1 ‗The Reception of Newton‘s Theory of Matter and his Atomism‘ (DRAFT 3) Catherine Wilson for H. Pulte and S. Mandelbrote, eds., The Reception of Isaac Newton in Europe

It was sometimes remarked by European academicians that Newton‘s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy was not a true contribution to natural philosophy. The Principia assuredly did not resemble the 17th century‘s preeminent work of natural philosophy, Descartes‘s Principia Philosophiae (1644). Despite Newton‘s occasional touching on ontological topics, and his harsh criticism of Cartesian subtle matter in Book III of his own Principia, the expected didactic account of corporeal nature, God, and the soul were missing; mathematics and methodology occupied their place. Immanuel Kant, while praising Newton‘s ‗immortal‘ work, declared that the Principia were only an instrument for the systematization of the laws of nature and for calculation, forming ‗no part of the philosophical study of nature.‘ The notion of mathematical principles of philosophy was as absurd, declared Kant, as the notion of philosophical principles of mathematics (Kant 1803/1902- , XXI: 482). Newton‘s so-called ―alchemical‖ papers on practical chemistry and the transmutation of substances were not recovered until the 20th century. From the turn of the 18th century, however, the Newtonian corpuscle that had made an appearance in Books II and III of the Principia as well as in Newton‘s Opticks was invoked in accounts of light, heat, and magnetism, as well as chemical solution, combination, crystallization, fermentation, and other operations. Bernard de Fontenelle, in his Éloge de Newton delivered after Newton‘s death in 1727, maintained that a ‗complete system of Physics‘ was implied in the ‗Queries‘ to his Opticks, and that the ideas Newton expressed there would either be a great help to future students of nature, ‗or at least make a curious history of the Conjectures of a past Philosopher.‘ (Fontenelle 1728, 20). The Encyclopédie article, ‗Matière‘ of 1765 moved briskly over Aristotle‘s concept of prime matter, and the Cartesian identification of matter and extension, to what was essentially a lengthy paraphrase of the 31st Query. Where Newton had cited cohesion, and electrical and magnetic attraction as evidence of the existence of short range attractive forces between 1

2 particles, and the expansion of decompressed ‗air‘ and vapour as evidence of repulsive forces in the Query, his expositors added such phenomena as capillarity, the formation of rounded water droplets, and the resistance to mixture of oil and water as evidence of repulsive forces, and such references became standard. As late as 1798, Pierre Simon Laplace devoted an entire chapter of his magnificent Mécanique céleste to a declaration of faith in the unity of macrocosm and microcosm, citing again, the ascent of liquids in thin glass tubes, the cohesion of solid bodies, and crystallization as evidence for the ubiquity of attractive and repulsive forces.

Matter in the Principia, the Optics, and the Queries

The basic ontology of the Principia is that of the mass point subject to forces, while the Opticks refer to ‗rays,‘ leaving their composition undetermined. The ‗fits‘ of transmission and reflection Newton posited to account for the colours of bodies nevertheless depended on their corpuscularian constitution, and the Queries went on to posit particles of solid matter, suggesting that the light ray is in fact composed of ‗very small Bodies emitted from shining Substances‘ (Newton 1730/ 1952, 387). Newton‘s favourable attitude to a corpuscularian theory did not distinguish him from his Royal Society fellows. His version of matter, or ‗body,‘ as he styled it, belonged within the anti-Aristotelian tradition established by the ancient atomists, described by his popularizer Algarotti as ‗more prudent and humane than the rest‘ (Algarotti 1765. vi), and favoured by Cartesians and Gassendists alike (Johnson and Wilson 2006). Descartes, whose Principia Newton knew well, required three grades of matter, the luminous, the lumeniferous, and the earthy. Newton opposed him, following the Gassendists and Robert Boyle in declaring that the elementary particles of matter were homogeneous and describing the true primordia of nature as hard, colorless particles of a perfectly uniform substance; differences in the elements – fire, air, earth, and water—could depend only on the arrangement and motion of their smallest parts. Fire was the glowing or shining of the agitated particles of a burning substance, and gold, mercury and other elements were composed of metallic particles that were resistant to smashing, grinding, heating, dissolving, and all other laboratory operations, but composed of yet smaller atoms in a 2

3 stable, strongly cohering structure that accounted for their particular properties and appearances. In principle, however, any chemical substance could be transformed into any other, and light, as a corpuscular phenomenon, entered into chemical reactions and could indeed be transformed into gross matter. The elementary particles of substances were all transparent; substances composed of very small composite particles, like water and glass, were also transparent; opacity resulted from the reflections between the internal particles of a substance when these were large enough. (Newton 1730/1952, 24951). In the Principia, Newton‘s main discussion of matter theory was placed deliberately in the context of a discussion of methodology, in Rule III of Book III. The universal qualities of bodies were said there to be extrapolated from experience according to the principle that ‗nature is always simple and ever consonant with itself‘ (Newton, 1686/1999, 795). All bodies known to us have extension, and bodies beyond the range of sense perception must be ascribed extension as well. Hardness and impenetrability in microscopic and submicroscopic entities are similarly inferred, so that ‗the foundation of natural philosophy‘ is that ‗every one of the least parts of all bodies is extended, hard, impenetrable, movable, and endowed with a force of inertia‘ (ibid, 796). Newton‘s further ascription of an attractive power to all bodies was, he and his readers realized, not to be inferred from direct experience, and, unlike the other properties he posited, it was unprecedented in corpuscularian theory. If, however, the attractive power of celestial objects was demonstrated by mathematical reasoning, the ‗analogy of nature‘ ensured that attraction was present in even the smallest particles of matter. The main features of Newton‘s atomism as outlined in the philosophical 28th, 30th, and 31st Queries were as follows: (1) The original creation of God consists of ‗solid, massy, impenetrable, moveable Particles, of such Sizes and Figures, and with such other properties, and in such Proportion to Space, as most conduced to the End for which he form‘d them‘ (Newton 1730/1952, 400). Other worlds could have been, and may be composed of different sorts of particles, in which case they would contain different substances and the ‗Nature of Things‘ would be other than it is (ibid.). (2) These primary particles are so hard as ‗never to wear or break in pieces;‘ their immutability sustains the immutability of compound substances such as water and earth (ibid.) Their primitive 3

4 hardness explains in turn why all gross bodies are either hard or can be hardened by congelation (ibid. 389). (3) The particles of bodies have ‗certain Powers, Virtues, or Forces, by which they act at a distance‘ (ibid., 375-6). (4) The primary particles, touching in only a few points, cohere ‗by the strongest Attractions,‘ composing ‗bigger Particles, whose Virtue is weaker,‘ and so on, ‗until the Progression end in the biggest Particles on which the Operations in Chymistry…and the Colours of natural Bodies depend‘ (ibid., 394). (5) Where the motions of the heavenly bodies are fully explained by inertia and the attractive force of gravity, smaller objects at shorter distances are governed by ‗some other attractive and repelling Powers which intecede the particles‘ (ibid., 397). (6) The primary particles are subject to a force Newton calls ‗fermentation‘ that produces motion, warmth, generation, and putrefaction (ibid. 380). (7) Radical transmutation is possible; water had been experimentally converted to earth by distillation, Newton believed, and light was perhaps convertible to grosser bodies and grosser bodies to light (ibid., 374-5). In favouring the hard, massy particle, Newton distanced himself, much as Boyle had done, from classical, atheistic atomism and from Cartesianism as well. ‘If we say with Descartes that extension is body, do we not manifestly offer a path to atheism?‘ he asked, implying that space, which he later represented as God‘s ‗sensorium,‘ and matter had to be distinguished for theological reasons (Newton 1978, 142–3). He further repudiated Descartes‘s bold suggestion that matter, left to itself, and guided only by the laws of nature imposed by God, could eventually form a cosmos with multiple worlds containing living plants and animals (Newton 1756). His rejection of the Cartesian position depended on two main arguments. The first, that the planetary system was too orderly and the bodies of animals too symmetrical to have arisen by chance and that the latter were ‗contrived with so much Art‘ that they implied a designer (Newton 1730/1952, 369, 403), was not especially original; the claim that, given cosmological time scales, matter would take on all possible forms of which it was capable, including animal machines, was widely repudiated. The second argument, that motion is lost in the cosmos, both as a result of the cumulative effect of attraction that pulls bodies out of orbit and through collision between inelastic bodies, and that the presence and agency of God are required to sustain it (Newton 1730/1952, 403), was original, but did not command 4

5 the same agreement. Indeed it was a view that seemed to G.W. Leibniz hardly compatible with a rational physics. Newton‘s demonstration of how the corpuscle could be integrated into experimental and mathematical science within a theological framework was perhaps nevertheless as effective as Boyle‘s rhetoric in dissociating atomism and mechanics from the perturbing doctrines of the ancient atomists. Newton‘s atomism was in any case conceptually anchored both in the a priori or common sense reasoning that had been cited in its favour from ancient times, and in his experimental optics and his celestial mechanics, through the ‗analogy of nature.‘ He said less about the primordia of nature than his fellow corpuscularians had in their anxious efforts to remove the taints of atheism and mortalism from the old doctrine, and his reticence perhaps gave his few pronouncements greater authority. He did not represent his ontology as merely probable, as Boyle had, or as merely furnishing the best explanation of the ease with which qualitative transformations took place in the chemical laboratory, and he by no means eschewed recourse to hypotheses involving subvisible corpuscles. Roger Cotes‘s preface to the second edition of the Principia (1713) inveighed against corpuscularians who ‗take the liberty of imagining that the unknown shapes and sizes of the particles are whatever they please, and of assuming their uncertain positions and motions‘ (Newton 1686/1999, 385). Yet Newton‘s own optical theory of ‗fits‘ was intended to be visualized in corpuscularian terms, as was his account of the solution of gold and silver in aqua regia and aqua fortis, which he discusses in the same terms as the maligned mechanical philosophers—probably Hartsoeker and Lemery (Partington 1962 III:33). Corpuscularianism had infiltrated European philosophical discourse through many channels—through Bacon, van Helmont, Sennert, Descartes, Gassendi, and Boyle, whose works were better distributed in Europe in the first half of the 18th century than were Newton‘s. Nevertheless, as Newton‘s English commentators, including John Keill, Colin Maclaurin, Henry Pemberton, and Benjamin Martin, were republished, translated, or imitated on the Continent, this feature of his ontology became prominent. The ontological doctrines of Newton‘s unpublished but widely circulated De gravitatione were presented by Pierre Coste in his 1735 French translation of Locke‘s Essay (De Gandt 1985, 108). His first expositors in the Netherlands, Pieter van Muesschenbroeck and

5

6 Willem s‘Gravesande, adopted a traditional presentation of his natural philosophy, with ontology first, rather than last. ‗Natural things are all bodies,‘ declared s‘Gravesande programmatically, in his Physices elementa mathematica, experimentis confirmata,

sive introductio ad philosophiam Newtonianam (1720), ‗and the assemblage or system of them all is called the Universe‘ (s‘Gravesande 1720, 4-6). He went on to itemize the properties of body as extension, solidity, divisibility, moveability, figure, and inertia, and observed that, as a gram of gold beaten flat has two million visible minima, the invisible minimal particles of which it is composed must be unimaginably small and numerous. Muesschenbroek‘s Epitome elementorum physico-mathematicorum (1726) located Newton in a tradition of atomic theory beginning with Moschus, Leucippus and Democritus, though pointedly not with Epicurus and Lucretius. At the same time, these expositors were willing to set aside basic philosophical questions about the essence of bodies. They did not insist on the perfect homogeneity of their elementary particles, or try to give the grounds of, or reasons for their possession of their fundamental characteristics, or worry about the philosophical conflict between the discreteness in nature posited of the elementary particle and its divisibility in thought. The silence of the Newtonians on these topics appeared to some philosophers as inadequacy or evasion; to others, it reflected a novel and appropriate distinction between experimental and speculative philosophy. Accordingly, Newtonian matter theory could be understood in three distinct, mutually exclusive ways. On the atomistic interpretation, Newton was thought of as positing unbreakable elementary particles, perhaps separated by void, perhaps floating in a fluid or particulate aether. Second, Newtonianism was interpreted antimaterialistically as implying that the solidity and hardness of gross bodies was merely phenomenal, with solid matter occupying a minute fraction of the universe. All the phenomena of materiality derived, on this view, from attractive, repulsive, and perhaps other, unknown forces. Finally, on an agnostic interpretation, matter was an unknowable noumenon whose inner essence was of no concern to the experimentalist, who attended only to the mathematical regimentation of behaviour of bodies observed by him or under his control. While the scheme of atoms and attractions was widely reported and chemists evidently visualized chemical processes and reactions in corpuscularian terms, European 6

7 chemistry was not devoted to a working out of the Newtonian programme for matter theory in the same sense that European physics was devoted to a working out of the Newtonian programme for mechanics or dynamics. Newton‘s commitment to the homogeneity of matter and the transmutability of all substances stood outside the main lines of the development of a chemistry of elements (Kuhn, 1952). Hermann Boerhaave depended more on Bacon than on Newton for his methodological remarks concerning the importance of experiment and systematization, and Newton and Newtonian attraction receive only the occasional mention in his generously documented texts, chiefly in the footnotes of his Elementa Chemiae. Like other early modern chemists, Boerhaave drew on the German tradition from Paracelsus to Homberg for his chemical views, which involved much emphasis on fire particles; these had been invoked by the Newtonian, John Freind, though such particles were inconsistent with Newton‘s own conception of heat, fire, and flame. Boerhaave expressed his doubts that the laws of motion of falling, projected and colliding bodies would ‗reach to those more remote, intestine motions of the component particles of the same bodies whereon the changes of texture, colours, properties, &c. induced by chemistry depend.‘ He applauded Newton‘s ‗hint‘ that different laws applied to the nonmechanical powers associated with gravity, magnetism, and electricity (Boerhaave 1732/1953, 155). Newton‘s authority might nevertheless be invoked in apologetic prefaces written by chemists, by way of establishing the dignity of their subject (Meinel 1981, 375),1 and short-range attractive and repulsive forces were assumed to underlie the phenomena recorded in the tables of affinity, records of the ease and difficulty with which various substances could be combined, produced from the early 1700 onwards. In retrospect, the image of the chemical microworld as consisting of globular bodies, separated by spatial intervals and impelled by forces, according to the analogy of nature is a curious one. The phenomena of the heavens were open to ocular inspection and measurement, and data collected and refined over many centuries had served as the basis for the deduction of

1

Meinel cites Hahn in particular as propounding a ‗corpusculorum mechanica‘ that

would reduce cohesion, heat, attraction and affinity to two complementary forces of attraction and repulsion (Meinel 1981, 377). 7

8 gravity. Such data were not available in chemistry, which studied not moving objects, but the qualitative transformations of substances under mixture and heating. Historically, the regular motions and unchanging structure of the heavens had been contrasted with both the earthy inertness of the terrestrial realm and with the ongoing qualitative changes of sublunary generation and corruption. While the unification of macrocosm and microcosm on the assumption that ‗matter‘ is everywhere the same and obeys the same laws remains the goal of physics, a system of orbiting planets seems a poor model for a lump of gold or lead. The ideal of deducing the forces of nature from the phenomena was irreproachable, but not easy to put into practice. Laplace argued that the impossibility of observing and measuring the behaviour of tiny molecules rendered the claim that chemical affinities depend upon the forms of molecules, and the distances between them which determine their attractions ‗vague and useless‘ (Metzger 1930, 68). Continental physicists were meanwhile troubled by the incompatibility of Newtonian hard bodies with the principle of conservation,to such an extent that an essay contest on the problem was sponsored by the French Académie des sciences in 1724 (Scott, 1959). If two perfectly hard moving bodies, for example, two primary corpuscles, which, being perfectly solid, have no void to render them elastic, and no material atmosphere to absorb their momentum, collide, the Newtonians maintained, they will stop; their force will simply go out of existence. Hence, an atomic universe without a divine, or at least incorporeal source of renewal cannot sustain itself for long, a view Newton in fact embraced. The Newtonian Maclaurin won the Académie prize for allegedly demonstrating the loss of force, but this result was vigorously disputed, and gave rise to the vis viva controversy. While Jean le Rond d‘Alembert maintained on behalf of Newton that one could not form an idea of matter without supposing an ‗original and primitive hardness,‘ even if such bodies were ideal and never physically instantiated, Johann Bernoulli rejected hardness ‗taken in the vulgar sense,‘ echoing Leibniz in arguing that perfectly solid atoms were impossible; they were ‗imaginary corpuscles which have reality only in the opinion of their partisans‘ (quoted Scott 1959, p. 200), and Leonhard Euler followed him in this opinion. However, the problem of hard bodies had further ramifications, for while perfectly solid atoms and perfectly inelastic collisions might be rare or nonexistent, the degree of elasticity possessed by any body 8

9 composed of hard atoms is a function of its cohesive forces and compressibility, so force ought to disappear to some extent in all collisions. To make matters worse, force would apparently be lost in collisions between perfectly soft bodies as well. By contrast with celestial mechanics and fluid dynamics, which had developed so brilliantly in Europe, the Newtonian programme for a unified science of material nature, embracing chemistry, electricity, heat, light, and magnetism based on particles and forces had accordingly either failed to emerge, or faced heavy competition towards the end of the 18th century. Electrical fluids, light waves, an imponderable aether, and caloric assumed prominence in scientific discourse, and remained prominent until the early 20th century. Schofield has, however, argued that these developments should be regarded as Newtonian in inspiration, on the grounds that Newton‘s supplementary ontology displaced mechanism with a broader form of materialism (Schofield 1970). Newton maintained that to enable the planets to move swiftly and freely, it was necessary ‗to empty the Heavens of all Matter, except perhaps some very thin Vapours, Steams, or Effluvia, arising from the Atmospheres of the Earth, Planets and Comets‘ (Newton 1730/1952 368). From early on he had conceived his material corpuscles as supplemented by an aether, ubiquitous and ‗strongly elastic‘ cited, in the widely-read letter to Boyle of 1679, as the principle of cohesion and of gravity. Later, as is well known, Newton disdained attempts to provide mechanical explanations of these phenomena. Still, the aether remained. The concluding General Scholium to the Principia opened with a demand for the elimination of vortices and a resisting medium for the planets, but ended with hints about ‗a certain very subtle spirit pervading gross bodies and lying hid in them‘ responsible for a vast range of effects, from cohesion, to electricity, light, and heat and, through its ‗vibrations,‘ for animal sensation and motion (Newton 1686/1999, 943-4). While Roger Cotes accused the Cartesians of ‗feigning certain occult fluids that permeated the pores of bodies very freely,‘ Newton‘s own Scholium to Corollary 6 of Bk I suggested that the earth floats in an ‗aether free of resistance.‘ Whether this aether was later rejected in favour of accounts requiring only corpuscles, void, various powers, and the presence of God, ‗incorporeal, living, intelligent, omnipresent,‘ is unclear, for the Opticks recognized ‗spaces void of both Air and Water, but perhaps not wholly void of all Substance, between the parts of hard 9

10 Bodies‘ (Newton 1720/1952, 249), and Query 28 allows for an ‗exceedingly rare Aetherial medium‘ that does not disturb the motions of planets and comets (Newton 1730/1952, 369). Readers, including the author of ‗Matière,‘ found these references puzzling. It was unclear how they affected the Newtonian programme, insofar as the aether was basically incompatible with the Rules for the Study of Natural Philosophy laid down in Book III of the Principia which dictate that the qualities of bodies are ‗only known to us by experiments.‘ If the aether was not ‗body,‘ was devoid of inertia, and did not affect the senses, but was still highly active in nature and responsible for the enormous variety of effects, did this imply that experimental physics would be forever incomplete? Euler, faced with this dilemma, decided on a priori grounds in his Essai sur les moindres parties de la matière (1746) that the aether was a material fluid, as required by his version of a Cartesian theory of light, composed, however, of particles that were of an entirely different nature from the molecules of ordinary matter. If ordinary matter was permeated by aether, the molecules of aether whose atomic particles were separated by void must possess density, but only a millionth of the density of the molecules of ordinary matter. (Euler 1746, 300). Aether went on to enjoy a long period of respectability up to the time of Einstein. Newton had presented and argued for his claim that light ‗consists of Rays differently refrangible‘ and that the ray of white light was composed of coloured rays in 1672. Though he was criticized by the French academician Edmé Mariotte, Huygens, Leibniz and Malebranche readily accepted the theory of the composite nature of white light and the coloured ray, and it was promoted in Prussia by the Leibnizian C.F. Wolff. From the start, however, Newton was criticized for not having supplied a mechanical account of light and the production of colors (Guerlac 1981, 80-100). Descartes had tried to do so, arguing that light was a disturbance in the aethereal medium that carries the planets around—he compares it to the snapping of a whip—but, at the same time, he explained colour as resulting from the velocity of the spin on excited corpuscles impacting on the human eye. Huygens‘s account of light as a wave pulse expounded in his Traité de la lumière of 1690 was similarly difficult to fit to a theory of rays (Buchwald 1989, 5)—or, for that matter, colours. 10

11 Having already rejected the Cartesian plenum in the Principia, Newton criticized the pression theory of light in the first Latin edition of the Opticks (1706) and wondered in turn whether shining substances such as the sun might not emit ‗rays of small light particles,‘ suggesting that the colors of light rays depended on the sizes of these particles, and the colors of opaque objects on their reflection from and absorption by those objects. (cf. Newton 1730/1952, 362-4). No coherent account either of light as a stream of particles or light as a disturbance in a medium was formulated however before Euler, and opticians like Malebranche attempted to steer a middle course between a pression theory and a particle theory with, in Malebranche‘s case, minute ‗aether vortices‘ rather than solid corpuscles serving as bearers of light. (Hakfoort 1995, 4, 56). In 1717, Dortous De Mairan posed a problem of theory choice between the two schemes that was to shape discussion for centuries. (Hakfoort 1995, 37, 57). Newton‘s expositors s‘Gravesande and Mueschebroek kept a simplified emission theory of light before the minds of readers through their textbooks, as did Francesco Algarotti in his Newtonianismo per le dame (1737), translated into English, French, German, and Dutch, and Euler in his Lettres à une Princesse d’Allemagne (1768-72). Continental opticians, more loyal to the Cartesian plenum and pression theories, and unhappy over the treatment accorded to Leibniz in the calculus priority dispute, were less convinced by Newton‘s emission theory of light than their English and Irish counterparts. Jacques Rohault‘s popular Treatise of physics, according to its subtitle ‗mostly taken out of Newton,‘ presented a basically Cartesian account of light (Rohault 1702, 132) in its many French, Latin, and English editions appearing between 1702 and 1735. The particle theory was widely criticized as implying that the matter of the sun would waste and that the interference of particles emanating in all directions from luminous objects would create a chaos in place of a visible world. And where did the emitted particles end up? Their very smallness was held by the Newtonians to ensure that the sun would last for a very long time. However, the spectre of a frozen universe, after all luminous bodies had thrown off all their matter worried Newton himself; the sources of luminosity seemed to need replenishment by means of active principles. As Euler pointed out in his Nova theoris lucis et colorum of 1746, the first serious attempt to propound a mathematized wave theory of light, smelling—an effluvial phenomenon— 11

12 seemed a poor model for seeing. Against undulatory theories, it was pointed out in turn that light and sound seemed to behave differently. Sounds, agreed to be wave phenomena, could be heard around mountains, while light was not seen in the shadow of obstructing objects. Euler‘s bold but wrong conjecture that an obstacle to sound, just as much as to light, would create a shadow, was rendered doubtful by a simple experiment by the German Georg Simon Kluegel reported in 1776 (Hakfoort 1995, 141). Kluegel‘s professed skepticism about the human ability to discover the ultimate nature of light reduced the impact of this finding. Nevertheless, towards the end of the 18th century, the emission theory, now mathematized by Laplace, gained ground and achieved virtual hegemony. Observations on phosphorescence and on the chemical influence of light on bodies posited by Newton had accumulated, and the production of oxygen in leaves, the fading of colors in cloth, the blackening of silver-coated plates, and the phenomena of freckling and tanning were cited in his favour (ibid., 162 ff.). Jean Senebier cited a compelling number of instances in his Mémoires physico-chymiques, sur l’influence de la lumière solaire pour modifier les êtres des trois règnes de la nature (1782). Though not logically inconsistent with pression theory, such effects were more easily visualized in corpuscularian terms, and, according to the encyclopedist Johann Samuel Traugott Gehler in his Physikalisches Woerterbuch (1789), ‗a nearer acquaintance with chemistry must make everyone lean towards the system of emissions‘ (quoted Hakfoort 1995,170). In developments undreamed of by Newton, though evidently not by Robert Hooke and Gaston Pardies earlier, light ‗molecules‘ of various colours even made an appearance, (Frankel 1976) before undulatory accounts of the light ray remerged in the early 19th century.

Metaphysics and Natural Philosophy

The neo-atomist tradition of Gassendi and Locke took an aggressively skeptical position on ‗substance‘ –both corporeal and thinking –which, in Locke‘s view, was an Iknow-not-what, rather that something whose essence or essences, in case there were a plurality of them, could be discovered by reason. While Newton had much to say about 12

13 body as experienced by experimentalists, his dislike of speculation implied an agnostic approach to metaphysics that, in conjunction with Locke‘s sensationalism, ultimately furthered a split between physics and metaphysics. Thus Muesschenbroek in his textbook described the empirically determinable characteristics of all bodies as extension, impenetrability, inertia, moveability, possibility of rest, shape, weight, and attraction but declared that that body is ‗in itself unknown‘ (Muesschenbroek 1720, 15). Boerhaave stated in the preface to his chemical lectures that chemistry did not require knowledge of the intima natura or essence of matter and was praised by his English translator for nearly losing from view ‗body, that complex thing.‘ (Boerhaave 1727, 52). D‘Alembert said that we perceive nature ‗as through a veil.‘2 By professing unconcern with the essence of bodies, natural philosophers were able to avoid entanglement with the hoary old problems of infinite divisibility and to sidestep the new problem of perfectly hard atoms. But some Continental philosophers persisted in the search for rational foundations to natural science, and the interval between Leibniz and Kant saw a determined search for alternatives to the Newtonian corpuscle. Almost from the beginning of his philosophical career, Leibniz had been assembling physical, observational, metaphysical, and theological objections to material atoms, which he had first encountered in Gassendi‘s works. He was subsequently judged either a formidable opponent of Newtonian ontology or a ridiculous example of the poverty of metaphysics; J.A. Eberhard declared that with his principles of sufficient reason and the identity of indiscernibles, he had battled against ‗the delusions of empty space and atoms‘ (Eberhard, 1795/ 2003, 153), but the Newtonian Voltaire merely mocked him, asking, whether every drop of urine contained an infinity of monads— Leibniz‘s alternative to material corpuscles—endowed with perceptions of the entire universe (Voltaire 1992, 22: 434 ).

2

As one historian has remarked, ‗…In the (17th) C. Spinoza said we do not know what

body can do; in the 18th, Mme de Chatelet. Voltaire, Maupertuis, and d‘Alembert said we do not know what body is. ‗ In the 19th century, ‗One no longer tried to define matter or body in general;‘ (Le Rou 2001, 149) 13

14 After the publication of the Commercium Epistolicum in 1712, Newton and the Newtonians had became the target of Leibniz‘s wrath, and it was convenient for him to assert that the Principia was a symptom of the decline of religion and morality evident amongst the English. (He had in mind Hobbes, Locke, Toland and perhaps others.) Newton, Leibniz observed, had cited not one experience or experiment in favour of atoms, and identical particles also violated the principle of diversity, or the identity of indiscernibles, whose truth was evident, he maintained, from searching inquiry into nature. The posit of perfectly hard, cohering indivisible particles of particular magnitudes and shapes was arbitrary; how could there exist extended but indivisible substances or particles differentiated by position alone, if space was, as Leibniz thought, a perceptual phenomenon rather than an observer-independent substance? ―Atoms of matter,‖ said Leibniz, ―are contrary to reason…There are only atoms of substance, that is, real unities absolutely destitute of parts…the final elements in the analysis of substantial things. We could call them metaphysical points: they have something vital, a kind of perception, and mathematical points are the points of view from which they express the universe‖ (Leibniz 1989, 201). Where the Newtonian John Keill, whom Leibniz detested, would go on to claim that ‗Every body is a lifeless heap of matter‘ (Keill 1726,75), Leibniz maintained that even a drop of water when seen through the microscope reveals a world composed of a vast number of living creatures (Leibniz 1965, I:335), an indication of the ubiquity of vital principles. The Leibnizian school nevertheless admitted corpuscularianism as an explanatory scheme adequate to save the phenomena of grosser bodies; indeed Leibniz had demanded mechanical explanations referring only to magnitude, figure, and motion for all bodies encountered in experience. All material bodies, not only organisms, were described as ‗machines‘ in his follower C.F. Wolff‘s Cosmologia. Wolff departed from Leibniz‘s position in assigning determinate figures and magnitudes to all bodies, a mild concession to the Newtonians (Wolff 1964, 108-9). Yet Wolff too required true substances-incorporeal monads—indivisible and without extension, figure or motion; matter arose, according to his Ontologia, from the aggregation of simple substances, containing a principle of change within them (Wolff 1977, 594-5; cf. 1964, 147). Beneath what

14

15 Leibniz had termed ‗mere physical science‘ was a very different Nonnewtonian reality grasped by the metaphysician. Voltaire‘s Élemens de la philosophie de Newton, the first edition of which appeared in 1738, followed by his La métaphysique de Newton of 1740 (later appended as an introduction to the former work), have been credited with the massive increase in knowledge of and admiration for Newton in France. To elevate Newton was to demote both Descartes and ‗la chimère de ses trois élements‘ and Leibniz and his monads. Voltaire skated over all the difficulties with material atomism and presented the monadology in the most ridiculous imaginable and scatalogical light (Voltaire 1992, 24144). This generated a reaction, and sympathetic, or at least neutral presentations of Leibniz‘s philosophy, as well as editions of his works, began to appear in mid-century. Emilie du Châtelet explicated and endorsed Newton‘s system in her widely read Institutions de physiques, (1740-1), but she also irritated Voltaire by defending the metaphysical primacy of the monad over the Newtonian corpuscle. Ludwig Martin Kahle defended Leibniz against Newton in his own Vergleichung of 1741, Pierre Sigorgne explicated him in 1768, and Euler discussed him in the above-mentioned Lettres à une Princesse d’Allemagne, from which Kant has been alleged to have derived much of his physics. Jakob Brucker‘s splendid multi-volume history of philosophy of 1766-7 familiarized both French and German readers with Leibniz‘s main theses: both the Encyclopedists and Kant benefited from it. The double scheme of phenomenal and noumenal reality suggested by Wolff and Châtelet became dramatically codified by Kant. In the meantime, the material corpuscle had undergone a kind of physical attenuation. Newton required that particles be extended so as to be the bearers of mass, and primary particles had also to be hard and impenetrable. However, he also described gross bodies as extremely rare and porous in the Opticks (Newton 1720, 249), and John Keill, in his lectures of 1700 published as Introductio ad veram physicam, stated it as a theorem that an arbitrarily small portion of matter could fill an arbitrarily large space with arbitrarily small distances between the particles of matter composing it (Keill 1702, 55). The theorem was reproduced in a shorter form without proof by (s‘Gravesande 1721, 10), and the suggestion that matter perhaps occupied a very inconsiderable portion of the

15

16 universe was quickly noted by European reviewers of the Opticks, by Leibniz, and eventually by Voltaire (Thackray 1968, 39). Keill‘s argument opened the door to conceptualizing solid, hard matter as a phenomenon, vindicating Leibniz‘s insight but without the apparent absurdity of ascribing to the primary elements of nature, including those, to quote Voltaire, in le plus vil excrement, confused perception of the entire universe in its past, present, and future conditions, which in any case hardly explained the appearances. Rudjer Josip Boscovich appreciated this point: he accepted the homogeneity of matter against Leibniz‘s principle of indiscernibles, but he denied primitive hardness. He substituted for the Newtonian corpuscle a theory of unextended simple points, separated by void, endowed with inertia and a power that varied in intensity with the distances, increasing and decreasing and changing from attraction to repulsion and back again. Before phenomenal hard bodies came into contact, their velocity was reduced by this repulsive force, so that the law of continuity was not violated. The existence of ‗particles of definite shape offering high resistance to deformation‘ was, however, vindicated; solids and fluids were both particulate in structure. (Boscovich 1763, 17), and Boscovich then attempted to explain fermentation, crystallization, fire, light, sensation, electricity and magnetism with this apparatus. As Eric Schliesser has noted, (Schliesser,

) debates over the nature of matter

reflected much wider issues in 18th century intellectual life; they concerned the autonomy and authority of philosophy vis-à-vis mechanics and the empirical sciences. The narrowing of natural philosophy to the investigation of the properties and interactions of matter, or, in Newton‘s usual terminology ‗body,‘ implied a rift between, on one side, experimental and mathematical science, and on the other, metaphysics, encompassing the investigation of God and the human mind or soul, and whatever inferences regarding nature or the world might flow from the existence and activity of finite and infinite spirits. The role Newton assigned to ‗Philosophy‘ in the Preface to the Principia was at once modest, for the task of finding out the forces of nature from observing motions and analyzing it mathematically, and then showing how the remaining phenomena were to be derived fro them was admitted to be ‗Difficult,‘ and at the same time grand, for it was said to be the ‗whole‘ task of Philosophy. This was assuredly a controversial definition. 16

17 The metaphysicians expected more commentary on the supersensible and transcendental -as well as less mathematics. They wanted the theory of corporeal nature to be put into a human context, to be linked with a theory of creation, a theory of mind-body relations, and a theory of the fate of the soul. Above all, there should be clarification of God‘s moral role in the world and his interests as these related to the conduct of human life. Assuredly, some Newtonians were aware of their obligations in this respect. The translator‘s preface to the German edition of Benjamin Martin‘s Philosophia Britannica, (1777), suggested that Newtonianism provided an answer to Pierre Bayle‘s religious skepticism that Leibniz‘s ‗metaphysische Raritaeten‘ could not supply. ‗Hierauf werden die Grenzen der Wissenschaften ganz anders erweitert‘ (Martin 1777, xxiv). Where a Newton-inspired union between science and metaphysics was forged, however, it was not always of a sort that could please the theologian. The notion that gravity was a superadded power of matter encouraged John Locke to think of the ‗suitably organized matter‘ of the brain as possibly endowed with the power of thought, in which case the human soul was not a separate substance. Though deeply foreign to Newton‘s own vague but panentheistic metaphysics, and his commitment to free will and to nonmechanical active principles as glimpsed in his manuscript De Gravitatione and in the General Scholium to Rule IV of the Principia, the materialist interpretation of Newtonianism is a well-documented strand of its European reception (Yolton 1991). A theologically-skeptical and anticlerical tradition in French philosophy, represented by Étienne de Condillac, Julien Offray de La Mettrie, the encyclopedists Denis Diderot and d‘Alembert, and the Baron Holbach, took hold, raising the spectres of mortalism and the denial of free will that Kant was moved vigorously to combat. Voltaire declared in this connection that ‗Animals, plants, minerals, everything appears to be endowed with mass, weight, and number. All is springs, levers, and wheels, hydraulic machines, chemical workshops, from the blade of grass to the oak, from the flea to the man, from the grain of sand to our clouds‘ (Voltaire 1997, 5). Baron Holbach recapitulated the Newtonian program in his Système de la Nature, referring solidity, crystallization, the refraction of light, capillarity, and ‗all chemical combinations generally‘ to forces whose study was the principal object of the study of nature. ‗Thus matter is subsumed under the empire of diverse attractive and active forces‘ (Holbach 17

18 1994, II:322) . This subsumption, he argued, justified his ethical view of humans as bodies subordinated to the laws of nature and justified in their pursuit of pleasure. Immanuel Kant feared materialism as undermining of morals and as promoting political passivity and hopelessness, but he was persuaded that Leibniz‘s monadology, Berkeley‘s visionary idealism, and indeed all systems involving involving pananimism or vision through God were mere fabrications of the human imagination. He demanded the construction of a vast ‗critical metaphysics‘ that would confine Newtonian physics to the appearances, bar its extension into the life sciences, and reclaim it from Hume, Voltaire and their scoffing friends. For while the unknowability of the properties of substance could leave open room for faith and confidence in human moral capability, the possibility of an exhaustive understanding of nature as matter subject to mathematically formulated law excluded them. In his Metaphysical Principles of Natural Science (1786), Kant defined matter as everything movable in space ( Kant 1902- , IV:503), but he maintained that impenetrability and extension were qualities arising from repulsive forces postulated as obtaining between the ‗parts‘ of continuous substance. ‗Solid or absolute impenetrability is banished from natural science as an empty concept‘ (ibid.). In the Critique of Pure Reason, published in the following year, he made it clear that he was speaking of matter as phenomenon, the subject matter of natural philosophy. He accepted the Newtonian framework of matter, force, space, and time, even deeming it cognitively necessary, but he regarded it as only the framework of a science of appearances. In the Critique of Pure Reason, he declared that matter was ‗substantia phaenomenon.‘ ‗The transcendental object,‘ he went on, ‗which might be the ground of the appearance that we call matter, is a mere something about which we would not understand what it is even if someone could tell us ‗ (Kant 1902- ,IV: A277; III B333) . Matter was not a ‗thing in itself,‘ insofar as any attempt to reconcile its infinite divisibility with the finite extension of discrete portions of matter was hopeless. Leibnizian monadism was not to be the preferred alternative; rather the question of the ultimate constitution of matter should be declared to be not only outside the purview of sense perception, but outside the powers of human reason. Atomism, Kant decided, ‗is a sort of construction method for putting a world together out of all kinds of immutable and differently formed materials,‘ but it ‗must have 18

19 no place in the philosophy of nature‘ (Kant 1902-, XXII:207). His adoption of ‗caloric,‘ a kind of light-fluid, as the fundamental material of nature in the papers composing his Opus Postumum is reminiscent of Newton‘s own convertible material substratum, but Kant‘s phenomenalism, his polemic against atoms and void, and his repeated complaints against the presence of the term ‗philosophical‘ in Newton‘s title reflected the deep division between Newtonians and many French and German savants. The disputes over the existence and properties of atoms were not settled in the 18th century, and even after John Dalton returned to hard, spherical atoms as the foundation of chemistry, controversy over the true primordia of nature carried on well into the 19th century and is in a sense ongoing. Newton‘s contribution to this long conversation about the nature of matter was significant, not only because his position was definite enough in some respects to prompt creative resistance, and open enough in other respects to suggest alternatives to hard body atomism, but also because Newton portrayed matter and its activities in such an exciting manner. The three philosophical queries to the Opticks are reveries that engage and entice the reader. ‗What hinders the fixed stars from falling upon one another?‘ How do ‗watery tinctures and salts‘ grow into birds, beasts and fishes, insects, trees and vegetables? What makes mercury take on the forms of a hard, brittle metal, a corrosive salt, or a vapour which, ‗agitated in a vacuum,…shines like fire‘? Where Robert Boyle referred apologetically to the study of corporeal nature and judged the study of natural philosophy deeply inferior to that of theology, while at the same time emphasizing its priestly character, 18th century Newtonians proceeded with confidence, sacrificing wealth and leisure to perform calculations and experiments. Voltaire cheerfully humbled himself to learn mathematics and Newtonian mechanics from Muesschenbroek and Châtelet and engaged the Abbé Nollet at great expense to stock a ‗cabinet de physique,‘ which eventually contained over 345 items for the study of air, fire, light, solids and liquids, electricity (Gauvin 2006, 172). Experimental, as opposed to mathematical, physics in the 18th century employed itinerant demonstrators, favoured showy displays of ―phenomena,‖ and recruited women as spectators and practitioners. There was nothing priestly about this aspect of the Newton-inspired engagement with material nature; Margaret Jacobs goes further in claiming that ‗the 19

20 Newtonian definition of the relationship between man and matter gave a philosophical sanction to the pursuit of material ends, to using the things of this world to one's advantage, in effect, to bargain, to sell, to engage in worldly affairs with the knowledge that this activity is a God-given right‘ (Jacob 1978, 547). The passivity of matter to which Jacobs refers in this connection, and the possibility of its mastery and reshaping by human technologies was emphasized by Bacon and Descartes, and the credit for introducing subvisible moving corpuscles into scientific ontology as the basis of all visible phenomena belongs more properly to Gassendi, Hobbes, and Descartes than to Newton. Their moral, theological, and political views tended, however, to make readers uneasy and not at all prone to celebrate them in poetry or to engage in the literary expression of enthusiasm. Rupert Hall has pointed out that the admiration for Newtonian corpuscularianism and mechanism that pervades 18th century poetry and popular philosophy is less reflective of Newton‘s innovations in matter theory than of his religiosity, his conservatism, and his success as a mathematical natural philosopher. Popular Newtonianism was, Hall suggests, ‗Descartes whitewashed…with a coat of the most resplendent, scientifically unimpeachable paint‘ (Hall 1978, 410). From all this bustling effort in the 18th century, no second Principia, no physical work of ‗genius‘ emerged to give the hoped-for explanations of light, heat, magnetism, fermentation, and all the operations of chemistry. Kant‘s constant demands for ‗systematicity‘ in all the sciences are perhaps to be understood as expressions of frustration over this state of affairs, for Kant is the most priestly philosopher of his era. At the same time, matter, conceived in Newtonian fashion as permeated by forces, principles, and perhaps ‗spirits‘ was ennobled. Curiosity-driven experimentation, distinguished from the toils of the chemist by its employment of intricately wrought optical and measuring instruments, acquired not merely legitimacy but even prestige.

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