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Notes
Although it can be seen to be the culmination of a trend that was leading to this new way of understanding the natural world. See, for example, Peter Dear (1995).
There is some irony in Ducheyne’s position, given that his title is taken from a comment which shows how close God always is to Newton’s thoughts: “Whereas the main Business of natural Philosophy is to argue from Phenomena without feigning Hypotheses, and to deduce Causes from Effects, till we come to the very first Cause, which certainly is not mechanical” (Newton 1730, p. 344).
That something cannot act where it is not was a long-standing traditional view, attributed by scholastic philosophers to Aristotle (but based on a misreading of a passage in Physics, Book 7). It is endorsed by Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Part I, Question 8. But it is still being invoked by John Locke (1690), Book II, Chap. 8, § 11.
“Epicurean attraction” is Ducheyne’s short-hand way of referring to the incessant gravitational fall which Epicurus (341–270 BC) attributed to his atoms. This concept was unacceptably dangerous to Newton because it made gravity an intrinsic property of matter—a property which therefore needed no explanation, in the same way that the extension of matter needed no explanation; it was just an aspect of the nature of matter. Newton wanted to be able to use the fact that matter attracted other matter as a mystery that demanded an explanation. The only possible explanation, Newton believed, was that passive matter must have been given the power of attraction by God.
I pass over the fact that the aether queries were very much an afterthought on Newton’s part—the other queries take it for granted that physical action is the result of attractive and repulsive forces acting at a distance between all particles. Ducheyne seems to place too much emphasis upon the aether queries and not enough on the other queries. For a full account of the queries and how they shaped the history of Newtonianism see Thackray (1970), and Schofield (1970).
It is perhaps worth pointing out to the unwary reader, however, that Ducheyne makes a bad slip on his p. 41, when he inconsistently says the opposite (and thereby joins the company from Leibniz to Dobbs): “It should be noted that claiming that gravity depends on the will of God is not the same as claiming that God directly causes gravity. That Newton made the latter claim is evident from manuscript material. To the best of my knowledge, however, there is no evidence to suggest that Newton embraced the former.” To be consistent with the rest of his argumentation (which is correct), the words “latter” and “former”, in the second and third sentences respectively, should be swapped around. This very unfortunate slip is likely to be highly confusing to many of his readers.
This is complemented with one or two other pieces of evidence, but none of them provide unqualified support for Ducheyne’s strange claim. For example, he cites a letter of 1681 from Newton to Thomas Burnet, author of the Telluris theoria sacra (1681), in which Newton does take a Cartesian line with regard to celestial motions. But Newton was responding to a query from a self-professed Cartesian here, and so responded in kind, rather than trying to introduce Burnet to his own more idiosyncratic, and still undeveloped (and unpublished), theory of gravity.
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Henry, J. Steffen Ducheyne: The Main Business of Natural Philosophy: Isaac Newton’s Natural-Philosophical Methodology . Sci & Educ 22, 737–746 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-012-9466-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-012-9466-4