-maker/repairman), Newton and his closest followers such as Clarke and Whiston agree that God's will is supreme: real miracles have occurred in the past and, because of God's unlimited power and dominion, such miracles may occur in the future. Newton's clearest statement of his insistence upon the possibility of God's specially provident disruption of the mechanics he originally created is found in a manuscript draft of his views on God's power (a text first revealed by McGuire), and which dates from the early 90's:

That God is an entity in the highest degree perfect, all agree. But the highest idea of perfection of an entity is that it should be one substance, simple, indivisible, living and lifegiving, always everywhere of necessity existing, in the highest degree understanding all things, freely willing good things; by his will effecting things possible; communicating as far as it possible his own similitude to the more noble effects; containing all things in himself as their principle and location; decreeing and ruling all things by means of his substantial presence (as the thinking part of man perceives the appearances of things brought into the brain and thence its own body); and constantly cooperating with all things according to accurate laws, as being the foundation and cause of the whole of nature, except where it is good to act otherwise.33

Of course, Newton and Whiston prefer not to demonstrate the specially provident aspect of God's dominion over nature by recourse to miracles, if at all possible. Most "miracles," observes Newton, are not really examples of voluntary acts of God's will in which he first suspends the ordinary concourse of nature and then supplants them with an extraordinary, specially provident, miracle. Most miracles "are not so called because they are the works of God, but because they happened seldom and for that reason excite wonder."³⁴ In his manuscript concerning the various crimes, lies, and forgeries perpetrated by Athanasius, Newton devotes much time to showing how "that crafty Politician" almost single handedly, foists the idolatrous Trinitarian doctrine upon the heathen through the use of "monstrous Legends, fals miracles, veneration of reliques, charmes, ye doctrine of Ghosts or Demons, & their intercession & worship.…"³⁵

Apart from the creation and the continued overseeing of the survival of that creation, Newton's preferred argument for illustrating the specially provident aspect of God's dominion is the record of fulfilled scripture prophecy. Prophecies are uniquely suited to demonstrating the dominion of God in the historical events predicted and then brought to pass in both the "world natural" and the "world politic." Owing to God's omniscience and power to effect his will, he is able to synchronize most natural and political events (predicted through the mouths of his chosen prophets) with the ordinary concourse of natural law while always reserving his sovereign right directly to interpose his will. As the historical events of the natural and political past have illustrated God's dominion, the signs of Newton's own times will continue progressively to unfold the true state of God's dominion over creation:

For the event of things predicted many ages before, will then be a convincing argument that the world is governed by providence. For as few and obscure prophecies concerning Christ's first coming were for setting up the Christian religion, which all nations have since corrupted; so the many and clear Prophecies concerning the things to be done at Christ's second coming, are not only for predicting but also for effecting a recovery and re-establishment of the long-lost truth, and setting up a Kingdom wherein dwells righteousness.

Furthermore, writes Newton:

But if the last age, the age of opening these things, be now approaching, as by the successes of late Interpreters it seems to be, we have more encouragement than ever to look into these things.³⁶

Behind the mechanical framework of the Principia is Newton's God of Dominion creating and then preserving creation. The Lord God exercises dominion either through secondary, mechanical causes (which is the usual case) or through extraordinary, direct, voluntary interpositions of his will (which are very unusual but, owning to God's power, are still possible at any time.)

The metaphysics of the Principia is absolutely pervaded by Newton's God. But, one might ask, what has metaphysics to do with mathematics? Is not Newton's raw mechanism of a world devoid of metaphysics? Is not at least the mathematical aspect of the method of the Principia sacrosanct from any sort of metaphysical "sideshow."³⁷

The dominion of God over his creation is just as important to Newton's epistemology as it is to his metaphysics. They are clearly inseparable in Newton's integrated system of thought. Newton is most famous for combining mathematics with empirical observations but both these elements of his scientific method are intrinsically related to his voluntaristic conception of God's dominion.

Without the metaphysically justified conception of the perseverance of the ordinary concourse of natural laws, which Newton derives from the will and power of the Lord God of Dominion, there could be no mathematical demonstration of the "necessary" forces of nature within this particular order of material creation chosen so long ago by the deity. Without God first creating and then sustaining the generally regular operations of nature, there could be no ordinary concourse of natural law to describe with mathematical principles.

Beyond this point, but closely allied to it, is Newton's best known contribution to mathematics, his famous method of fluxions which dates from 1665. Newton's method of fluxions is inevitably connected with his theory of the continuous dominion of God since the creation; fluxions are a method which view geometrical quantities as arising from a continuous motion as if they were computer-generated. Any line or curve can be seen as the result of the continuous flowing motion of a point. The rate of flow Newton calls a "fluxion." The flowing line itself is called a "fluent." Newton's early mathematical work is given over to demonstrating, their corresponding fluxion given any particular relationship between two fluents. Inversely, Newton demonstrates how to determine the necessary relationship between two fluents given two related fluxions.

Newton's calculus is based on the continuity of flow as supervised by the God of Dominion operating in his generally provident mode of creator and preserver of the current state of natural law. A. Rupert Hall, in his exacting treatise on the "war" of priority in the discovery of the calculus waged between Leibniz and the followers of Newton, has pointed out that Newton's method is conceived in an entirely different metaphysical framework than that of Leibniz's differential calculus which is rooted in the relative discontinuity and individual freedom of monads created by an absconding deity long ago.³⁸

But perhaps the most important reason for regarding Newton's theology as part of his scientific methodology is his empiricism. Why, for example, does not Newton go along with Leibniz's necessitarian and rationalist view that experiments and empirical observations are completely unnecessary? Newton, after all, begins with observations of the phenomena of nature before seeking to describe the covering law behind those phenomena in necessary mathematical terms.

While mathematically necessary descriptions will hold as "universally" true, for the most part, owing to the ordinary concourse of God's dominion, ultimately God suffers no restraint upon his absolute will and power. Because God is so powerful that he can alter the course of nature at will, scientific knowledge of nature must necessarily be based upon repeated empirical observations just because we humans do not know when or where he might exercise his specially provident power of miraculous will and suspend or reverse what we have been pleased to call the "laws" of nature generally operative in this creation until now. Our knowledge of whether scientific "laws" of nature imposed by the Lord God of Dominion at the time of creation will continue to be "laws" in the future, and to express then the same relationships previously discovered to hold between forces, can ultimately be only very highly probable owing to the contingent aspect of our knowledge of nature which results from Newton's conception of the unlimited power and will of the Lord God of Dominion.

Newton's experimentalism is inextricable from his theology and his voluntaristic metaphysics because of the contingency which it introduces into human knowledge of nature. In the 1713 Preface to the second edition of the Principia, Roger Cotes explains how the Newtonian God of Dominion forces us to be experimentalists:

Without all doubt this world, so diversified with that variety of forms and motions we find in it, could arise from nothing but the perfectly free will of God directing and presiding over all.

From this fountain it is that those laws, which we call the laws of Nature, have flowed, in which there appear many traces indeed of the most wise contrivance, but not the least shadow of necessity. These therefore we must not seek from uncertain conjectures, but learn them from observations and experiments.³⁹

Newton, in his Fourth Rule of Reasoning first added in 1723 to the third edition of the Principia, underscores Cotes' concern to refute the God of the rationalists who, once finished with creating matter and the laws governing it, absents himself from further involvement. Newton notes the methodological impact for human knowledge of a physical nature subservient either to God's ordinary or to his extraordinary acts of will:

Rule IV In experimental philosophy we are to look upon propositions inferred by general induction from phenomena as accurately or very nearly true, notwithstanding any contrary hypothesis that may be imagined, till such time as other phenomena occur, by which they may either be made more accurate, or liable to exception.

This rule we must follow that the argument of induction may not be evaded by hypotheses.⁴⁰

Newton's universe is in one sense necessary and in another contingent. For God, the universe is always necessarily dependent upon his will. As the generally provident author of the physical laws which ordinarily govern motion in the current structure of the material realm or as the specially provident interventionist, Newton's God rules on earth and in heaven. But the absolute nature of God's dominion over creation makes human knowledge of the usually lawful structure of the material world necessarily contingent upon the will of God. Human knowledge is contingent upon whether God is exercising his will through the ordinary concourse of nature (as has ordinarily been the case in the past) or through the very rare instances of an extraordinary direct interposition of his will. Mathematically demonstrable laws of nature which apply to a great many observed phenomena are "necessary" only while God sustains and preserves them in their ordinary concourse. As Whiston puts it, "'Tis true that Natural Causes will operate as usual," but only if God wills them to continue doing so in the future as they have in the past.

Because of the basic Newtonian view about the voluntaristic nature of God's dominion which underlies any attempt to seek knowledge—whether in the interpretation of prophecies or the understanding of the laws of nature—finally what matters most is a cautious empiricism. Newton writes, for example, of the "design" of God in giving men prophetic predictions. It is not to enable interpreters to gratify

men's curiosities by enabling them to foreknow things, but that after they were fulfilled they might be interpreted by the Event, and his [God's] own Providence, not the Interpreters be manifested thereby to the world.⁴¹

So, too, in natural philosophy Whiston, echoing the fourth Rule, explains why empiricism is the only path to follow:

Our imperfection is such, that we can only act pro re nata, can never know beforehand the Behaviours of Actions of Men; neither can we forsee what Circumstances and Conjectures will happen at any certain time hereafter… ⁴²

The contingent nature of our knowledge, which is the direct result of the nature of God's power and will to change the ordinary concourse of events, results for Newton and the Newtonians in a characteristic note of caution in both theological speculations about future prophecies and scientific "predictions" about the course of future events.

Nevertheless and however reluctantly, Newton accepts the possibility that God may choose to suspend or overturn the ordinary course of nature by a specially provident act of his sovereign will. Though such acts are possible, Whiston says that they "are not ordinarily to be expected." The contingent feature which God's will and power introduce into what humans may know about the fabric of God's creation limits human knowledge of the natural laws ordinarily governing mechanical causes to probabilistic inductions based upon repeated observations. To the question of whether "there be a continual immediate Government of the Universe; or whether god so disposed all things at first, as not to interpose by a continual actual Operation upon them," Clarke gives the characteristically Newtonian response that God "preserves and governs, disposes and directs continually all the Motions and Powers of Things in the natural world."⁴³

For Newton, there are real consequences in his science for his theological view that the whole of nature is subordinate to God "and subservient to his Will"⁴⁴ just as it is no doubt the case, as Westfall has persuasively argued, that there are real consequences introduced into Newton's method of studying theology which result from his rigorously trained scientific intellect. They are mutually influential. Newton would have been astonished to learn that some of his interpreters, following Hume's lead, have claimed that theology, metaphysics and epistemology have no necessary, integrated, synthetic relationship in themselves, much less that he has himself been placed into this school. Newton's own thought is in fact a seamless unity composed of theology, metaphysics, and epistemology all mixed together simply because, at their base, is the Lord God of supreme dominion. It is permissible, of course, to refract Newton's thought into its various hues and shades and to study them independently so long as we remember not to take any one element as logically prior to any other element. Refracting Newton into shades and hues may be a reasonable learning aid but we miss the blinding incandescent light of his true genius if we forget finally to recombine his many parts into the integrated whole which is the totality of his genius.

Newton's God and Newton's Politics

Many writers, in Newton's day and in ours, have been convinced that science and politics are woven tightly together in Newtonian thought. Nick Herbert, in his fine book Quantum Reality, has correctly pointed out that

For better or for worse, humans have tended to pattern their domestic, social, and political arrangements according to the dominant vision of physical reality. Inevitably the cosmic view trickles down to the most mundane details of everyday life.⁴"

In Newton's case, Herbert states baldly that Newton's conception of passive, inert matter gliding through space, like the giant spaceship in 2001: A Space Odyssey, in accord with the forces of nature as computed by the HAL-9000 computer, overturns the medieval metaphysics of hierarchical gradations of celestial matter arranged in successive spheres. This metaphysical revolution occurs "coincidentally" with a profound political revolution. Just at the time when Newton substitutes, in his Principia, a universe "of ordinary matter governed by mathematical laws" for a Dantean (medieval) universe of hierarchical quintessences presided over by the direct command of God, society moves from a feudal monarchy (which mirrors the metaphysics of the medievals) to democracies where individual parts, composed of Newtonian matter, are both equal and equally under the rule of law. Herbert writes:

Coincident with the rise of Newtonian physics was the ascent of the modern democracy which stresses "rules of laws rather than men" and which posits a theoretical equality between the parts of the social machinery. The Declaration of Independence, for example, [sic] "We hold these truths to be self-evident" reads more like a mathematical theorem than a political document. As above, so below. The egalitarian mechanism that Newton discovered in the heavens has insinuated itself into every aspect of ordinary life. For better or worse, we live today in a largely mechanistic world.⁴⁶

It is reasonable to expect such a viewpoint to be expressed in passing in the Introduction toa book devoted primarily to describing the development of modern quantum mechanics. One is quite surprised to encounter such an anachronism in a scholarly treatment of Newton, however. Nevertheless, of the law of gravity, Gale E. Christianson writes:

With this single law of physics Isaac Newton "democratized" the universe, as it were, by laying permanently to rest the concept of a hierarchical dominance among the celestial bodies… In the seemingly infinite universe envisioned by Newton, no one body is more important than any other.⁴⁷

There is, certainly, a relationship between the metaphysics of scientific world-views. And one may even wish to read an embryonic declaration of political independence back into Newton's view of matter. But to do so loses sight of the fact that Newton's God creates that matter, installs the laws which regulate it, continually supervises the maintenance and repair of those laws, and occasionally suspends them. A God without such dominion, writes Newton, "is nothing else but Fate and nature."⁴⁸ Newton simplifies the hierarchy, but he strengthens the basic ontology of hierarchical dependency by his emphasis upon the Lord God of Dominion. Newton rails against the atheistic tendencies of Descartes precisely for forgetting the nature of this relationship:

Indeed however we cast about we find almost no other reason for atheism than this notion of bodies having as it were, a complete, absolute and independent reality in themselves.⁴⁹

But there is a much more sophisticated position which relates Newton's physical theories to the developing Whig ideology of his day. Newton's thought emphasizes order and simplicity in both the rules of reasoning and in his theological notebooks. This methodological preference for order and simplicity is echoed in Newton's many manuscripts "methodizing" the interpretation of prophecies: God is "the god of order not confusion," writes Newton.⁵⁰ In the "Rules of Reasoning in Philosophy," this attitude is expressed in Rule I, the principle of the simplicity of nature, according to which "Nature is pleased with simplicity, and affects not the pomp of superfluous causes."⁵ As Margaret C. Jacob and others have argued, latitudinarian low churchmen are quick to seize upon this aspect of Newton's thought and to make the orderliness of the Newtonian heavens the political and social ectype for the rising Whig ideology of the first decades of the eighteenth century.⁵² In his The Newtonian System of the World, The Best Model of Government, J. T. Desaguliers makes this analogy crystal clear:

ATTRACTION now in all the Realm is seen, To bless the Reign of George and Caroline."⁵³

Jacob's point is well taken, but one may still inquire whether such a use of Newton's science is one which Newton himself makes or would have sanctioned. Does Newton wish to make the same connection between the orderliness of the heavens and the political theory of the moderate Whigs and their latitudinarian apologists? Within the context of the high and low church parties and the Whig-Tory struggle for power which is central in England from the 1690's onward,⁵⁴ it is tempting to argue that Newton is himself a latitudinarian Whig, albeit a silent one. He owes his job to the rising Whig tide and his arguments and positions are quickly adapted by latitudinarian churchmen to support the Whig party.⁵⁵

But William Whiston records a conversation which indicates that Newton's distance from the politicians of his day is more than just another manifestation of his shyness to engage in controversy and which also suggests that there is a real intellectual difference between Newton and his Whig patrons. Whiston writes that he

early asked him [Newton], why he did not at first draw such Consequences from his Principles, as Dr. Bentley soon did in his excellent Sermons at Mr. Boyle's Lectures; and as I soon did in my New Theory; and more largely afterward in my Astronomical Principles of Religion; and as that Great Mathematician Mr. Cotes did in his excellent Preface to the later Editions of Sir 1. N.'s Principia: I mean for the advantage of Natural Religion, and the Interposition of the Divine Power and Providence in the Constitution of the World; His answer was, that He saw those Consequences; but thought it better to let his Readers draw them first of themselves: Which Consequences however, He did in great measure draw himself long afterwards in the later Editions of his Principia, in that admirable Genera [sic] Scholium at its conclusion; and elsewhere, in his Opticks. … Nor can I dispence with myself to omit the Declaration of his Opinion to me, Of the Wicked Behavior of most modern Courtiers, and the Cause of it, which he took to be their having laughed themselves out of Religion; or, to use my own usual phrase to express both our Notions, because they have not the fear of God before their Eyes, Which Characters being, I doubt, full as applicable to our present Courtiers, as they were to those of whom he apply'd them long ago, is a Cause of Lamentation.

Whiston concludes that his own experience has led him to distrust all politicians and courtiers. When even honest Christians go to court his experience has shown them rarely "to amend those Courts, but to be almost always greatly and fatally corrupted by them."⁵⁶

Amidst the raging tumult of party, sectarian, and intellectual strife which characterizes his society before and after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, Newton calmly goes about the business of illustrating the true nature and extent of God's dominion in theology, in science, and in politics for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear. He is secure in his view that in the latter days such knowledge will increase even while "many will run to and fro." (Daniel 12:4) While Newton is in fact very much interested in eradicating any Roman Catholic influence, once the Catholic menace evaporates his job reverts to illustrating the dominion of God to all remaining idolaters whether Whig or Tory, high church or low church, deist or Anglican who have the ears to hear and eyes to see. In London increasingly in the 1690's where he is seeking an appointed public office, he seeks to accomplish this goal through his role as one of those who helps to select the Boyle Lecturers, through his revisions to the Principia which he works on in the early 90's and which remains in a most important manuscript in which he anticipates the Lord God of the 1713 General Scholium, s7 and through such controversies as the debate with Leibniz which begins over the question of the priority of the discovery of the method of fluxions but, by 1710, enlarges beyond the priority dispute into a debate concerning the dominion of God.

In the realm of politics, there is no reason to read Newton as a kind of latitudinarian moderate Whig just because he owes his political appointments at the Mint to the political ascendancy of that party. As the above text suggests, he may have mistrusted "most Courtiers." Certainly, the retention of the Trinitarian idolatry in the established Anglican church, high or low, idolatrously continued to mock the power and will of the Lord God of Dominion as illustrated in fulfilled prophetic predictions andalso demonstrated in the Newtonian fabric of the heavens.

Herbert is correct that for better or for worse there is a linkage between metaphysics and politics. In Newton's case, this linkage simply does not produce a latitudinarian, low church, moderate Whig. Rather, the one-way dependency of created mankind upon God the creator underpins a political philosophy in which God's dominion is the central feature in explaining man's moral and political duties both to God and to other men.

God voluntarily creates the world and preserves it through acts of will. God's act of will in making the world is exactly analogous to the way a human being wills his body to move. Newton writes that "God … created the World solely by an act of the will, just as we move our bodies by an act of the will."⁵⁸ We understand God's will and power to act over the whole of creation to be analogous, in a limited way, to our will and power to act over our bodies. We remotely understand God's infinite dominion over the totality of his creation by analogy with our finite dominion over our bodies.

And this understanding of the extent and nature of God's dominion is the key to Newton's political and moral views about the duties and obligations of man. Newton writes that

so far as we can know by natural philosophy the first cause, what power He has over us, and what benefits we receive from Him, so far our duty towards Him, as well as that towards one another, will appear to us by the light of nature.⁵⁹

A clear statement of the sorts of duties owed to the Lord God of Dominion and to our fellow men is found in the first paragraph of Newton's brief manuscript note entitled "Religion":

Our Religion to God: God made the world and governs it invisibly, and hath commanded us to love, honour and worship him and no other God but him and to do it without making any image of him, and not to name him idly and without reverence, and to honour our parents, masters and governors, and love our neighbors as ourselves, and to be temperate, moderate, just and peaceable, and to be merciful even to brute beasts.⁶⁰

Because man and God both have will and the power to create, the analogy may be extended from God's dominion over us, his creations, to our dominion over property, our creation. The implications of this voluntaristic theory of God's dominion for human property are largely drawn out by John Locke in both his Essay Concerning Human Understanding and in his Two Treatises of Civil Government where Locke discusses the ability of human beings to understand God's dominion by analogy with how the human will operates to move our bodies.⁶" In a footnote which Pierre Coste writes for the third French edition of Locke's Essay (1734), Coste reports a discussion that Coste had with Newton long after Locke had died. Coste records that Newton then informed him that he, Newton, had suggested this theory to Locke when he once met with Locke at the Earl of Pembroke's house.⁶²

Newton's God of dominion causes him to spum as idolatrous anyone who dilutes the dominion of God whether through deistic mockery of God's power or through misguidedly worshipping false images of God or false metaphysical conceptions of God. This includes deistic radical Whigs wholaugh at the story of Moses and the flood as well as moderate low churchmen who subscribe to the Trinitarian heresy and the moderate Whig political establishment which supports that false creed. But he does so in an enigmatic way through the metaphysical statements in the General Scholium which are designed only for the illumination of the wise. Newton's religion is at the root of Newton's political activity. His view of God's dominion keeps him steady in the swirling eddies of his contemporary political surroundings. It is a fact that he gets along with all sides. He wins Royal release by the Stuart king from ordination in the Church of England as a condition for maintaining his Cambridge Fellowship in 1675 and is appointed Warden of the Mint in 1696, with the help of the Whig minister Halifax, and Master of the Mint in 1700, this time without the intercession of Halifax who was no longer in office.

There is one possible way to interpret Newton as a member of the moderate Whig party and that is the fact that he does support the will of the people over the will of the king at the time of the Glorious Revolution. This doctrine is a defining characteristic of the moderate Whigs who displace the king in spite of the Tory argument that the king's dominion over his kingdom derives directly from God. To find Newton supporting the will of the people would seem to make him some sort of Whig. So, one might argue, yet again, that here is a good example of how Newton's religion is separated from his political theorizing and activity. But, it seems to me that here, too, Newton's guiding intellectual principle of the dominion of God is central and probably places him in the moderate Whig camp for reasons which have more to do with his metaphysical view of the nature of God's dominion rather than with any republican allegiance to the sovereign will of the people. William Whiston has outlined how this is possible and while I am fully aware of the dangers involved in taking Whiston's position to be isomorphic with that of Newton on this (or any other) point, Whiston's "compromise" seems to me at least suggestive of how it is possible for a committed Arian, who despises idolatry and emphasizes God's dominion, might support the Parliament over the king in a revolution. Whiston develops a moderate position midway between the radical republican Whigs—according to whom the will of the people is absolutely sovereign—and the Tories—according to whom the people always owe passive obedience to their monarch by virtue of his divinely ordained right to rule, a right which is transferred by hereditary succession. Whiston modifies the notion of divine right to show that God still providentially directs the political affairs of his creatures by guiding the will of the people in their choice of a new king. God's dominion is completely preserved by this new mechanism in which the choice of the people, and not the institution of primogeniture, is divinely guided. The analogy is complete because such an extraordinary act of God operating directly through the will of the people does not happen always or even often. Ordinarily, God does confer his dominion to his chosen kings through the ordinary concourse of the mechanism of heredity. But his power is such that he can choose to alter this means of succession by an act of extraordinary concourse. Whiston combs the Bible for examples to show that God has operated in just such a fashion in the prophetic histories.⁶³ And what if the new monarch supports a false and idolatrous doctrine such as the Trinity? Well, God works in mysterious ways his wonders to perform. It may be his way of effecting his plan for the end of times, we'll just have to wait and see. But his dominion is never in doubt for Whiston or for Newton.

Conclusion

It is certainly possible to study Newton's many various theories over the wide range of his thoughtseparately but we do less than full justice to the range and scope of his genius if we neglect his emphatic regulative principle concerning the dominion of the Lord God of creation which underlies all his work. Newton's conception of a voluntaristic deity, a supremely powerful, absolute sovereign who is the Lord God of creation directly influences his theology, his natural philosophy, and his politics and provides the key to understanding the synthetic unity in his thought which constitutes the true incandescence of his genius. To overemphasize any one aspect of Newton's philosophy by neglecting the implications of his underlying view of the God of Dominion is to run the risk of completely misunderstanding him in his own terms even though we may thereby anachronistically induct him into the modern Pantheon of heroes who have created our present culture. He is neither a scientist, nor a theologian, nor a political theorist in any recognizably individuated, modern sense.⁶⁴

Notes

¹ Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), p. 264. Consider the sort of modern Valhalla into which modern scientific rationalists seek to enshrine Newton. In the Introduction by Zev Bechler to a collection of essays entitled Contemporary Newtonian Research (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1982), Bechler writes that "This belief in the overall rationality of the scientist is the unbreakable tie that unifies historians of scientific ideas into one big loving family in which disputes can't really be fundamental. Here everyone works for the common good and deviations are negligible, and the common good is an exhibition of true rationality silently throbbing wherever science exists." (p. 2)

² Robert C. Cowen, "Sir Isaac Newton: Charting the Course of Modern Thought," The Christian Science Monitor (July 17, 1987), p. 16. Other journalists have helped to define Newton as the positivistic father of all that is "good," i.e., rational, and, therefore, serious and "objective," in modern science. But journalists tend to write their stories based on what the people they interview tell them. Writing in The New York Times (March 31, 1987), Malcolm W. Browne "pegs" his story of the three-hundredth anniversary of the publication of Newton's Principia to the many events celebrating this anniversary, from specially issued postage stamps to symposia and conferences. His story features a long interview with Dr. Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, one of the "leading physicists participating in the current symposiums on Newton's Principia.…" In answering Browne's question about how Newton would have felt about the course of science since his death, Dr. Chandrasekhar replies, "I think he would have been troubled by the development of quantum theory since so much in quantum physics is indeterminate and acausal. But he would have been far less surprised by today's science than would any of his contemporaries. He would have been much more disturbed, I think, by today's religious evangelism." (p. 21)

³ D. T. Whiteside, "Newton the Mathematician," in Contemporary Newtonian Research, ed. Zev Bechler (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1987), pp. 109-27.

⁴ Richard S. Westfall, Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980.)

⁵ Richard S. Westfall, "Newton's Theological Manuscripts," in Contemporary Newtonian Research, pp. 139-40.

⁶ Westfall, Never At Rest, p. 596.

⁷Ibid., p. 597.

⁸ Margaret C. Jacob, The Newtonians and the English Revolution, 1689-1720 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976), passim, but especially, p. 175.

⁹ Sir Isaac Newton, Opticks or A Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections & Colours of Light. Based on the fourth edition, London, 1730. With a Foreword by Albert Einstein, and Introduction by Sir Edmund Whittaker, a Preface by I. Bernard Cohen, and an Analytical Table of Contents prepared by Duane H. D. Roller (New York: Dover Publications, 1952), Book One, Part II, Prop. v, Theor, iv, p. 134.

¹⁰ Westfall, "Newton's Theological Manuscripts," p. 130.

¹¹ Newton, Yahuda MS 14, f. 25, Hebrew University, Jerusalem.

¹²Ibid. Frank E. Manuel, in his book The Religion of Isaac Newton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), discusses a fragment from Yahuda MS 15.5 (dated by Westfall as from the period around 1710) on p. 21. Manuel argues that the Lord God of the General Scholium must not be seen as merely the result of the great dispute with Leibniz. It is a view reiterated too many times in too many other contexts. The text pointed to by Manuel reads:

If the father or son be called God, they take the name in a metaphysical sense as if it signified Gods metaphysical perfections of infinite eternal omniscient omnipotent whereas it relates only Gods dominion to teach us obedience. The word God is relative and signifies the same thing with Lord and King, but in a higher degree. As we say my Lord, our Lord, your Lord, the King of Kings, and Lord of Lords, the supreme Lord, so we say my God, our God, your God, the God of Gods, the supreme God, the God of the earth, the servants of God, serve other Gods; but we do not say my infinite, our infinite, your infinite, the infinite of infinities, the infinite of the earth, the servants of the infinite, serve other infinities. When the Apostle told the Gentiles that the Gods which they wor-shipped were not Gods, he did not meane that they were not infinities, (for the Gentiles did not take them to be such:) but he meant that they had no power and dominion over man. They were fals Gods; not fals infinities, but vanities falsely sup-posed to have power and dominion over man. (Yahuda MS 15.5, folios 96 verso, 97 recto, and 98 recto.)

¹³Sir Isaac Newton's Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and His System of the World. Translated into English by Andrew Motte in 1729. The translations revised, and supplied with an historical and explanatory appendix by Florian Cajori. 2 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1962), 2:544. In a footnote to this text, Newton states that, according to Dr. Edward Pococke (the Biblical scholar and orientalist who had introduced the study of Arabic into Oxford and then become the first Professor of Arabic there), the Latin word Deus derives from the (transliteration of) du in the Arabic which means lord.

¹⁴ Newton, Yahuda MS 15.1, Hebrew University, Jerusalem. Newton's conception of the nature ofGod's dominion and its necessary consequence that Jesus is not divine in his metaphysical nature is adopted by his disciples Samuel Clarke and William Whiston. The following text from Clarke, for example, resoundingly echoes the quotation cited above from Newton's General Scholium. In his The Scripture-Doctrine of the Trinity. In Three Parts. Wherein All the "Texts" in the New Testament relating to that Doctrine, and the principal Passages in the Liturgy of the Church of England, are collected, compared, and explained (London, 1712), Clarke writes:

The reason why the Scripture, though it stiles the Father God, and also stiles the Son God, yet at the same time always declares there is but One God; is because in the Monarchy of the Universe, there is but One Authority, original in the Father, derivative in the Son: The Power of the Son being, not Another Power opposite to That of the Father, nor Another Power coordinate to That of the Father; but it self The Power and Authority of the Father, communicated to, manifested in, and exercised by the Son. (pp. 332-3)

One author, the low church Whig, William Stephens, clearly recognizes the heterodoxy of Clarke's position in this text, which Stephens quotes, and then controverts, in his sermon entitled The Divine Persons One God by an Unity of Nature: Or, That Our Saviour is One God with his Father, by an Eternal Generation from his Substance, Asserted from Scripture, and the Ante-Nicene Fathers (Oxford, 1722.) Stephens quotes the entire text of Clarke cited immediately above and then writes:

In this Proposition, the Unity of the Godhead is plainly resolv'd into an Unity, not of Nature and Essence, but of Dominion and Authority: And, if this be the Scripture-Doctrine, as this Author would perswade us, Our Saviour is no otherwise God, than as his Father has been pleas'd to associate him with Himself in the Government of the Universe.

This Artifice of speciously continuing to our Saviour the Name and Title of god, (and yet in reality of denying it him,) by supposing him to be God only by Authority and Power, and not by Nature, is not a novel or late-invented Scheme. The Arians of the fourth Century pleaded the same thing: And hence it came to pass, that in the Great Defenders of the Nicene Faith in that Century we find so much Labour expended in shewing that the Word God is not a Name of Office and Authority, but of Being and Substance; that it does not denote Ruler, Governour, and the like; but a Nature and Essence, Infinite, Eternal, and Divine, in that Person of whom it is praedicated. When the Followers of Socinus reviv'd the same Plea, they met with no better Success than their Predecessors in the Evasion: and, the Godhead has been by many Hands so accurately shewn to be a Substance, not an Office, that it would be Superfluous and Unnecessary to attempt a further Proof of it. (pp. 4-5)

¹⁵ Newton, "Commonplace Book," s.v. "Predestinatio," Keynes MS 2, King's College Library, Cambridge.

¹⁶ Newton, Yahuda MS 14, f. 9 verso. Cited in Westfall, Never At Rest, p. 315.

¹⁷ See Westfall, Never At Rest, pp. 330-4.

¹⁸ Newton to Bentley, December 10, 1962, in The Correspondence of Isaac Newton, 7 vols., ed. H. W. Turnbull, J. F. Scott, A. R. Hall, and Laura Tilling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), 3: 233.

¹⁹ Westfall, Never At Rest, p. 329.

²⁰ Newton, Yahuda MS 7.2, f. 4. Cited in Westfall, Never At Rest, p. 319.

²¹ See James E. Force, William Whiston, Honest Newtonian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 76.

²² Newton, Yahuda MS 1.2, ff. 60-1; Yahuda MS 1.3; ff. 40-8. Cited in Westfall, Never At Rest, p. 325.

²³ Manuel reproduces Newton's "Fragments from a Treatise of Revelation," Yahuda MS. 1, as Appendix A in his The Religion of Isaac Newton. The citation is from p. 124 of Manuel's book. Westfall dates this work from the early 70's.

²⁴ Gale E. Christianson, In the Presence of the Creator. Isaac Newton and His Times (New York: The Free Press, 1984), pp. 312-3. Christianson also reminds us that "we remember Newton and honor him today not for providing us with ultimate answers to the most profound scientific questions but because, in apprehending the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux, Isaac Newton contributed more than any other individual to a rational world view." These statements must be juxtaposed with the following quotation from Christianson's Preface:

Historians have tended increasingly to interpret Newton and his intellectual achievements not in seventeenth-century terms but in the light of our times. In doing so we have been made ever more conscious of his limitations and ever less appreciative of the revolutionary nature of his many accomplishments. Moreover, the twentieth century has made out of Newton something that he was not—an Enlightenment figure whose dedication to the principle of a mechanical universe became his reason for being and his single most important legacy to posterity. That Newton did adhere to a philosophy of mechanistic causation in the physical world is undeniable; but to argue, as did Voltaire, that this is the whole Newton, or even the essential Newton, is erroneous. Isaac Newton held tight the conviction that science (or natural philosophy, as it was known in his day) must be employed to demonstrate the continuing presence of the Creator in the world of nature.

Christianson, like Westfall, feels that what influence there is between Newton's theology and Newton's science runs from Newton's science to Newton's theology. As Christianson points out, for Newton and the Newtonians, science is used to reveal a God with "continuing presence," but it also reveals, in conjunction with the argument from prophecy, a God of supreme dominion, a Lord God whose will and power are sovereign. Another way to put this point is to argue that, for Newton, natural philosophy is something beyond what we today would call science and that it contains a heavily metaphysical approach to nature which, in Newton's case especially, is necessarily related to theology. Newton does not strip his universe of metaphysical considerations simply because in his voluntaristic theory of God's nature, God is always supervising nature, whether directly or indirectly.

²⁵ David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding in Enquiries Concerning Human Understandings and Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge, third edition with text revised and notes by P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975) pp. 16 and 165.

²⁶ Newton, Opticks, pp. 403-4.

²⁷ The line of interpretation which I am adopting in this paper was first established nearly thirty years ago by Alexandre Koyré in his From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1957), Chap. XI. Koyré is not always given the respect which is his just due. In the mid-fifties, he clearly saw the connection between empiricism and a priorism in physics and a deus artifex and a dieu faineant in theology. Twenty years ago, J. E. McGuire wrote a fundamental article based on first rate and highly original research in manuscript sources which further established beyond doubt that Newton's theology is inextricably and mutually bound up with his metaphysics and his natural philosophy. See J. E. McGuire, "Force, Active Principles, and Newton's Invisible Realm," Ambix 15, No. 3 (1968), esp. pp. 187-94. The writer who has done the most to link Newton's conception of God with such medieval metaphysical theologians as Ockham and Suarez has been Francis Oakley. See his The Political Thought of Pierre d'Ailly: The Voluntarist Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964); his "Medieval Theories of Natural Law: William of Ockham and the Significance of the Voluntarist Tradition," Natural Law Forum 6 (1961), pp. 65-83; and his "Christian Theology and the Newtonian Science: The Rise of the Concept of the Laws of Nature," Church History 30, No. 4 (1961), pp. 433-57.

²⁸ Newton, Yahuda MS 21, fol. 1 recto. In the General Scholium, Newton writes, "We know [God] only by his most wise and excellent contrivances of things, and final causes; we admire him for his perfections; but we reverence and adore him on account of his dominion: for we adore him as his servants; and a god without dominion, providence, and final causes, is nothing else but Fate and Nature." Sir Isaac Newton's Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, 2:546. The point is that what makes a king to be a king is his dominion, i.e., his ability to exert his will and power. One worships God because of his power over us unless one is wickedly vain and thus caught up in idolatry. The text of 2 Kings 17:15-6, which is the text for this sermon, is most significant. After journeying to Damascus where he met the King of Assyria, Tiglath-Pileser, the King of Judah saw a bronze altar. He sent the details of the construction of the altar home to "Uriah the Priest" ordering him to build a copy for use in the temple at Jerusalem. Ahaz is regarded as one of the worst kings in the history of Judah because of his reinstitution of human sacrifice. The text for Newton's sermon is preceded in verse 14 by the remark that the people of Israel and Judah "were stubborn, as their fathers had been, who did not believe in the LORD their God." Newton's text then reads:

They despised his statutes, and his covenant that he made with their fathers, and the warnings which he gave them. They went after false idols, and became false, and they followed the nations that were around them, concerning whom the LORD had commanded them that they should not do like them. And they forsook all the commandments of the LORD their god, and made for themselves molten images of two calves; and they made an Ashe'rah, and wor-shipped all the host of heaven, and served Ba'al.

²⁹ Memoranda by David Gregory, 5, 6, 7 May 1694, in The Correspondence of Isaac Newton, 3:336.

³⁰ William Whiston, A New Theory of the Earth, second ed. (London, 1708, p. 284. In this text, Whiston cites as corroboration for this point Dr. Bentley's seventh sermon from his Boyle Lectures delivered in 1692 under the title A Confutation of Atheism From the Origin and Frame of the World (London, 1693.)

³¹ Whiston, A New Theory, pp. 435-6.

³²Ibid., pp. 432-3. I have emphasized the term "act."

³³ David Gregory MS.245, fol. 14^a, Library of the Royal Society, London. This translation is found in the seminal article by J. E. McGuire, "Force, Active Principles, and Newton's Invisible Realm," p. 190. As an example of how this distinction works in the writing of one of Newton's followers, consider William Whiston. Whiston accepts some events to be genuine transgressions of natural law by a special, voluntary interposition of God's power: the Creation of the matter of the Universe out of nothing; the changing of a chaotic comet's orbit into that of a planet; the formation of the seeds of animals, especially "our First Parents," and vegetables. And

The Natures, Conditions, Rules and Quantities, of those several Motions and Powers according to which all Bodies, (of the same general nature in themselves,) are specifi'd, distinguish'd, and fitted for their several uses, were no otherwise determin'd than by the immediate Fiat, Command, Power, and Efficiency of Almighty God (New Theory of the Earth, pp. 287-95.)

As for Clarke, he, too, makes a place for real miracles in the ordinary coursing of nature. In his 1705 Boyle Lectures, he writes that a miracle

is a work effected in a manner unusual or different from the common and regular method of Providence by the interposition either of God Himself, or some intelligent agent superior to man, in the proof or evidence of some particular doctrine or in attestation to the authority of some particular person. [A Discourse Concerning the Unchangeable Obligations of Natural Religion, and the Truth and Certainty of the Christian Revelation, Being Eight Sermons Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Paul in the Year 1705 in A Defense of Natural and Revealed Religion, 2 vols. (London, 1707), 2:165.]

³⁴ Quoted in Sir Isaac Newton's Theological Manuscripts, ed. H. McLachlan (Liverpool, University Press, 1930.), p. 17. Like Whiston who wrote a book on when miraculous acts ceased in the early church, Newton believed that true miracles ceased being performed by God early in the church's history. See Newton to Locke, 16 February 1691-2, The Correspondence of Isaac Newton, 3:195.

³⁵ Newton, "Paradoxical Questions concerning y^e morals & actions of Athanasius & his followers," Clark Library Manuscript. Cited by Westfall, Never At Rest, p. 345.

³⁶ Newton, Observations Upon the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St. John. In TwoParts (London, 1733), pp. 251-2.

³⁷ The term is Frank E. Manuel's and comes in the context of Manuel's reluctance to entertain any metaphysical significance beyond the debate over who discovered calculus first in the dispute between Newton and Leibniz. See his A Portrait of Isaac Newton (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), p. 333.

³⁸ A. Rupert Hall, Philosophers at War. The Quarrel Between Newton and Leibniz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 258. To Hall, the relationship between metaphysics and mathematics is a "Pandora's box" which he mentions in passing:

Let me release from this Pandora's box no more than the simplistic affirmation that Leibniz's was a calculus of discontinuity, of monads, while Newton's was concerned with the continuity of flow, with time; or, one might say, differentials belong to the relative, fluxions to the absolute. Does not this involve seeing different things?" (p. 258.)

The irony of finding this position stated in a book in which the author has already stated his general position that the path of the argument from the priority dispute into the realm of metaphysics was "a largely regrettable and pointless diversification" is pointed out by Steven Shapin, "Licking Leibniz," History of Science 19 (1981), p. 302.

Another famous scholar who argues for the complete autonomy of Newton's scientific mechanics from any taint of metaphysics, is Edward W. Strong. He believes that Clarke departs from Newton's own line of thinking

by taking the religious addendum to be fundamental to his science, for therein [Clarke does] violence to the autonomy of science in methods and results upon which Newton had clearly and vigorously insisted. [Strong, "Newton and God," Journal of the History of Ideas 7, No. 2 (April, 1952), p. 167.]

³⁹Sir Isaac Newton's Mathemnatical Principles of Natural Philosophy, "Cotes's Preface to the Second Edition," 1:xxxii. Just as Strong has argued that Clarke departs from Newton's position so, too, he argues that Cotes in this Preface "might have prompted Newton to relax his caution as a scientist." ("Newton and God," p. 167.)

⁴⁰Sir Isaac Newton's Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, Book III. 2:400. Newton's view about the contingency of human knowledge in the light of God's total dominion over nature parallels that of Robert Boyle who puts

this point most clearly when he observes that in this very phenomenal world of partial regularity, at any moment all our science may be upset by the elimination, or change of regularity through the operation of Him who is the guider of its concourse. For the most optimistic investigator must acknowledge that if God be the author of the universe, and the free establisher of the laws of motion, whose general concourse is necessary to the conservation and efficacy of every particular physical agent, God can certainly invalidate all experimentalism by withholding His concourse, orchanging these laws of motion, which depend perfectly upon His will, and could thus vitiate the value of most, if not all the axioms and theorems of natural philosophy. Therefore reason operating in the mechanical world is constantly limited by the possibility that there is not final regularity in that world, and that existential regularity may readily be destroyed at any moment by the God upon whom it depends. [Mitchell Salem Fisher, Robert Boyle: Devout Naturalist. A Study in Science and Religion in the Seventeenth Century (Philadelphia: Oshiver Studio Press, 1945), pp. 127-8, citing Reconcileableness of Reason and Religion, in The Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle, 6 vols, ed. Thomas Birch (London, 1772), 4:161.]

This text is cited by Mitchell Salem Fisher in Robert Boyle: Devout Naturalist. A Study in Science and Religion in the Seventeenth Century (Philadelphia: Oshiver Studio Press, 1945), pp. 127-8. Fisher goes on to note that Newton agrees with Boyle's view about God's power over creation: "[Boyle's] God, like that of Newton's was an absolute, free, and omniscient being who governed all the phenomena of nature not at all as any indwelling soul of the world, but as the mechanical master and lord of the universe." (p. 160)

⁴¹ Newton, Observations Upon the Prophecies, p. 251.

⁴² Whiston, A New Theory of the Earth, p. 432.

⁴³ A. A. Sykes, "The Elogium of the late … Samuel Clarke," The Present State of the Republic of Letters 4 (1729), pp. 54-6.

⁴⁴ Newton, Opticks, Query 31, p. 403.

⁴⁵ Nick Herbert, Quantum Reality. Beyond the New Physics (Garden City: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1987), p. xi.

⁴⁶Ibid., pp. xi-xii.

⁴⁷ Gale E. Christianson, In the Presence of the Creator, p. 307. A. J. Meadows has also found in the American Constitution the "logical culmination" of Newton's "mechanical" frame of nature. See his The High Firmament (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1969), p. 148. It may very well be the logical culmination of the frame of nature once that framework is ripped out of the dominion of God. But it is not the logical culmination for Newton just because he cannot imagine eliminating God from the structure of the heavens. This logical consequence is first arrived at by Hume who starts from vastly different metaphysical suppositions.

⁴⁸Sir Isaac Newton's Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, 2:546.

⁴⁹Unpublished Scientific Papers of Isaac Newton, ed. A. Rupert Hall and Marie Boas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), p. 144.

⁵⁰ Newton, Yahuda MS 1, bundle 1, folio 14^r.

⁵¹Sir Isaac Newton's Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, 2:398.

⁵² Margaret C. Jacob's book, The Newtonians and the English Revolution, 1689-1720, will remain the standard work on how Newton's work is taken up for the purpose of low church latitudinarian apologetics. Another approach is found in Steven Shapin, "Of Gods and Kings: Natural Philosophy and Politics in the Leibniz-Clarke Disputes," Isis 72 (June, 1981), pp. 187-215. Shapin is concerned to cast the Leibniz-Clarke dispute over the dominion of God into the context of the Whig-Tory, low church-high church, dynastic politics of the day. On the whole, he is quite successful; certainly he is correct in emphasizing the centrality of the metaphysical issue of the debate. Like Jacob he is primarily concerned with the uses others make of Newton's work and not about inquiring "Whether or not Newton … intended that his philosophy of nature should be put to specific political uses…" (p. 189).

⁵³ J. T. Desaguliers, The Newtonian System of the World, The Best Model of Government (London, 1728), lines 191-2, p. 34.

⁵⁴ Geoffrey Holmes, "Science, Reason, and Religion in the Age of Newton," British Journal for the History of Science II, Part 2, No. 38 (July, 1978), p. 168.

⁵⁵ Perhaps the strongest statement of the contention by both Margaret C. Jacob and James R. Jacob that the latitudinarian churchmen who utilize Newton's science for the defense of religion do so in behalf of low church orthodoxy and against the crypto-Republican forces of Radical Enlightenment is found in their joint article entitled "The Anglican Origins of Modern Science: The Metaphysical Foundations of the Whig Constitution," Isis 71, No. 257 (June, 1980), pp. 251-67. I take no issue with the general conclusion that Newtonian scientific arguments are used by others to give vital ideological support to the Protestant monarchy.

⁵⁶ William Whiston, A Collection of Authentick Records Belonging to the Old and New Testament, 2 vols. (London, 1728), 2:1073-4.

⁵⁷ See J. E. McGuire, "Newton on Place, Time, and God: An Unpublished Source," British Journal of the History of Science 11, No. 38 (1978), pp. 115-29.

⁵⁸ Newton, Unpublished Scientific Papers, p. 107. Cf. Henry Guerlac, "Theological Voluntarism and Biological Analogies in Newton's Physical Thought," Journal of the History of Ideas 44, No. 2 (April-June, 1983), pp. 219-29.

⁵⁹ Newton, Opticks, p. 182.

⁶⁰ Newton, "Irenicum," Keynes MS 3.

⁶¹ See James Tully, A Discourse on Property. John Locke and His Adversaries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 35-50.

⁶² John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Collated and annotated by AlexanderCampbell Fraser, 2 vols. (New York: Dover Publications, 1959), 2:321-2. See also Alexandre Koyré, Newtonian Studies (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1965), p. 92.

⁶³ See Force, William Whiston, p. 103.

⁶⁴ This paper is being printed for the first time in this volume. An earlier version of it was presented by the author as part of a public lecture series devoted to the topic of "Science, Politics, and Religion in 17th Century England" on December 1, 1987. This lecture series was sponsored by The Claremont Colleges Program in Critical Studies of Science and Technology and The Humanities and Social Sciences Department of Harvey Mudd College through the generosity of the Garrett Fund.