Abstract
Many writers have been forced to examine — in their treatments of Hume’s knowledge of and acquaintance with scientific theories of his day — the related questions of Hume’s knowledge of and acquaintance with Isaac Newton and of the nature and extent of Newtonian influences upon Hume’s thinking. Most have concluded that — in some sense — Hume was acquainted with and influenced by Newton’s thought in particular and scientific thought in general.1
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Notes
I do not intend to examine in great detail all the varying interpretations of Hume’s thought which treat Hume’s interests in science, Newton, and Newton’s possible influences upon Hume’s philosophical development. By and large, these interpretations fall into four categories (although parts of one interpretation may be integrated into another): (1) The “Model” School of Interpretation. Many writers, such as James Collins, Barry Stroud, John Laird, and Antony Flew, have argued that Hume’s attempt to develop a secular basis for the “science of man” (and to make all other disciplines subsidiary to it) is “Newtonian” in inspiration. Just as Newton’s one, unifying, general principle of gravitation covers the movements of falling sparrows and orbiting moons, Hume’s principles of mental association provide a completely general explanation of human behavior.
The “Methodological Influence” School of Interpretation. Some writers, such as Duncan Forbes, Norman Kemp Smith, and James Noxon, have discerned and emphasized Newton’s influence on Hume’s philosophy chiefly in Hume’s experimental methodology which, as with Newton’s, is grounded in experiments and empirical observations. Occasionally, as in the work of James Noxon (see Note 41 below), this school of interpretation is accompanied by a developmental corollary according to which Newton’s methodological influence on Hume holds only during Hume’s youth and that, with age and philosophical maturity, Hume outgrows this early influence.
The “Strong” School of Interpretation. Proponents of this view, such as Nicholas Capaldi and David Miller, hold aspects of both the preceding Schools of Interpretation and so view the influence of Newton on Hume to be very strong.
The “Contextualist” School. Writers in this category are distinguished by their approach to the study of Hume’s philosophy. Refusing to reduce Hume to a text, they have insisted on reading Hume as a man in a specific period. Many of the writers who have already been mentioned have a degree of the contextualist approach in their work, but the recent work of David Fate Norton, M. A. Stewart, and John Wright have followed this fruitful line of inquiry with such a great degree of skill and hard work that they constitute a separate category. Newtonian influence often remains a factor in their interpretations but often is attenuated as they examine how Hume’s works respond to specific challenges from his more immediate historical and social contexts and to his more immediate intellectual contemporaries. Norton, for example, has shown the profit to be derived from reading Book 3 of the Treatise (1740) in the light of the Newtonian moralist George Turnbull’s Principles of Moral Philosophy (1740). [David Fate Norton, David Hume. Common-Sense Moralist, Sceptical Metaphysician (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), pp. 152–63.] John Wright, for another example, has shown the effect of the Karnes-Stewart debate upon Hume’s own claim that Newton had ascribed activity to matter itself.
[John Wright, The Sceptical Realism of David Hume (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), pp. 162–4.] Finally, M. A. Stewart has reconstructed Hume’s targets in the ninth part of the Dialogues in a way which interposes Lord Karnes and George Anderson between Newton and Clarke.
[M. A. Stewart, “Hume and the ‘Metaphysical Argument A Priori’,” in Philosophy, Its History and Historiography, ed. A. J. Holland (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1985), pp. 243–70.] A highly significant new “Contextualist” approach to the entire topic of Hume’s interest in and knowledge of science has recently been advanced by Michael Barfoot. On the 4th of June, 1986, Barfoot announced, in a paper read to the ‘IPSE 86’ project and entitled “Hume’s Early Scientific Education at the University of Edinburgh,” his momentous discovery of a new source which casts light on the entire “culture of science” in Hume’s day. Retitled “Hume and the Culture of Science in the Early Eighteenth Century,” this paper has been extensively recast. It is published in Studies in the Philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. M. A. Stewart, Oxford Studies in the History of Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 151–90. A “Contextualist” to the core, Barfoot offers startling new evidence regarding Hume’s actual course work in natural philosophy during the mid-1720’s which includes the discovery of Hume’s membership in the Physiological Library founded by Robert Steuart for Steuart’s students and those interested in natural philosophy. Barfoot suggests, rightly, that the catalog of this library, together with an understanding of the nature and content of the courses in the sciences which Steuart offered to subscribing members of the library, and the fact that Hume attended Steuart’s class in 1724–5 provides crucial new information about Hume’s early education in various particular sciences as well as in what Barfoot calls the culture of science. Barfoot goes on to show that “Understanding the palimpsest of natural knowledge beneath Hume’s text enriches the interpretation of many otherwise puzzling features of Treatise I. ii.” (p. 189)
Peter Jones, Hume’s Sentiments. Their Ciceronian and French Context (Edinburgh: The University Press, 1982), p. 11. As his title indicates, Jones is very much in the school of the “Contextualists.” But he seeks to reject the standard view, held in varying degrees as delineated in Note 1, that there is in fact any scientific and Newtonian context to Hume’s thought.
Peter Jones, Hume’s Sentiments. Their Ciceronian and French Context (Edinburgh: The University Press, 1982), Ibid., pp. 13–4.
Peter Jones, Hume’s Sentiments. Their Ciceronian and French Context (Edinburgh: The University Press, 1982), Ibid., p. 15.
In addition to the general approaches to the whole of Hume’s work depicted in Note 1 above, there is one work literally in a category by itself when any discussion is undertaken concerning the linkage of Hume’s religious scepticism in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and Newton’s design argument. Since its first publication in 1963, Robert H. Hurlbutt’s Hume, Newton, and the Design Argument (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963) has remained the single most illuminating source on the subject. Its publication as a revised edition in 1985 is to be applauded.
Jones, Hume’s Sentiments, p. 12.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., pp. 13–4.
Ibid., pp. 12–3.
Ibid., p. 17.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Paul Russell has succeeded in placing Hume’s intellectual project in his “science of man” into an important but much overlooked context — that of Thomas Hobbes’ own similar project. See his “Hume’s Treatise and Hobbes’ The Elements of Law” Journal of the History of Ideas 46, No. 1 (Jan.-March, 1985), pp. 51–63, and his “Skepticism and Natural Religion in Hume’s Treatise” Journal of the History of Ideas 49, No. 2 (April-June, 1988), pp. 247–65.
See Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), p. 201.
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, second edition with test revised and notes by P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1979), “Appendix,” pp. 638–9. My tactic of simply laying out the texts in which Hume directly quotes or refers to Newton derives from the presentation given by Christine Battersby at the Hume Society Conference held at Trinity College, Dublin, in 1981. See Note 41.
David Hume, “Of the Middle Station of Life,” in The Philosophical Works, ed. Thomas Hill Green and Thomas Hodge Grose, 4 vols. (London, 1882), 4:379. Donald W. Livingston kindly pointed this text out to me.
David Hume, “Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences,” in Works, 3:183.
David Hume, A Letter from a Gentleman to his Friend in Edinburgh, ed. Ernest C. Mossner and John V. Price (Edinburgh: The University Press, 1967), pp. 28–9.
David Hume, An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, in Enquiries concerning the Human Understanding and concerning the Principles of Morals, Reprinted from the Posthumous edition of 1777 and edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge. Third edition with Text Revised and Notes by P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 73n. Further references will be cited as ‘E’ followed by the relevant page number(s).
Hume’s reference here to Newton’s “chief rule of philosophizing” is intriguing. The “chief rule” seems, at first sight, to be Newton’s second Rule: “Therefore to the same natural effects we must, as far as possible, assign the same causes.” [Sir Isaac Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and His system of the World, Translated in 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, 1934), 2: 398.] Hume is intimately familiar with the second Rule. As I argue in the second section of my paper, Philo clearly states that this Rule underlies the design argument. But in the text quoted just above it seems to me that Hume may possibly be referring to the fourth Rule as Newton’s “chief rule of philosophizing.” In the text from the second Enquiry, Hume states that the “chief rule” of ascribing similar causes for similar effects must be applied only in instances where they have empirically been found to be the same. If this reading of Hume’s statement here is correct, then the “chief rule” is actually the fourth Rule which likewise limits application of the second Rule to experienced phenomena: “In experimental philosophy we are to look upon propositions inferred by general induction from phenomena as accurately or very nearly true, notwithstanding any contrary hypotheses that may be imagined, till such time as other phenomena occur, by which they may either be made more accurate, or liable to exceptions….” (Newton, Mathematical Principles, 2:400.) If Hume believes that the fourth of Newton’s Rules is in fact the “chief rule of philosophizing,” then my case in the second part of my paper concerning Hume’s detailed knowledge of Newton’s Rules in his criticism of the design argument is somewhat strengthened.
Hume to his cousin, Mrs. Dysart of Eccles, 19 Mar., 1751, in The Letters of David Hume, 2 vols., ed. J. Y. T. Greig (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1932), 1:158–9.
David Hume, Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, ed. Norman Kemp Smith (Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson & Sons Ltd., 1947), p. 136. For the dating of this section of the Dialogues, see Kemp Smith’s “Introduction” to this edition, pp. 87–96, and M. A. Stewart, “Hume and the ‘Metaphysical Argument A Priori’,” p. 266. Further references to the Dialogues will be cited in the text as ‘D’ followed by the relevant page number(s).
David Hume, The History of England. From the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688, 8 vols. (London, 1782), 6:196–7.
Hume, The History of England, 8:332–4.
David Hume, The Natural History of Religion, in The Natural History of Religion, ed. A. Wayne Colver, and Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, ed. John Valdimir Price (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1976), p. 79.
Jones allows that Hume “was familiar, at most, with the Prefaces, Definitions and Axioms of Principia, together with the General Scholium, the Rules of Reasoning in Book III and Cotes’s famous Preface in the second edition.” (Hume’s Sentiments, p. 12.) Later he acknowledges Hume’s view of the “value” of a general version of these “rules” “in his own endeavour”; nevertheless Jones concludes that, “although there is some overlap, Hume’s fundamental assumptions about man and his nature are already driving him apart from Newton….” (Hume’s Sentiments, pp. 12–13.) From this he concludes that Hume totally lacks any interest in science, including Newtonian science, by which Jones means, apparently, some “serious” kind of science that does not include scientific metaphysics. Jones’s refusal to acknowledge the permeability between the boundaries of modern-day disciplines for a man of letters in the eighteenth century is extremely misleading. On his view, the following quote in which a Newtonian scientist-theologian makes explicit the connection between the second Newtonian Rule and the design argument, has nothing whatsoever to do with real science. William Whiston writes: … every unbyassed Mind would easily allow, that like Effects had like Causes; and that Bodies of the same general Nature, uses, and Motions, were to be deriv’d from the same Originals; and consequently, that the Sun and the fixed Stars had one, as the Earth, and the other Planets another sort of Formation. If therefore any free Considérer found that one of the latter sort, that Planet which we Inhabit, was deriv’d from a Chaos; by a parity of Reason he would suppose, every one of the other to be so deriv’d also. [A New Theory of the Earth (London, 1696), “Introductory Discourse concerning the Genuine Nature, Stile, and Extent of the Mosaick History of Creation,” p. 40.]
Whiston, Astronomical Principles of Religion, Natural and Reveal’d (London, 1717), p. 255.
Newton, Mathematical Principles, 2:398.
Most of my analysis in this paper is directed to Hume’s understanding of the properly Newtonian way to interpret Newton’s second Rule (regarding the principle of uniformity with respect to causes) in the light of the fourth Rule. But Hume also is familiar with the first of Newton’s Rules, the principle of simplicity which Hume quotes at the beginning of Part XII of the Dialogues. As Hume makes plain, the principle of simplicity is a maxim which is “a great foundation of the COPERNICAN system.” He then adds that “astronomers often, without thinking of it, lay this strong foundation of piety and religion.” Earlier he mentions that this “is a maxim established in all the schools, merely from the contemplation of the works of nature, without any religious purpose.” (D 214) So, other sources may well be the source of Hume’s knowledge of Newton’s first Rule. But, again, my focus is on the second and, especially, the fourth Rules. In my interpretation of the regulative use of the fourth Rule, I am following closely the interpretation of E. A. Burtt who argues that if Rule 4 is not a “regulative” principle which governs how we read the other three Rules, then Newton would be guilty of asserting, in his first three Rules, certain and a priori principles in the fashion of Descartes. Possibly it is to make clear that it is not his intention to be a latter-day Cartesian that Newton adds the fourth Rule in the third edition of 1726. (See Note 34.) Burtt cites a supporting text for this interpretation from the Opticks and concludes that “… in his strictly scientific paragraphs the emphasis is overwhelmingly in favour of their tentative, positivistic character, hence the fourth rule of reasoning in philosophy… must be regarded as imposing definite limits on all of the other three.” E. A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1954), p. 219. I am convinced that the origin of Newton’s tentative empiricism, in which human knowledge of nature remains forever contingent, lies in his voluntaristic notion of God’s dominion. This view of Newton’s is shared by Robert Boyle who puts this point of view very clearly when he states 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, or changing 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, in The Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle, 6 vols., ed. Thomas Birch (London, 1772), 4:161.]
Philo emphasizes the difficulties in applying the “experimental” principle, “Like effects prove like causes” to “theological argument.” He says: Now it is certain, that the liker the effects are, which are seen, and the liker the causes, which are inferred, the stronger is the argument. Every departure on either side diminishes the probability, and renders the experiment less conclusive. You cannot doubt of this principle: Neither ought you to reject its consequences. All the new discoveries in astronomy, which prove the immense grandeur and magnificence of the works of nature, are so many additional arguments for a Deity, according to the true system of theism: But according to your hypothesis of experimental theism, they become so many objections, by removing the effect still farther from all resemblance to the effects of human art and contrivance.” (D 165) As far as Hume is concerned experimental theists such as Cleanthes (or Newton) misunderstand their own principle and its limitations. The more observational and experimental data which comes in — and which according to the fourth Rule must be actively sought — the weaker the design analogy.
I. Bernhard Cohen, Introduction to Newton’s Principia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), p. xi. For a more complete analysis of the variety of scientific, especially Newtonian, texts to which Hume had access, see Barfoot, “Hume and the Culture of Science in the Early Eighteenth Century.” Barfoot is correct in pointing out “how arbitrary and historiographically questionable the selection of texts has been” in the various discussions of Hume’s “Newtonianism.” The works of Pemberton and Maclaurin are always mentioned, but the various Newtonian works of Desaguliers, Whiston, and ‘sGravesande “are usually ignored.” (pp. 161–2n.)
Jones states that the “‘Newtonian Philosophy’ could be understood in very different ways, depending on the presumed knowledge of the audience and the required precision of the speaker” and cites Chambers’ article on “Newtonian Philosophy” as evidence for a hierarchy of Newtonians. Some do understand the difficult mathematical sections of the Principia but the majority do not. (Hume’s Sentiments, p.yy 12.) Jones regards the latter category of Newtonians as not serious enough for consideration and as not really interested in Newtonianism. It is necessary, then, to examine just what Chambers does say about “Newtonian Philosophy” in his famous Cyclopaedia article from 1728, the year following Newton’s death. He first defines “Newtonian Philosophy” generally as “the doctrine of the universe, and particularly of the heavenly bodies; their laws, affections, &c. as delivered by Isaac Newton.” Chambers next, as Jones points out, distinguishes five other usages of the term. It is used variously to refer to the “new philosophy” of “corpuscularianism”; to the “method or order which Sir Isaac Newton observes in philosophizing”; to “that wherein physical bodies are considered mathematically”; “that part of physical knowledge, which Sir Isaac Newton has handled, improved, and demonstrated in his Principia”; and, finally, to “new principles which Sir Isaac Newton has brought into philosophy.” Jones certifies only the third usage, “that wherein physical bodies are considered mathematically,” as signifying genuine “Newtonian Philosophy.” Then he argues that, because “There is no evidence that Hume was competent to follow the mathematical core of the Principia” and “because we may infer that he understood the ‘Newtonian method’ in one or more of the non-technical senses that became popular in the first half of the eighteenth century,” Hume cannot be interested in serious Newtonianism. If our wish is to understand the context of the people of an era, we must permit them to speak for themselves. If Chambers records that these various senses are all part of “Newtonian Philosophy,” we must acknowledge that “Newtonian Philosophy” then had a wider, more latitudinarian, meaning than it does today when it has been reduced to just what Jones says it is, i.e., the mathematical sections of the Principia. Chambers, to continue with his article, goes on to spend three folio columns elucidating the chief points of Book III (save for the “Rules” which he does not once mention), especially gravity “which some condemn as an occult quality, and others as miraculous, and praeter-natural causes.” He notes, after observing the slow progress of the “Newtonian Philosophy” abroad, the “general acceptance” of it, apparently in all its senses, at home. [Ephraim Chambers, Cyclopaedia: Or, An Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences…, 2 vols. (London, 1728), s.v. “Newtonian Philosophy.”]
Alexandre Koyré, “Newton’s ‘Regulae Philosophandi’,” in his Newtonian Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), pp. 261–72.
David Gregory, Astromiae, physicae et geometriae elementa (Oxoniae, 1702.)
John Keill, An Introduction to Natural Philosophy (London, 1720.) This work is an English translation of a Latin work which first appeared in 1720. Also of importance in this regard is Keill’s An Introduction to the True Astronomy (London, 1721), the English translation of a work published in 1718.
John Clarke, A Demonstration of Some of the Principal Sections of Sir Isaac Newton’s Principles of Natural Philosophy (London, 1730), pp. 98–104. Clarke directly quotes all four Rules and emphasizes the necessity of empirical observations in order to evade “hypotheses,” but he does not refer at all to the application of these Rules to the design argument.
Henry Pemberton, A View of Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy (London, 1728), pp. 23–6. The fourth Rule is simply paraphrased in four lines.
Colin Maclaurin, An Account of Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophical Discoveries, 2nd ed. (London, 1750), pp. 396–412. On p. 400, Maclaurin states, “The plain argument for the existence of the Deity, obvious to all and carrying irresistable conviction with it, is from the evident contrivance and fitness of things for one another, which we meet with throughout all parts of the universe. There is no need of nice or subtle reasonings in this matter…. It strikes us like a sensation.” Compare this with Cleanthes’ remark in Part 3 of the Dialogues (D 154): “Consider, anatomize the eye: Survey its structure and contrivance; and tell me, from your own feeling, if the idea of a contriver does not immediately flow in upon you with a force like that of sensation.” (I have added emphasis to both quotes to show the points of resonance.) Now it is the case that the Newtonians do not possess the exclusive concession on the eyeball as the perfect example of design. But the above text by Maclaurin (with its startling Humean echo) suggests the wide dissemination of this idea in a Newtonian setting which held the design inference arising from its contemplation to be as forceful as sensation and which was recognizable then as Newtonian in inspiration. In Newton’s theological manuscripts, and so unknown to Maclaurin (unless he discussed it with Newton or someone who knew Newton’s views on this point), is the following highly suggestive text. Newton writes: Whence is it that the eyes of all sorts of living creatures are transparent members of ye body, having on ye outside an… transparent skin, & within… a crystalline lens in the middle & a pupil before the lens all of them so truly shaped & filled for vision, that no Artist can mend them? Did blind chance know that there was light & what was its refraction & fil the eyes of all creatures after the most curious manner to make use of it? “These & such like considerations always have & ever will prevail with mankind to believe that there is a being who made all things & has all things in his power & who is therefore to be feared.” (Newton, “A Short Scheme of the True Religion,” Keynes MS 7, King’s College Library, King’s College, Cambridge.)
The most interesting interpretation of the application and importance of Newton’s Rules which I have been able to find is that of the Newtonian experimentalist, Wilhelm Jacob ‘sGravesande. In the Preface of his Mathematical elements of Physicks, Prov’d by Experiments: Being an Introduction to Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy, Made English… by Dr. John Keill, F.R.S. (London, 1720.) Naturally, as this book precedes the publication of the third edition of the Principia by some six years, there is no mention in it of the fourth Rule. None of its subsequent editions or translations, including the translation of the sixth edition by J. T. Desaguliers, contains any discussion of the fourth Rule. Still, his discussion of the first three Rules is interesting for its resonance with Hume’s views that when making probable inductions, we assume, from habit, that the future will resemble the past. ‘sGravesande writes: But to return to Physicks. Here we must judge of the Agreement of Things with our sensible Ideas. For Example, the Extension and Solidity of Matter, which we affirm upon this Foundation, are certain beyond Controversy: We do not here enquire whether the Senses may not on some Occasions deceive us, and how that Error may be remedied, but only consider the thing in general. In Physics we cannot make a Judgement immediately, or directly concerning all our Senses. But there is another proper way of Reasoning, tho’ not Mathematical, founded on this Axiom: That is to be accounted true, which if it be not allowed, Humane Society could not subsist, or the Method of Mens Living would be destroyed. From which Proposition, which no one can make any doubt of, the second and third Newtonian Rules of Philosophizing are most evidently deduced. For unless we account those things as generally true, which every where appear such, where we can make any Experiments; and that like Effects be supposed to arise from a like Cause, who can be able to live one Moment of Time in Ease? Indeed, without attending to it, every one doth daily admit the following Reasonings to be indubitable; and sees evidently that the Conclusions from them cannot be called into Question, without supposing the Destruction of the present Frame and Constitution of Things. A Building, to-day perfectly firm in all its Parts, will fall down to-morrow of its own accord; that is, the Cohesion of the Parts of Bodies, and their Gravity, which I never saw, nor heard of, chang’d without the Intervention of some external Cause, will not be changed this Night; for there will be the same Cause of Cohaesion and Gravity to-morrow as to-day. The Certainty of which Reasoning can only be deduc’d from the above mentioned Principles…. I have used such and such Food for several Years, I will also take it to-day without any Fear. When I see Hemlock I conclude there is Poison in it, tho’ I have made myself no Experiment. All these Reasonings are founded upon Analogy: And it is not to be doubted but we are put under the Necessity of Reasoning by Analogy, by the Creator of all Things. This therefore is the proper Foundation of Reasoning. It’s interesting to note here how, without benefit of the fourth Rule and its insistence upon experimental verification, the first three Rules can be the basis for dogmatically making certain claims about the future. It’s extremely speculative, of course, but it seems at least possible that the fourth of Newton’s “Rules of Reasoning” (which Hume may possibly refer to as the “chief rule of philosophizing” — see Note 21), may be the basis for Hume’s whole criticism of induction.
This point is made by James Noxon in his Hume’s Philosophical Development. A Study of his Methods, Corrected edition (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 76. The early influence of Newtonian scientific methodology, argues Noxon, wanes as Hume matures philosophically and comes to realize the inherent tensions between his early, Newtonian-inspired psychology and his own philosophy and when he also develops a growing hostility to what he comes to recognize as the enthusiastic excesses of the Newtonian theologians. I was privileged to hear Christine Battersby’s excellent critique of this position in a paper entitled “Hume, Noxon and Newton” which she delivered to the Hume Society Conference held at Trinity College, Dublin, in 1981. Battersby examined the course of Hume’s long involvement with Newton and the sciences and argued conclusively against such a developmental thesis. There is a strong affinity between Noxon’s developmental thesis and Jones’ position when he talks of how “Hume’s fundamental assumptions about man and his nature are already driving him apart from Newton….” (Hume’s Sentiments, pp. 13–4.) Or, again, “In fact, Hume’s own philosophical reflections led away from Newton….” (Hume’s Sentiments, p. 18.) The difference between them is that, for Noxon, the acknowledged early methodological interest of Hume in Newton is a serious scientific one whereas, for Jones, as a result of his refusal to acknowledge the permeability of the disciplines in Hume’s day, this sort of interest, not being mathematical, is simply not serious.
If our criterion for a serious interest in “Newtonian Philosophy” is to be a clear understanding of the mathematical sections of the Principia, which take up most of the book, then, as now, few people could be classified as having been directly influenced by Newton’s work. As Jones points out (Hume’s Sentiments, p. 12), Voltaire observes that “In London, very few people read Descartes, whose works have become quite useless… neither do many read Newton, because one must be very learned to understand him.” [Voltaire to Abbé Bignon, late 1713, in A Voltaire, Oeuveres complètes de Voltaire, ed. Beuchot, 72 vols. (Paris, 1834–40), 37:191.] Jones takes this statement as evidence that Hume lacks any serious interest in Newton. I take it as evidence for the need to rethink how we conceive of what counts as serious interest in Newton and in science in the age of Newton. In Jones’s view, of course, Voltaire must himself lack any serious interest in Newton and science.
Jones, Hume’s Sentiments, p. 17.
Hume reveals the importance of the Gentleman’s Magazine in the dissemination of news within the republic of letters in his letter to William Mure of Nov. 14, 1742. In January, 1742, in the second volume of Essays Moral and Political, Hume had published his character sketch of Sir Robert Walpole. In his letter to Mure, Hume claims that only with the reprinting of his piece on Walpole in the Gentleman’s Magazine are his Sentiments “publish’d to all Britain.” See The Letters of David Hume, 1:44.1 would argue, judging from the tremendous number of references to Newton and Newtonian Philosophy in the pages of the Gentleman’s Magazine, that it is a most important source for expanding our understanding of the extent and spread of Newton’s ideas (and of ideas whose proponents claimed a linkage with Newton) within the society in which Hume lived. In general, I fully agree with Jonathan Rees’s criticism of historians of philosophy in which he chides many of the practitioners of that gentle art for their general tendency to ignore any sort of archival work and their sad indifference “to the use of sources other than the publications (or at most the manuscripts), of the canonized Great Dead Philosophers.” Rees’s views are voiced in a “Letter” published in the British Society for the History of Philosophy Newsletter, No. 1 (Autumn, 1986), p. 3.
Gentleman’s Magazine, May, 1734, p. 335.
Ibid., June, 1734, p. 335.
Ibid., September, 1734, pp. 483–4.
The Letters of David Hume, 1:24.
Ibid., 1:26.
Gentleman’s Magazine, March, 1739, p. 115; and April, 1739, p. 174.
Ibid., July, 1751, pp. 314–5.
Ibid., pp. 315–7.
Ibid., December, 1751, pp. 556–8.
Ibid., May, 1751, p. 203. This reply is directed at an essay published in the Gentleman’s Magazine in September, 1750, pp. 398–9. According to the author of this reply (in May, 1751), the original essayist had confused light with air. By way of correction, this author (from May, 1751) introduces Newton’s definition to show that light is distinguished from air “which is a gross, ponderous, elastic fluid, and is only the medium or vehicle, but by no means the substance, of light.”
Gentleman’s Magazine, May, 1751, pp. 218–22.
Compare this quote from a committed Newtonian design theorist who, in the following passage, does exactly what Philo complains about in the above text. William Whiston writes: But then as to the nature of the fix’d stars, ‘tis in all probability the same with the sun’s; and so each of them may have their respective systems of planets and comets as well as he has. Which things, considering that the number of them is continually found to be greater, according as the telescopes we use are longer and more perfect, do vastly aggrandize the idea of the visible universe; and ought proportionally to raise our admiration of the Great Author of the Whole to the highest degree imaginable. (A New Theory of the Earth, p. 33.)
In her 1981 paper entitled “Hume, Noxon and Newton,” Christine Battersby cited the following resonance between Hume’s writing and the Opticks of Newton. In the Treatise, where Hume is discussing absolute time and arguing that our idea of time is built up by the mental succession of experienced events, Hume refers to John Locke and gives an apparently Lockean example to prove his point. Hume writes, “If you wheel about a burning coal with rapidity, it will present to the senses an image of a circle of fire; nor will there seem to be any interval of time betwixt its revolutions….” (Treatise, p. 35.) Battersby cited the actual passage from Locke which presents a very different image with a metaphor to the “Images in the inside of a Lanthorn, turned round by the Heat of a Candle.” [John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, ed. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1975], p. 184.] The specific image to which Hume appeals in the Treatise, our perception when wheeling a burning coal about us with rapidity, is used twice by Newton in the Opticks. [Sir Isaac Newton, Opticks or a Treatise of the Reflections, Inflections & Colours of Light. Based on the Fourth London Edition, 1730. (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1952), pp. 141 and 347.]
Newton, Opticks, p. 169.
The idea of a geological catastrophe had been popularized by Thomas Burnet in his Theory of the Earth (1681–90) which, by 1700, had been the subject of thirty-two rebuttals including that of William Whiston in his A New Theory of the Earth (1696.) There are many other discussions in which the authors, like Philo in Part 6 of the Dialogues, argue that “… it may rationally be supposed, that there were then great Mutations and Alterations made in the superficial part of the Earth….” [This quotation is from John Ray, Three Physico-Theological Discourses (London, 1721), p. 121.] Jones flatly ignores this mention by Hume of fossils and geological upheavals and instead states that “there is no reference to Buffon’s exciting speculations on the origins of universe or of man, no apparent interest in Hutton’s revolutionary geological theory which had developed over thirty years from the 1750s…” (Hume’s Sentiments, p. 17.) As I mention in the text, Hume may not be referring to the strictly geological notion of cyclical mountain building and erosion. The perpetual circulation of matter may possibly be a reference to Newton’s distinctly alchemical theory of the operation of aether. Here is a quote from Newton’s Correspondence which is hauntingly similar to the idea briefly sketched by Hume in the Dialogues. Newton writes: For nature is a perpetuall circulatory worker, generating Fluids out of solids, & solids out of Fluids, Fixed things out of volatile & volatile out of fixed, Subtile out of gross and gross out of subtile. Some things to ascend & make the upper terrestrial juices, Rivers and the Atmosphere; & by consequence others to descend for a Requitall of the former. And as the Earth, so perhaps may the Sun imbibe this Spirit copiously to conserve his shineing, & keep the Planet, from receding further from him. [The Correspondence of Isaac Newton, 7 vols., ed. H. W. Turnbull, J. F. Scott, A. R. Hall, and L. Tilling (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1959–77), 1:366.
On the alchemical nature of this theory, see J. E. McGuire, “Newton’s Doctrine of Physical Qualities,” Ambix 14, No. 2 (June, 1967), p. 85.]
The Newtonian, J. T. Desaguliers, to take one example, had utilized Newtonian cosmogony as a model for understanding the microscopic world. [See Arthur Quinn, The Confidence of British Philosophers. An Essay in Historical Understanding (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1977), p. 76.] Whiston, to take another example, writes that the microscope reveals “entire Bodies themselves in parvo.” (Whiston, A New Theory of the Earth, pp. 299–300.) Nearer to Hume’s day, Henry Baker had published his very popular (though undoubtedly not serious) The Microscope Made Easy in 1743 which is supplemented in 1753 with his two-part Employment for the Microscope. In the former work, Baker writes about how Malphigi, Leeuwenhoek, Hooke, Grew, and others all “bear Witness, that the Microscope has discovered not only in the larger Seed, such as the Walnuts, Chestnut,… & Co., but also in the smaller….”
[Baker, The Microscope Made Easy (London, 1743), Part ii, Chapter xlvi.]
If a similarity must be insisted upon, the problem is that the inference reveals “a mind like the human,” thus making Hume’s transition from arguing about the analogy between human products and natural things to, instead, arguing about what possibly may be inferred about the nature of the creator if one takes the analogy as a given.
First espoused by Descartes in the Principia Philosophiae [Oeuvres de Descartes, 12 vols., ed. C. Adam and P. Tannery (Paris, 1897–1910), 8:156–7], the theory of the cometary origins of the earth gained wide recognition in the first half of the 18th century as the result of William Whiston’s A New Theory of the Earth which went through six editions during the first half of the eighteenth century. In his remark about a comet possibly being the “seed” of the world, Hume may be referring to Descartes or Whiston. Hume may have known Whiston’s New Theory directly (as Berkeley did) or through the lengthy summary of Whiston’s New Theory in Buffon’s Histoire et théorie de la terre, vol. 1, Histoire naturelle (Paris, 1749), Premier discours, Article IL Jones points out (Hume’s Sentiments, p. 17) that Hume owned “some volumes” of Buffon’s great work in 1766 and is surprised that Hume does not refer to him. It may be (though it need not necessarily be) the case that Hume’s reference to a cometary seed is to Whiston via Buffon.
It is Hume’s view that the only job for a scientist (or a man of letters speculating about the limits of such inquiries) is to describe particular sequences of events and, thus, to build up a picture of the structure and behavior of natural processes and mechanisms. Seeking for the “ultimate cause” of the whole is beyond, as far as the moderate sceptic Hume is concerned, what a scientist or any other human being can hope to attain. For a clear and accurate account of Hume’s views on causal explanation in science and the vanity of pursuing “ultimate causes” after the manner of Newton, see Donald W. Livingston, Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), Chapter 6, especially pp. 160–7. The effect of this searching analysis is once again to place Hume within the sphere of Newtonian influence. Livingston shows how Hume is a sceptical critic of Newton’s search for ultimate causes but points out that Hume’s standpoint is not from outside of the tradition of belief in ultimate causal connection — “it is rather the result of a searching examination of one who is still within the tradition” (p. 166.) For corroborative texts from the Dialogues, see pp. 174 and, especially, p. 191.
Hauksbee’s electrical experiments before the Royal Society in 1705–6 provoked Newton’s theorizing on electricity, a subject which he had not touched upon for thirty years. In his theorizing concerning the binding effect of electrical forces upon the particles of bodies, Newton emphasizes their extreme elasticity. According to Westfall, “when he reintroduced an aether of similar qualities into his philosophy a few years later, he argued from its properties that it was composed of particles that repelled each other powerfully.” [Richard S. Westfall, Never at Rest. A Biography of Isaac Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 747.] J. L. Heilbron has argued recently that Newton finds support for his later view concerning the connection between electricity and gravity in the experiments of such disciples as Hauksbee and Desaguliers. In an unpublished draft addition for the Opticks edition of 1717/8, Heilbron states that Newton “discusses a microscopic correlate of the gravitational aether….”
[J. L. Heilbron, Physics at the Royal Society during Newton’s Presidency (Los Angeles: The William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, U.C.L.A., 1983), p. 64.]
On Hume’s scientific credentials to be one of the Secretaries of the Edinburgh Philosophical Society, see Barfoot, “Hume and the Culture of Science in the Early Eighteenth Century,” p. 165. During Hume’s last years, Pringle became embroiled, as President of the Royal Society, in a controversy with King George III concerning the most effective design for lightning rods. The chief advocate of the pointed conductor was Benjamin Franklin, prize-winning Fellow of the Royal Society and, from 1775, an active rebel against crown rule in the American colonies. On political grounds, the King rejected the pointed conductor advocated by the rebel leader and the Royal Society and installed at the royal palaces the rounded, blunt lightning rod. In 1777, King George met with Pringle and urged him to use his influence within the Royal Society to reverse the Society’s official stand favoring the pointed conductor. Pringle, in a reply worthy of his departed friend and patient, David Hume, replied, “Sire, I cannot reverse the laws and operations of nature.” Because of his own age (71) and because he had openly rebuffed the Society’s royal patron, Pringle did not stand for re-election to the Presidency of the Royal Society in 1778. [Sir Henry Lyons, The Royal Society, 1660–1940; A History of its Administration and its Charters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1944), pp. 193–4.] In 1762, at Hume’s request (in his capacity as Joint Secretary of the Philosophical Society of Edinburgh), Franklin had sent Hume and the Philosophical Society a paper on the use of the lightning rod.
[Ernest C. Mossner, The Life of David Hume, second edition (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1980), p. 394.]
David Hume and Alexander Munro, Editors, Essays and Observations, Physical and Literary, Read before a Society in Edinburgh and Published by them, Vol. 1 (Edinburgh, 1754), pp. vi-vii. This text is reprinted in Scots Magazine 16 (1754), pp. 185–6.
T. E. Jessop, “The Misunderstood Hume,” in Hume and the Enlightenment. Essays Presented to Ernest Campbell Mossner, ed. William B. Todd (Edinburgh: The University Press; Austin: University of Texas Humanities Research Center, 1974), p. 12.
A much shorter version of this paper was presented by the author at the International Hume Conference sponsored by the Hume Society and the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh on August 25, 1986. A slightly different version was printed in Hume Studies 13, No. 2 (Nov., 1987), pp. 166–216. Since it was written a new document has been auctioned comprising Hume’s lecture notes on a course he apparently took on “fluxions” from George Campbell in Edinburgh in 1726. See Sotheby’s sale catalogue for an auction held at Sotheby’s Grosvenor Gallery on New Bond Street on “Thursday 21st July 1988 at 11.00 am” and “Friday 22nd July 1988 at 11.00 am” concerning works in “English Literature and History, comprising Printed books, Autograph Letter and Manuscripts…”, Item 473, p. 241.
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Force, J.E. (1990). Hume’s Interest in Newton and Science. In: Essays on the Context, Nature, and Influence of Isaac Newton’s Theology. Archives Internationales D’Histoire Des Idées/International Archives of the History of Ideas, vol 129. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-1944-0_10
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